Vacationers bound for Grand Canyon National Park may want to take the train this summer. Park superintendent Boyd Evison says 3,800 cars are currently arriving each day, and 6,400 vehicles will pack the park during the peak months of July and August. With only 1,600 parking spaces in the South Rim Village, that means drivers […]
Grand traffic problems
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Who will lead the Navajo Nation?
Six candidates for the Navajo Nation presidency are officially in the running for the August 8 primary. Only two will face off in the November general election. For now the list of candidates reads like a directory of tribal leaders. Current tribal president Peterson Zah is seeking a third term. Running against him are tribal […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Agency takes out a cabin
Jerry Holliday wasn’t pleased when he found out that Forest Service workers blasted down the walls of his cinderblock cabin in southern Utah’s Manti-La Sal National Forest. “Hell, you just don’t blow somebody’s property up and walk away,” Holliday told the Salt Lake Tribune. Holliday and co-owners Gene and Kenny Shumway had built the cabin […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Oil, feathers and EPA
Thousands of birds flying across the Western plains each year fatally mistake oil pits for bodies of water. Once the birds land, their feathers become coated and they die. In its first attempt to address the problem, the Environmental Protection Agency recently fined Texaco Refining and Marketing Inc. and four other companies $300,000 and ordered […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Wyoming dam gets go-ahead
Acting on a recommendation from the state’s Water Development Commission, the Wyoming legislature recently approved a $30 million appropriation to build the Sandstone Dam (HCN, 12/27/93). The commission okayed the project despite conflicting evidence regarding the geologic suitability of the site. Mike West, a geologist hired by opponents of the dam, says he found irregularities […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Not for the birds
A grizzly bear that found the seeds in a bird feeder to his liking was recently moved to the southwestern area of Yellowstone National Park. The two-and-one-half-year-old male bear was trapped by the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks on private land near Big Sky, Mont., reports AP. The bear was the first trapped […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Grazing allotment in hot water
Oregon environmental groups sued the Malheur National Forest May 11 for violating the Clean Water Act on a grazing allotment along the John Day River near Camp Creek. The groups say grazing has destroyed vegetation along river banks, causing water temperatures on the John Day to hit 75 degrees, seven degrees above the state standard […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Five star visitor complex
The Bureau of Reclamation is now building the nation’s first boondoggle tourist stop. Thanks to cost overruns and management neglect, the Hoover Dam visitor center in southern Nevada will cost $119 million instead of an estimated $32 million. Scheduled to be finished in 1995, the 44,000-square-foot center, which sits on the side of a cliff, […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Same old DOE?
U.S. Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary may be displaying unprecedented candor by disclosing her agency’s sordid history of radiation experiments on humans. But two reports by the General Accounting Office suggest that the agency remains an old boys’ club. According to one report, the DOE has yet to investigate what happened to $30 million of goods […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
The Chapman saga continues
The U.S. Forest Service, with approval from Secretary of Agriculture Jim Lyons, has signed a deed of trust with Colorado developer Tom Chapman. The deal gives Chapman 105 acres of federal land near the Telluride Ski Area in return for Chapman’s 240 acre inholding in the West Elk Wilderness near Paonia. Chapman must also remove […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Vandals destroy desert tortoise dens
As a vacation and retirement destination, southwestern Utah boasts a mild year-round climate and the world-famous Zion National Park. It’s also home to the most viable population of the Mojave desert tortoise, a creature threatened with extinction. For years biologists and environmentalists have been studying ways to keep the prehistoric reptile from succumbing to new […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Of buffalo thoughts and amethysts
I’ve grown up and moved away. I live in a city now instead of a little town. My grammar is better, my table manners hardly offend at all and I’ve been seen at art galleries and concerts. Yet still there are people who patronize me when they find out where I grew up. That was […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Don’t try to improve grazing; abolish it!
My greatest fear about grazing reform is that it will substitute for substantive reform. The grazing fee will increase from one-quarter to one-half of fair market value, but government will kick back even that increase to those ranchers who talk the range reform talk. The increased fee will go to range developments to mitigate livestock […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Yellowstone gets new superintendent
In a shuffle of top national park managers, Yellowstone National Park Superintendent Bob Barbee in late May found himself reassigned to the job of director in the agency’s Alaska region. Barbee, who had presided over Yellowstone for 11 years, had just finished building a house near Bozeman, Mont. As superintendent of one of the most […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Old guard may beat new chief
JACKSON, Wyo. – A retired U.S. Forest Service supervisor urged agency personnel to move swiftly to transform an organization that has historically resisted change. Tom Kovalicky, who began his Forest Service career in Wyoming, said that Jack Ward Thomas, the controversial new Forest Service chief, “wants to change bad practices,” but may already be in […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Low-tech ants give a high-tech Idaho lab fits
It’s nature’s equivalent of David versus Goliath. In this instance David happens to be 7 mm long and Goliath is the U.S. Department of Energy and the scientific community. Their battleground is the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL) in southern Idaho where harvester ants are stymieing waste disposal efforts by doing what ants do best […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
The Great River becomes a great sewer
FORT HANCOCK, Texas – Red-headed Jimmy Frank Rogers, a junior and an agile receiver on Fort Hancock High’s six-man football team (school enrollment: 102), straddled some spindly salt cedar on the steep banks of the Rio Grande and surveyed what was once the Great River. “I’d guess maybe 20 yards across,” offered Rogers, tugging at […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Group vows to head off the ‘New West’
GLORIETA, N.M. – About 500 members of People For the West, a Pueblo, Colo., group that supports traditional multiple use of public lands, concluded a three-day conference with vows to become more organized and politically active. Bill Grannell, the executive director and former Washington, D.C., lobbyist for the National Association of Counties, said the goal […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Grazing combatants vow to keep feuding
The day after he didn’t get appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt dove back into grazing reform. At a U.S. Senate hearing in Albuquerque, N.M., on May 14, Babbitt told several hundred ranchers and environmentalists that he expects to “stay in the middle of this grazing issue until we work out […]
Posted inJune 13, 1994: A doomed species?
Dear friends
1984 Redux A decade late, High Country News has caught up to George Orwell’s 1984. With the help of a grant from the Surdna Foundation, a team here has begun to create an electronic index and archive of back issues. Almost certainly we will introduce new errors as we transfer information from print to electrical […]