Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, The wolves are back, big time. ROCKY MOUNTAIN HOUSE, Alberta – Someday, perhaps not too far off, residents of the region around Yellowstone National Park may know wolves the way Gerald Gustavson knows wolves. “It’ll happen one day, when you’re out in the forest, […]
Canada provides $2000 wolves
Posted inFebruary 6, 1995: The wolves are back, big time
Wolves may not need Big Brother
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, The wolves are back, big time. Some veteran wolf biologists call the designated federal restoration a big mistake. “They don’t need to reintroduce wolves,” says Diane Boyd, who for the past 15 years has studied wolves as they have migrated down from Canada and […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 1995: The wolves are back, big time
This mating is no game
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, The wolves are back, big time. Federal biologists are playing matchmaker. When six more gray wolves were trundled into Yellowstone Jan. 20, one male was introduced to a prospective new mate, and biologists hoped the two wouldn’t fight. They didn’t. Although the wolves postured, […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 1995: The wolves are back, big time
One bullet prompted regret
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, The wolves are back, big time. LANDER, Wyo. – The wolf head on the wall tucks its ears and bares its teeth at all who enter the living room of this 85-year-old retired sheep rancher. This aging trophy with broken teeth is perhaps the […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 1995: The wolves are back, big time
Happy pack of journalists pursues quarry
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, The wolves are back, big time. MAMMOTH HOT SPRINGS, Wyo. – There were photographers taking pictures of photographers, and another group of photographers taking pictures of them, when wolves came back to Yellowstone National Park. Canadian Broadcasting Company reporter Kelly Crowe called the frenzy […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 1995: The wolves are back, big time
The wolves are back, big time
YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. – Badged officers blocked traffic as the lengthy motorcade approached. Reporters and photographers crowded both sides of the road, and satellite dishes atop television stations’ trucks stood ready to beam the scene to the rest of the world. At a “media center’” occupying a cavernous gymnasium, banks of telephones were ready […]
Posted inJuly 24, 1995: Making a mountain into a starbase
Ranchers forced into numbers game
Imagine the Western range as a half-billion acre game board. It’s not hard; section lines, pasture lines, power lines, irrigation lines, and roads straight as lines subdivide it into as many playing squares as there are players. But it is not chess or checkers. It’s a deadly serious game, where the stakes are the health […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 1995: What a long strange trip it's been
Airports show difference between Denver and Utah
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, The West sings the Denver airport blues. It’ll be far more expensive for airlines to operate at Denver’s new airport than at other airports in the West – which puts the Denver hub at a new disadvantage. To recoup the higher charges, airlines are […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 1995: What a long strange trip it's been
Oregon’s Wallowa County is suffering
Dear HCN: Had reporter Kathie Durbin been more thorough in her examination of the facts (about the hanging in effigy in Joseph, Ore., of two environmentalists (HCN, 11/14/94), she would have discovered the unemployment rate in Wallowa County is nearly twice as high as she erroneously reported in her exposé on our ugly little town. […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 1995: What a long strange trip it's been
Albuquerque didn’t want to hear it
Dear HCN, I was most interested in Bruce Selcraig’s article on the pending water crisis facing the city that never listens (HCN, 12/26/94). I was enticed by the city manager, Richard Wilson, in 1971 to assume the position of planning director of the combined planning programs of Albuquerque/Bernalillo County Planning Commissions. One year later Wilson […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 1995: What a long strange trip it's been
Park Service can’t reform itself
Dear HCN, “Shrink To Fit” (HCN, 11/12/94), about downsizing the Park Service, hit me where I used to live. Almost 40 years ago I began a Park Service career as a laborer on a trail maintenance crew at Many Glacier. Two months ago I was one of the 425 who took the “buyout” and retired. […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 1995: What a long strange trip it's been
BuRec will halt water spreading
Dear HCN, Those who simply scanned Paul Koberstein’s Nov. 28, 1994, headline, “BuRec to allow water thefts to continue,” may have assumed that Reclamation is not addressing the problem of unauthorized use of water. That’s not the case. Reclamation is actively seeking to eliminate the unauthorized use of water, sometimes referred to as water spreading. […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 1995: What a long strange trip it's been
Land-use planning can be a nightmare
Dear HCN, As a Seattle-suburbs hobby farmer (horses), widow of a lawyer, mother of four college graduates, and (unpaid) legislative liaison for the King County Property Rights Alliance, I am also one of those “people with an ideological predisposition who are most vulnerable to independence, anti-government and property rights slogans.” (Hoo-ha!) The condescension of the […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 1995: What a long strange trip it's been
Wilderness trader cashes in
When the Forest Service agreed to give developer Tom Chapman 110 acres near the ski town of Telluride, Colo., in exchange for his wilderness inholding on the Gunnison National Forest, critics were outraged. They said taxpayers would lose valuable public land while Chapman stood to gain a huge profit. Apparently, the critics were right. Chapman, […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 1995: What a long strange trip it's been
L-P coughs up
Corporate giant Louisiana-Pacific must answer, finally, to a diminutive plaintiff. Four families who successfully sued the wood-products company two years ago will now collect their $2.3 million settlement. The U.S. Supreme Court recently denied the company’s appeal of the original judgment, reports the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. The case centers on the small town of […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 1995: What a long strange trip it's been
Option 9 survives
In a rare environmental victory for the Clinton administration, a federal judge upheld the president’s plan for protecting wildlife and allowing some timber cutting in the federal forests of the Pacific Northwest. Judge William Dwyer of Seattle, who said in 1991 that federal land managers had committed “deliberate, systematic” violations of environmental laws, ruled Dec. […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 1995: What a long strange trip it's been
Are grizzlies safe?
Grizzly bears in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem have “recovered” and no longer need protection under the Endangered Species Act. That’s the opinion of a federal team known as the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee, which decided in December to support the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s decision to petition for delisting the bear. “People should keep […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 1995: What a long strange trip it's been
A Newtonian vision
A cadre of policy wonks from some ultra-conservative think tanks decended on Capitol Hill Jan. 11 to tell sympathetic Republicans how they’d strip the budgets of the Department of Interior and the Forest Service. Representatives of the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy and Citizens Against Government Waste urged legislators to: * […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 1995: What a long strange trip it's been
‘Wise-use’ laws challenged
Environmentalists are challenging the “wise-use” laws of Catron County, N.M., that have become a model for other rural counties around the West. Two groups, the Greater Gila Biodiversity Project and Gila Watch, along with several private citizens, filed suit in federal court Nov. 17 charging that the ordinances are unconstitutional and violate civil rights laws. […]
Posted inJanuary 23, 1995: What a long strange trip it's been
An ersatz democracy gets what it deserves
In the late 1980s, the city and county of Denver chose to look away from a deteriorating public school system, dirty air, traffic jams and inadequate public transportation, to pour $10 billion into 53 square miles of prairie out toward Kansas. As this special issue shows, the decision to build Denver International Airport was made […]