Eyewitnesses visit Abe Jacobson and Carol Griffiths Jacobson were driving an unusual rig when they dropped by in May. Two kayaks and a canoe rode atop their van, which was stuffed with paddles, snowshoes, skis and just about every other outdoor toy you can imagine. This was no ordinary vacation, they explained; they were refugees. […]
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Posted inJune 5, 2000: Change on the Plains
Invisible roads block wilderness
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Imagine a map of North Dakota with every section line – the crisscrossed lines that stretch north-south and east-west across the state precisely one mile apart – converted into a public road. That’s just what the Dakota Territorial Legislature imagined in 1871, when it […]
Posted inJune 5, 2000: Change on the Plains
Elk find no home on the grasslands
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. When rangers at North Dakota’s Theodore Roosevelt National Park culled the park’s burgeoning elk herd early this year, they sent about 200 of the animals to Kentucky. There, the state wildlife division reintroduced the once-native animals to parts of the Appalachian state. This struck […]
Posted inJune 5, 2000: Change on the Plains
A dissident speaks up for the Badlands
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story To get to John Heiser’s home on the high plains of western North Dakota, you turn at the construction yard (“They’d like to pave everything over”), then bear left when you spot the microwave tower (“I think to myself every day how I’d like […]
Posted inJune 5, 2000: Change on the Plains
Change on the Plains
Ranchers on the national grasslands see their power ebb as a new era rushes in
Posted inMay 30, 2005: Write-off on the Range
Starry Eyes
Recently, at mid-afternoon on a rainy day, I looked up at the cloud-burdened sky and missed the stars. Truly missed them. I felt the kind of wistful pangs that you might feel when remembering a long-gone but beloved grandparent, or a teenage sweetheart who once misunderstood you. I knew they were up there — the […]
Posted inMay 30, 2005: Write-off on the Range
Dear friends
WELCOME, NEW INTERNS As a teenager, HCN summer intern Patrick Farrell says he spent summers in his hometown of Lincoln, Neb., “scheming ways to get to Colorado to rock climb.” Lured by his love of nature, he moved West to study history at the University of Washington — but spent “more time in the library […]
Posted inMay 22, 2000: Save Our Sagebrush
How we banned Compound 1080
Dear HCN, In a back-page essay, you show a photograph of Sen. Gale McGee, William Ruckelshaus, and me: Nathaniel Reed (HCN, 3/27/00: HCN at 30: ‘On faith alone’). I was serving as Assistant Secretary of Interior for Fish, Wildlife and Parks. The story of how the poisoned eagles were located, the intense investigation that followed, […]
Posted inMay 22, 2000: Save Our Sagebrush
Carless in Denali
Dear HCN, Larry Warren said in the April 10 High Country News that, “Beginning May 23, Zion (National Park) becomes the first Western park, and just the second in the national park system, to go carless. Acadia National Park in Maine was the first.” Mr. Warren should check out the history of Alaska’s Mt. McKinley […]
Posted inMay 22, 2000: Save Our Sagebrush
Dump cows – for what?
Dear HCN, In Debra Donahue’s opinion, “The writing is on the wall: Livestock grazing on semi-arid public ranges is uneconomic and unsustainable. The only solution is removing livestock altogether” (HCN, 2/28/00: A prof takes on the sacred cow). I’m not familiar with the implications of that statement in the state of Wyoming; I do know […]
Posted inMay 22, 2000: Save Our Sagebrush
‘Militia woman’ is fighting for her rights
Dear HCN, I read with interest your March 13 article about Jim Catron, “The Last Celtic Warlord lives in New Mexico” – which leads the reader to believe he is some kind of hero of the West. Many of us here in Catron County see it otherwise. We see him as a pompous, hot-headed little […]
Posted inMay 22, 2000: Save Our Sagebrush
Some predators have clout
Dear HCN, Apropos the item “Guides may get guidelines” (HCN, 3/27/00: Guides may get guidelines), Idaho, after long and mighty labors, has produced a draft “Wolf Management Plan.” Among other bemusing provisions in the plan is one which would provide monetary compensation to guides and outfitters for “economic harm caused individual outfitting businesses by decreasing […]
Posted inMay 22, 2000: Save Our Sagebrush
Dam unites environmental opposition
Dear HCN, I’m disgusted with the tone and inaccuracies of Adam Burke’s article, “One dam, two rallies” (HCN, 4/24/00: One dam, two rallies). “What’s the best way to build support for tearing down a dam?” he wrongly asks. None of the organizations at the rally ever supported “tearing down a dam’; they were advocating the […]
Posted inMay 22, 2000: Save Our Sagebrush
Heard around the West
Fast asleep at 5 a.m., while illegally camped in a parking lot in Yellowstone< National Park, two tourists from Oregon were rudely awakened " -- not by park rangers tapping on their window, but by a boom so loud they thought it was an earthquake. In a matter of minutes the couple was racing off, […]
Posted inMay 22, 2000: Save Our Sagebrush
Lawmaker accepts Babbitt’s challenge
COLORADO Western Colorado’s Black Ridge Canyon has the largest array of sandstone arches outside of Utah, second only to Arches National Park. What it lacks is over-arching protection. That may soon change. Republican Rep. Scott McInnis, from nearby Grand Junction, is proposing to make the 130,000-acre Black Ridge Canyon a national conservation area, with 72,000 […]
Posted inMay 22, 2000: Save Our Sagebrush
The Wayward West
It’s Idaho’s turn for a new national monument (HCN, 5/8/00: The Wayward West). Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt wants to create a national monument in the Great Rift and lava flow areas, west and south of Arco. The proposed monument would expand Craters of the Moon National Monument by 618 square miles and also protect the […]
Posted inMay 22, 2000: Save Our Sagebrush
The burbs target cougars
WASHINGTON The suburbs of Seattle have historically been home to voters who support wild animals, but as development encroaches on what once was wilderness, new homeowners, such as Tami Cron, feel torn. Last summer Cron opened her front door and came face-to-face with an adult female lion. “It is pretty nerve-racking to think cougars were […]
Posted inMay 22, 2000: Save Our Sagebrush
Service says dams should stay put
NORTHWEST The federal agency charged with recovering endangered salmon won’t recommend dismantling dams – at least for now (HCN, 12/20/99: Unleashing the Snake). Will Stelle, regional director of the National Marine Fisheries Service, said recently that his agency wants to table the breaching debate for five to 10 years while it tries to boost salmon […]
Posted inMay 22, 2000: Save Our Sagebrush
He’s worried about weeds
UNCOMMON WESTERNERS Steve Monsen is a stocky, modest, self-contained man. Sixty-three years old, the son and grandson of Utah sheep ranchers, he works as a botanist for an organization that could not sound more unassuming if it tried – the USDA Shrub Lab in Provo, Utah. There, he wears short-sleeved shirts and jeans and cuts […]
Posted inMay 22, 2000: Save Our Sagebrush
Yelling fire in a crowded West
I was in Jackson, Wyo., in fall 1988, right after Yellowstone National Park burned to the ground. School children were contributing nickels and dimes to build it back up, and there was a lynch-mob attitude in the town toward the National Park Service and other federal agencies (HCN, 9/26/88). Today, the Yellowstone fires are celebrated […]