A new group complains it’s too noisy in the Pike-San Isabel national forests. “Machines are over-running our public lands,” says Quiet Use Coalition board member Dick Scar. Founded in Buena Vista, Colo., the 100-member group hopes to convince the Forest Service to restrict motorized use in 16 areas of the forest to ensure a more […]
Pipe down!
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Yellowstone soft on safety
After five people working in Yellowstone National Park were accidentally killed in a little less than four years, a federal investigation found that the first and most famous national park had ignored hundreds of safety regulations. “Employees at almost all levels demonstrated an unwillingness to take responsibility for safety,” concluded a 1998 report by the […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Are snowmobiles overpowering parks?
During the peak of the snowy season in Yellowstone National Park, as many as 1,000 snowmobiles a day roar over its groomed roads. Critics say the machines cause more noise and air pollution than the park should have to handle. Park rangers who sell entrance tickets complain of headaches and nausea from breathing in clouds […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Clearcut the neighborhood
Whoever said irony is wasted on the West never met Tom Clyde. Clyde spent 17 traumatic years practicing law in Park City, Utah. In 1984, he packed his belongings into his Volkswagen bus and moved to a cabin on his family’s ranch 20 miles away. From this safe distance, he has been providing the locals […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
A Wyoming river needs help
A group of Wyoming fly fishermen needs help resuscitating a river. Since 1961, a 17-foot conduit has been sucking Platte River water from Wyoming’s Fremont Canyon and tunneling it down to a hydro-electric power plant managed by the Bureau of Reclamation. When the river dries up in the summer, “the bugs dry up, the fish […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Three cheers for the Treemusketeers
When the city council of El Segundo, Calif., announced that it would not support a city curbside recycling program, the Treemusketeers sprang into action. This environmental organization of young people, 10 to 14 years old, surveyed residents, contacted the city waste-hauler and then devised a subscription-based recycling program. Residents now can pay a waste-hauler $6 […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Putting grass back
-On a quarter section in this country, no one could’ve or should’ve been expected to make a living.” * South Dakota rancher Clarence Mortenson A map of South Dakota’s Spring View Township from 1890 shows a landscape plowed and fenced off by homesteaders, lured by grandiose claims of what the plains might produce. In reality, […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Locals rebel against road closures
Fierce opposition has delayed a Forest Service plan to close 210 miles of old logging roads in southwestern Utah. Local residents wrote letters, circulated petitions and turned out in large numbers for public meetings in Cedar City and Kanab last month, protesting the proposed limits on motorized access to the Dixie National Forest. “We’ve gotten […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Not such a cold fish
When the Endangered Species Act was signed 25 years ago, one of the first species to gain protection was the humpback chub. The chub, a warm-water fish native to the Colorado River system, has been headed downhill since 1967, when the construction of Glen Canyon Dam near the Arizona-Utah border cooled the downstream section of […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Beetle wars
The Idaho Panhandle national forests want to log 153 million board-feet of timber this summer – doubling the cut of the past two years – to stop a bark beetle explosion in north Idaho and eastern Washington. Chainsaws are set to roar by July, and plans call for 5,000 acres of clear-cuts and 35 miles […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Fishers fail trout test
That fat trout sizzling in an Idaho skillet last summer might have been a species on the edge of extinction. Even though the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed bull trout as threatened under the Endangered Species Act last June, that doesn’t mean anglers know what the fish looks like. Almost 70 percent of those […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Private dam planned on public land
A private company’s plans to dam a river on Wyoming’s Bighorn National Forest has not found many fans – even among government agencies. Sheridan-based Little Horn Energy Wyoming wants to build two reservoirs: a 140-acre impoundment on the Dry Fork of the Little Bighorn River, and a 73-acre pond on a ridge about 2,400 feet […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
The long road to wilderness begins here
When U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, D, introduced a new wilderness bill for western Colorado last month, there were loud cheers from the state’s wilderness movement. The bill seeks to protect more than a dozen tracts of mostly redrock canyon country managed by the Bureau of Land Management. Now begins the uphill battle to get it […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
The Wayward West
A Missoula, Mont., pulp mill says it won’t pump chlorine-related pollutants through its smokestacks or into the Clark Fork River anymore (HCN, 3/30/98). Smurfit-Stone Container Corp. says it’s pulling out of the paper-bleaching business because it can’t afford $40 million in EPA-mandated plant upgrades. Local activists cheered. “It’s just sinking in,” says Darrell Geist of […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Timber takes a hit
Timber targets on Northwestern national forests fell again in the latest attempt to fine-tune the Northwest Forest Plan (HCN, 11/23/98). “Now we have four years’ experience in implementing the Forest Plan,” says Forest Service spokeswoman Patty Burel. “We’re finding some things need adjusting.” The reductions, announced in December, drop the timber targets on eight national […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Heard around the West
We’re supposed to be getting fitter in America, but could it be we’re just getting fatter? In Seattle, Wash., the answer seems to be yes. Officials running the Puget Sound ferry recently reduced the seating capacity from 250 to 230 after finding that the bottoms of passengers had sprawled. The average width of a rear […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Giving voice to a Lakota history
It is hard to convey just how good this book is; it’s possibly the best book yet about the famous battle of the Little Bighorn. In Lakota Noon, Gregory F. Michno has gathered approximately 60 Indian narratives and produced a detailed reconstruction of the fighting. Individual warriors tell their stories through a chronological timeline of […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Beware Alaskans bearing gifts
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Oh, impressed, are you, that Bill Clinton wants to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy more land for the public domain? Well, consider this: So does Don Young. No, the crotchety, conservative chairman of the House Resources Committee has not turned green, or at least not very green. The bill […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
Affluent effluent stinks, too
BIG SKY, Mont. – For years, this posh resort community of 2,500 people leaked partially treated sewage into the pristine waters of the Gallatin River, the blue-ribbon trout stream in Robert Redford’s movie, A River Runs Through It. In 1991 alone, an estimated 47 million gallons of effluent seeped illegally into the groundwater that feeds […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
A question of photography ethics
It’s been said that a fed bear is a dead bear. So it was ironic when National Wildlife, the glossy, bimonthly publication of the National Wildlife Federation, illustrated portions of an article on efforts to save grizzlies with three photos of grizzly bears that allegedly had been lured into the photographer’s backyard with birdseed. The […]