Locals around Pyramid Lake, Nev., have wondered for years how explorer John C. Fremont first discovered this body of water in 1842. To test some hypotheses and to publicize the area, the nonprofit Friends of Pyramid Lake is sponsoring a two-part essay contest: Writers are invited to submit essays by Dec. 31 describing how Fremont […]
Help find Pyramid Lake
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
Californians stay home
After five years of stirring up the real estate pot, Californians have stopped moving east, and newcomers are moving to the coast again. That’s the conclusion of private researchers who studied surrendered drivers’ licenses in the Golden State. It marks the first time in six years that more people are moving into the state than […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
Eyes of fire
It was March 7, 1996, on the fourth day of a 10-day lion hunt in the Peloncillo Mountains of southern Arizona, when rancher Warner Glenn and his hunting dogs happened on a big cat they’d never seen before in America. It was a jaguar, and Glenn, in this quickly produced little booklet, tells us he […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
What’s not on the label
The “secret” ingredients in a few widely used pesticides won’t be secret anymore, thanks to a small nonprofit group in Eugene, Ore. The Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides won a lawsuit in U.S. District Court Oct. 16 against both the Environmental Protection Agency and the pesticide industry, which had claimed that “inert” ingredients are […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
One win, one loss
Fall brought both good and bad news for the Telluride Ski and Golf Company. The western Colorado company got another green light Oct. 22, to double its skiing terrain, when the Forest Service rejected an appeal by environmentalists. But in a separate agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency, Telski will pay a $1.1 million fine […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
Utah tells Babbitt to back off
Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has been sued by the state of Utah for his decision to reopen the process of wilderness designation (HCN, 9/2/96). Filed Oct. 14 in federal court, the suit challenges the legality of Babbitt’s “re-inventory” of Bureau of Land Management lands in Utah without public involvement. Babbitt announced on July 24 that […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
Newspaper sues Forest Service
When Forest Service agents broke up a logging blockade several months ago at Oregon’s Warner Creek, they arrested five protesters plus two journalists from the Eugene Register Guard who were caught in the fray. Although no charges were ever filed against the journalists, the newspaper has now sued the Forest Service, citing violations of constitutional […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
Power is no longer everything
Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt signed a historic record of decision Oct. 9 that aims to protect the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon. The new rule calls for regulating flow rates from Glen Canyon Dam to minimize erosion and unnatural water-level fluctuations, and it makes Glen Canyon the first hydroelectric dam mandated to generate power […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
BLM fills a hot job
As the first boss of the newly created national monument in southern Utah, the Bureau of Land Management’s Jerry Meredith won’t have to worry about filling anyone else’s shoes. But he’ll have plenty of other headaches. President Clinton’s recent designation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument sparked anger among locals and a flurry of controversial […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
Through Hells and high water
Jetboats will be banned for 21 days each summer on a 21-mile stretch of the Snake River through Hells Canyon, according to a Forest Service plan that’s been a decade in the making. Environmentalists and recreationists who float the river between Idaho and Oregon praised the restriction as a long-overdue first step toward returning quiet […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
A listing and a delay
Faced with a court-imposed deadline, the National Marine Fisheries Service listed only one West Coast coho salmon population as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. The agency announced Oct. 25 that coho along coastal Central California deserved threatened status under the law, but two populations in Northern California and Oregon will be studied for another […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
A rodent that can outlast a camel in the desert
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to as essay, “‘Nobody gives a damn about the prairie dog’.” It was a quote from naturalist J.R. Mead in 1859 that got University of Montana zoology professor Bert Pfeiffer curious about prairie dogs. Mead wrote: “Not a drop (of water) […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
The Last Ranch: The truth is stranger than the book
In 1992, I followed a year in the life of a third-generation ranch family named Whitten in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado. I was exploring an idea. I supposed that a fresh understanding of nature might save the world from becoming desert. The impetus came from a long association with the ideas of […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
Heard around the West
When two grizzlies in Glacier National Park began snuggling up to tourists, the agency brought in a pack of Karelian bear dogs. These black-and-white canines specialize in chasing their fellow carnivores in a very aggressive way. At least one grizzly has taken the hint. A bear biologist told the Hungry Horse News in Columbia Falls, […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
Shake-up: Greens inside the Beltway
WASHINGTON, D.C. – When the news leaked that Bill Meadows had been chosen to head The Wilderness Society, everyone called friends to commiserate. All anyone knew about Meadows was that “III” followed his name and he had raised $92 million for the Sierra Club. “He’s a fund raiser,” was the usual comment, followed by laments […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
‘Nobody gives a damn about the prairie dog’
The dirt two-track rises quickly from the river to a ridge of pines. After a few miles the track veers out onto the sagebrush flats of this high desert plain in Montana, and there, on a patch of ground where grass and sage thin out, I spot what I have come looking for: small mounds […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
Agriculture, education key to Indian prosperity
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to another news article, “Native Soil: Lakotas garden for health and independence.” In 1994, only one Native American received a doctorate in agricultural science. It’s not as if the country’s Indian reservations couldn’t use the expertise. They encompass 54.5 million acres […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
Native Soil: Lakotas garden for health and independence
PINE RIDGE, S.D. – One morning in May 1988, Leonard Little Finger woke up with a slight pain in his chest. But he went to his job as an administrator at the local hospital, and made only a casual mention of it to a doctor there. A quickly administered electrocardiogram revealed a predictable diagnosis for […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
Corporate giants slurp up a tiny town’s pure water
OLANCHA, Calif. – Crystal Geyser’s 100,000-square-foot bottling facility sticks out incongruously in this Owens Valley town of some 200 people. In the late 1980s, the company spent two years tasting water from all over the West, searching for a spot to build a new bottling plant. Crystal Geyser, one of the nation’s top sellers of […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
Will ‘wanton killer’ lope into Colorado?
EAGLE, Colo. – Wes Schlegel, a lifelong rancher, just couldn’t figure it out: “If my dad and granddad could have heard what was said here tonight, they’d be rolling in their graves.” What he’d heard was praise for wolves, now gone from the Flat Tops Wilderness some 30 miles from here. Schlegel lives about 15 […]