More than 500 residents of Jackson Hole, Wyo., packed a meeting hall in late August to fight a nuclear-waste incinerator planned for eastern Idaho. The crowd rallied to the evangelical fervor of Gerry Spence, the flamboyant lawyer who has built a national career on high-profile cases. By the end of the evening, everyone from movie […]
Downwinders speak up and pay up
Posted inSeptember 27, 1999: The Millworker and the Forest
Crow tribe lays claim to elk
The Crow Tribe has launched a plan to capture 550 wild elk on its reservation in the Bighorn Mountains of Montana. It’s the beginning of the tribe’s foray into game farming, but it is also sure to mark the beginning of a bitter battle over publicly owned wildlife. “It is a spooky proposal, that’s for […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 1999: The Millworker and the Forest
The Wayward West
Meridian, Idaho, will host a high-visibility merger Oct. 2, when Rep. Helen Chenoweth, 61, weds Wayne Hage, 62. Chenoweth is famous for fighting federal protection of endangered species and wilderness (HCN, 9/28/98). Her betrothed, a rancher from Tonopah, Nev., has battled the Forest Service in court for almost a decade over grazing (HCN, 10/30/95). Invitations […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 1999: The Millworker and the Forest
The Red Desert: Wyoming’s endangered country
RED DESERT, Wyo. – Fossils of tree limbs were all around, most the size of my fingers, a few the size of horse troughs. Prehistoric bits of turtle shell, horse bones and arrowhead chippings also lay scattered, testimony to the diverse inhabitants who once frequented this ocean-turned-desert. I suddenly looked up. Our group had flushed […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 1999: The Millworker and the Forest
Heard around the West
Is there a “Stupid Motorist Act” in Arizona? You bet, says Elliot Freireich of the West Valley View in Litchfield Park. After summer monsoons hit, dry washes suddenly fill with water and cascade onto roads, he reports. Yet some drivers with more bravado than brains try to splash through. “Sometimes they make it. Sometimes they […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 1999: The Millworker and the Forest
An Arizona mayor condemns the New West’s thirst for servants
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to another article,”Battered borderlands.” Ray Borane, mayor of Douglas, Ariz., from a letter to the Aspen Daily News, dated July 8, 1999: “The U.S. Border Patrol has apprehended and expelled from our area more than 200,000 illegal aliens since the beginning […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 1999: The Millworker and the Forest
Battered borderlands
The Border Patrol seeks a conservation ethic
Posted inSeptember 27, 1999: The Millworker and the Forest
A Lewis and Clark revival hits the Northwest
While tracing the steps of Lewis and Clark, Judy Anderson has stopped off at two dozen places where the explorers walked nearly 200 years ago. Among these, Pompey’s Pillar, a lonely landmark on the plains of southeastern Montana, remains fixed in her memory. There, immortalized behind Plexiglas, she saw William Clark’s signature carved into soft […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 1999: The Millworker and the Forest
Do you want more wilderness? Good luck
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Poor W. Howard Gray didn’t know what hit him. Just a few years before, in the early 1960s, the head of the American Mining Congress seemed justified in confidently predicting oblivion for this absurd proposal to set aside millions of acres of land for … well, for doing nothing with it. All […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 1999: The Millworker and the Forest
Disease is wasting the West’s wild herds
Nobody knows where the disease came from, or if it has existed forever, confined to the lodgepole forests, shortgrass prairies and alfalfa fields of north-central Colorado and southeast Wyoming. It is not known how it passes among its victims. What is certain is that the whitetails, mule deer and elk that contract it inevitably die […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 1999: The Millworker and the Forest
The Cowboy State’s next boom
GILLETTE, Wyo. – Will Wyoming’s arid Powder River Basin be home to cranberry bogs and alligator farms? Most people aren’t taking such suggestions too seriously yet. But thanks to a boom in coal-bed methane development, the basin will soon have more water than anyone knows what to do with. “The fact is, we’re going to […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 1999: The Millworker and the Forest
Dear Friends
Here come the hunters Though the health department made our meat-locker neighbor shroud its backdoor hoist with a giant tarp, staff can’t help noticing all the carcasses swinging by. Elk and deer, so far, we can report, but no black bear. All have been killed by the hunting elite that likes to make things tough […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 1999: The Millworker and the Forest
The Millworker and the Forest
Notes on natural history, human industry and the deepest wilds of the Northwest
Posted inSeptember 13, 1999: Troubled Oasis
Toilet water and other woes
Dear HCN, I used to live in the subdivision below Susan Ewing’s in Montana’s Gallatin Valley (HCN, 5/10/99). As a geologist with experience in groundwater consulting, I became involved in our neighborhood’s concerns about the impacts on our wells of yet another proposed subdivision in the area. While Montana’s intermontane valleys host abundant groundwater supplies […]
Posted inSeptember 13, 1999: Troubled Oasis
Stand in the place where you live
Dear HCN, Dan Flores’ essay on ranchettes in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley interested me, since I am a fellow Bitterrooter who makes a living working for the very ranchetteers he discussed (HCN, 5/10/99). I do tree planting, ecological restoration and native landscaping for them, and so I’ve done much brainstorming on what makes a “good ranchette.” […]
Posted inSeptember 13, 1999: Troubled Oasis
After the ranchers go, sprawl comes
Dear HCN, Your front page story on Jon Marvel points to the fact that you seem to have no clear vision of how to save the West from inappropriate development and urban sprawl (HCN, 8/2/99). I got the same feeling when I read your feature story on Wyoming a while back. You and your bright, […]
Posted inSeptember 13, 1999: Troubled Oasis
They’re both right!
Dear HCN, I find the exchanges between Tom Power and Ed Marston perplexing (HCN, 8/2/99). They are both right! My colleagues and I have surveyed over 7,000 randomly selected persons in the West over the last 10 years. In all these surveys people consistently say they either moved to or live in the West for […]
Posted inSeptember 13, 1999: Troubled Oasis
Lyons is a stereotyper
Dear HCN, Steve Lyons rips on the Aryan Nations as a pack of dimwits (HCN, 8/16/99). Fine, I’m with him there, but it seems Lyons is so blinded by his own politically correct views that he didn’t catch himself perpetrating yet more stereotypes. As an expatriate Montanan, I resented the “Ford-with-Montana-plates’ sound bite. Since when […]
Posted inSeptember 13, 1999: Troubled Oasis
The different faces of bigotry
Dear HCN, Regarding Stephen Lyon’s essay “An ugly message marches down an Idaho street” (HCN, 8/16/99): The rise to power of the Nazi Party in 1933 was both surprising and rapid. Few people then anticipated the process or magnitude of events to come. Just shortly before, Germany had been a refuge from the wave of […]
Posted inSeptember 13, 1999: Troubled Oasis
Lyons is unfair to Idaho
Dear HCN, Stephen Lyons’ article on the Aryan marchers in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, was terribly misleading and distorted against Idaho (HCN, 8/16/99). When I moved to this area in 1977, I had no idea about the Aryans. It wasn’t long before I learned of them firsthand. We would all like Butler and his group to […]