If dirt roads in southern Utah suddenly seem free of ruts, washboards and washouts, you can thank Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. Environmentalists believe Babbitt’s recent announcement of a new BLM inventory of wilderness led to a flurry of illegal road work by county crews. For if roads exist, the Bureau of Land Management can’t include […]
Will counties de(grade) wilderness?
Posted inSeptember 30, 1996: Can this man break the right's grip on Idaho?
Tribal group tries again to save mountain
When Congress gave the University of Arizona a go-ahead to ignore environmental studies and build its third and largest telescope on Mount Graham, construction crews jumped into action (HCN, 5/13/96). Now, an obscure federal advisory group says builders moved too quickly and possibly illegally. According to the President’s Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, the Forest […]
Posted inSeptember 30, 1996: Can this man break the right's grip on Idaho?
If they build it, will more come?
What’s better for controlling and educating crowds of hikers in Utah’s Grand Gulch – a brand-new visitors’ center visible from the highway or more rangers on the trail? The Bureau of Land Management has removed an old mice-infested trailer and wants to build a 1,600-square-foot center to teach people how not to disturb sensitive archaeological […]
Posted inSeptember 30, 1996: Can this man break the right's grip on Idaho?
All is not quiet on the Front
Though oil and gas developers have long had their eyes on the vast reserves that geologists say lie beneath Montana’s rugged Rocky Mountain Front, environmental concerns have held most of them at bay. Now, a more immediate threat looms over the area. Wyoming businessman Mark Alldredge has filed 104 mining claims over 3.4 square miles […]
Posted inSeptember 30, 1996: Can this man break the right's grip on Idaho?
Feds go after Summitville boss
Taxpayers got mixed news in late August about the cleanup of southern Colorado’s notorious Summitville gold mine. The good news came from the Justice Department, which announced that it had convinced a Canadian bank to freeze $152 million in stocks owned by the mining executive who oversaw Summitville. That mine’s toxic wastes killed 17 miles […]
Posted inSeptember 30, 1996: Can this man break the right's grip on Idaho?
Who snatched the salmon?
The fish had beaten the odds. After swimming 900 miles from the Pacific Ocean, past eight dams and up to over 6,000 feet, the almost three-foot-long endangered chinook salmon finally reached the Sawtooth Hatchery in Stanley, Idaho. It was one of only 132 adult salmon to make the journey this year to spawn in the […]
Posted inSeptember 30, 1996: Can this man break the right's grip on Idaho?
Redwood summer roars back
Musician Bonnie Raitt wasn’t singing the blues in California Sept. 15 when she was arrested with 896 others for acts of civil disobedience – trespassing onto Pacific Lumber Co. property and chaining themselves to mill gates. Their mission was saving the Headwaters grove, the world’s largest ancient redwood forest in private ownership. An estimated 4,000 […]
Posted inSeptember 30, 1996: Can this man break the right's grip on Idaho?
Snail’s trail leads to Yellowstone
Wolves and exotic lake trout aren’t the only new denizens of Yellowstone National Park. New Zealand mudsnails, as tiny as BBs and as prolific as fruit flies, have rapidly spread throughout the park’s upper Madison River. Although trout eat the snails, they pass through the fish undigested and alive, and reproduce so quickly that they […]
Posted inSeptember 30, 1996: Can this man break the right's grip on Idaho?
It ain’t over till it’s over
When President Clinton announced a $65 million land swap with Crown Butte Resources Inc. to stop development of a gold mine on the boundary of Yellowstone National Park, it sounded like a done deal. But federal officials have only six months to come up with property that Crown Butte must agree to accept; if not, […]
Posted inSeptember 30, 1996: Can this man break the right's grip on Idaho?
A harsh and priceless gift to the world
“There was a hardness of stone,” Theodore Roethke starts a poem, “an uncertain glory … Between cliffs of light / We strayed like children.” The Harsh Country, the poem is called. I’m miles away from what I think of as the harsh country, the cliffs of light, the country of bright stone. It has a […]
Posted inSeptember 30, 1996: Can this man break the right's grip on Idaho?
Clinton learns the art of audacity
Editor’s note: On Sept. 18, just before President Clinton announced the creation of the nation’s newest monument, writer and University of Colorado law professor Charles Wilkinson talked about the historical precedents for protecting land through presidential action. GRAND CANYON, Ariz. – The grandest, most electrifying moments in American conservation history have always been reserved for […]
Posted inSeptember 30, 1996: Can this man break the right's grip on Idaho?
Managing the monument: The devil is in the details
Note: This article is a sidebar to a feature story. If it survives expected legal challenges, the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument will in all likelihood stop the industrialization of the Kaiparowits Plateau. While the proclamation creating the monument did not take away Andalex’s right to mine its rich coal fields, federal land managers acknowledge that […]
Posted inSeptember 30, 1996: Can this man break the right's grip on Idaho?
A daunting, beautiful place
Note: This article is a sidebar to a feature story. Covering an area larger than the state of Delaware, the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument encompasses some of the wildest, most desolate land in the country. The expanse of canyons, bluffs, grasslands, cliffs is dotted with fossils and Native American archaeological sites. If you stand on […]
Posted inSeptember 30, 1996: Can this man break the right's grip on Idaho?
The mother of all land grabs
Note: This article is a sidebar to a feature story. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah: “In all my 20 years in the U.S. Senate, I have never seen a clearer example of the arrogance of federal power. Indeed, this is the mother of all land grabs. And, the declaration by President Clinton is being made without […]
Posted inSeptember 30, 1996: Can this man break the right's grip on Idaho?
1996: Clinton takes a 1.7 million-acre stand in Utah
A Bold Stroke: Clinton takes a 1.7 million-acre stand in Utah
Posted inSeptember 30, 1996: Can this man break the right's grip on Idaho?
Salt Lake has an Olympian traffic jam
On weekday afternoons, I-15 in Salt Lake City has traffic jams that rival those of Los Angeles. In response, Utah has taken a California approach: Build more lanes. Starting next spring, the city’s main thoroughfare will be reconstructed and doubled in size at a cost of over $1 billion, the largest public works project in […]
Posted inSeptember 30, 1996: Can this man break the right's grip on Idaho?
Uranium poisons Navajo neighborliness
CROWNPOINT, N.M. – The water in this town on the eastern side of the Navajo Nation is so pure that people drive from as far as 80 miles to fill their barrels. But some fear it will be tainted if a proposed uranium mine gets approved next year. “All it will take is one accident […]
Posted inSeptember 30, 1996: Can this man break the right's grip on Idaho?
Glacier Park finds itself inundated
Some Montanans had a rude awakening this summer when officials announced the end of business-as-usual in Glacier National Park. In July, park Superintendent David Mihalic released management proposals that included closing roads and campgrounds, removing park buildings, and limiting access to the much-loved Going-to-the-Sun Highway. These “preliminary alternatives,” the first steps in revising the 1977 […]
Posted inSeptember 30, 1996: Can this man break the right's grip on Idaho?
Dear friends
Odds and ends Thanks to Boulder, Colo., reader Evan Cantor who sent us 10 years of back issues of High Country News. They’ve been snapped up by Paonia High School, which school secretary Judy Briscoe tells us has become much involved in interdisciplinary teaching. And thanks to Evergreen, Colo., writer Dyan Zaslowsky, who passed on […]
Posted inSeptember 30, 1996: Can this man break the right's grip on Idaho?
The bigger the mine, the better the deal
BOZEMAN, Mont. – The way things are going around here lately, we should change Montana’s nickname from the Big Sky Country to the Big Swap Country: Let’s make a deal! No doubt it’s a form of progress. So were the 1872 Mining Law and the railroad land grants in their day. But qualifiers need to […]