In a surprise May 19 ruling, a federal appeals court sent a land exchange in western Washington back to the drawing board. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decided that the controversial Huckleberry Land Exchange needed more study and told company loggers to stop cutting the traded land. The exchange gave Weyerhaeuser Co. 4,300 acres […]
Growth & Sustainability
Posted inApril 12, 1999: Is trapping doomed?
The new voice at BLM
Dallas lawyer Thomas A. Fry III talks and acts like a guy who’s in charge, but in reality, he’s “acting” director of the Bureau of Land Management. The 54-year-old Fry is the second acting director of the BLM in five years. Mike Dombeck supervised the BLM for three years as acting director before becoming chief […]
Posted inMarch 29, 1999: Wheeling and dealing
Land deal links desert parks
A California-based land trust has arranged to put almost 500,000 acres of mountaintop forests, sand dunes and volcanic cinder cones into public hands. The $61.5 million deal now awaits a decision by Congress to release $36 million from the Land and Water Conservation Fund. The Wildlands Conservancy, based in Yucaipa, Calif., will pay the remainder. […]
Posted inMarch 29, 1999: Wheeling and dealing
Tree lovers are willing to pay
Washington’s Loomis State Forest has 25,000 roadless acres, and environmentalists say they’ll spend millions to preserve it. In just a few months, the Loomis Forest Fund raised $3 million, but contributors say they need $10.1 million more to compensate the state for the cash it could make by logging. The forest, which borders Canada, is […]
Posted inMarch 29, 1999: Wheeling and dealing
Wheeling and dealing
Note: a sidebar article, “A muckraker throws a well-aimed wrench,” accompanies this feature story. WESTON HILLS, Wyo. – Larry Gerard’s blue work shirt whips in the wind as we stand among ponderosa pines on this ridge. To the west, the Bighorn Mountains glitter with spring snow. Just below, rancher Joe Collins is planting wheat. The […]
Posted inMarch 29, 1999: Wheeling and dealing
A muckraker throws a well-aimed wrench
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. In the end, Wyoming’s self-appointed public-lands watchdog wasn’t able to halt the “Big Trails’ land swap atop the Bighorn Mountains. But his one-man battle against the controversial deal changed the way land exchanges are handled in the Cowboy State. The watchdog is John Jolley, […]
Posted inMarch 1, 1999: Working the land back to health
The ranch restored: An overworked land comes back to life
Note: in three sidebar articles accompanying this feature story, environmentalist Kathleen Simpson Myron, environmentalist Rose Strickland, and retired BLM range conservationist Earl McKinney give their perspectives in their own words. McDERMITT, Nev. – The Trout Creek Mountains of southeastern Oregon will never rank among America’s most magnificent peaks. Although beautiful in their way, the Trout […]
Posted inFebruary 1, 1999: Saving the Platte
Fun-hogs to replace cows in a Utah monument
As tourists flock to southern Utah’s new Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, ranchers are breaking camp and moving out. In December, the nonprofit Grand Canyon Trust announced it had brokered a deal between five ranching families and the Bureau of Land Management to retire or relocate grazing allotments on about 120,000 acres inside the monument. “There […]
Posted inJanuary 18, 1999: Desert sprawl
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers wants to lure volunteers to work in a number of positions ranging from trail crew workers to campground hosts. Volunteers choose the region and the Corps matches them with a project. Call the Volunteer Clearinghouse at 1-800-VOL-TEER, write to P.O. Box 1070, Nashville, TN 37202-1070, or check out www.orn.usace.army.mil/volunteer. […]
Posted inJanuary 18, 1999: Desert sprawl
Agencies seek quieter public meetings
This winter, hundreds of people filed into school gymnasiums, town halls and hotel conference rooms, working up the gumption to stand in front of a crowd and speak out on the future of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah. To their surprise, the stomach butterflies were for nothing. They didn’t find the rows […]
Posted inDecember 7, 1998: Vail and the road to a recreational empire
Land Trusts
The last decade has been a good one for the West’s land trusts. A census conducted by the Washington, D.C.-based Land Trust Alliance reveals that the number of land trusts that serve the Rocky Mountain states has risen from 20 to 52, and the Southwest shows similar growth. Nationwide, these private nonprofits, whose primary purpose […]
Posted inOctober 26, 1998: The Oregon way
Trading away the West
Historical photographs of ranch life tend to be so full of men that an observer might think no women ever lived on the range. But in 1898, Mabel Souther did more than just live on the Big Red Ranch in northeastern Wyoming – she took pictures that documented the working life there. Perhaps her cowpoke […]
Posted inAugust 17, 1998: Living out the trailer dream
More than pretty parks
The secret’s out. Some Bureau of Land Management land can rival the scenery of more famous – and more crowded – national parks. The BLM, in cooperation with more than 20 conservation and recreation groups, has just published Beyond the National Parks, a guide to Western public lands, which covers all the Western states, including […]
Posted inAugust 3, 1998: Tribes reclaim stolen lands
We can take it
As the country struggled through the Great Depression, nearly 3 million young men came together in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) with the motto, “We can take it.” Between 1933 and 1942, the CCC built 125,000 miles of roads, strung 89,000 miles of telephone lines and revegetated almost a million acres of rangeland. This year, […]
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
Fees please visitors
Land-management agencies call new user fees an “unqualified success’ and they’re asking Congress to make them permanent. During its first season on more than 200 sites around the country, the fee program raised $53.5 million. Before the trial fees got under way, public correspondence ran about 2-to-1 against, saying they discouraged low-income and local users […]
Posted inMay 11, 1998: The working West: grassroots groups and their newsletters
To burn or not to burn
Another 40-foot stick-figure totem will be set ablaze by 12,000 revelers in the desert in Nevada if a federal agency says yes to the San Francisco-based organizers. Last year the Burning Man arts get-together was moved to private land, where county fees, including $308,000 for fire insurance alone, drove the festival into debt. That made […]
Posted inApril 13, 1998: Oil clashes with elk in the Book Cliffs
Oil clashes with elk in the Book Cliffs
VERNAL, Utah – Dinosaurs live on in northeastern Utah. A life-size plaster Tyrannosaurus rex, advertising nearby Dinosaur National Monument, stands poised to pounce on visitors as they enter the town of Vernal. The wide main street is lined with hotels, restaurants and gift shops – the Dinosaur Inn, Dine-a-ville, the Dinosaur Quarry. Thousands of visitors […]
Posted inMarch 2, 1998: Wild horses: Do they belong in the West?
Colorado BLM going wild?
The Bureau of Land Management has announced that an additional 167,000 acres of public land in western Colorado are eligible for wilderness status. When the BLM’s roadless lands were first surveyed in 1980, 800,000 acres in western Colorado were given protection as potential wilderness areas. The new acreage may now be added to these existing […]
Posted inFebruary 16, 1998: Private rights vs. public lands
Private rights vs. public lands
Thousands of inholdings create conflicts inside federal lands
Posted inFebruary 16, 1998: Private rights vs. public lands
On the offensive: developer Tom Chapman
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. There are those who say he’s a classic American businessman who’s become a fierce defender of private property rights. Critics believe he’s a Colorado profiteer who makes millions blackmailing the U.S. Forest Service to buy him out. One thing is clear: Thomas E. Chapman […]