Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Bill Marlett is the executive director of the Oregon Natural Desert Association. He has filed a number of appeals and a lawsuit against the BLM, all asserting his group’s opposition to grazing on Steens Mountain. “I told (Babbitt) point-blank that we want a date-certain […]
Growth & Sustainability
Posted inNovember 22, 1999: Go tell it on the mountain
‘I don’t want to run a different business’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Fred Otley is a fourth-generation rancher on Steens Mountain in the Kiger Creek and Kiger Gorge area. He is the coordinator of Friends of Steens Mountain, a group of local citizens and ranchers, and is a “private landowner liaison” to the Resource Advisory Council. […]
Posted inNovember 22, 1999: Go tell it on the mountain
‘Multiple use is still the best concept’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Stacy Davies is the ranch manager of the Roaring Springs Ranch in the Catlow Valley, on the west side of Steens Mountain. Owned by the Bob Sanders family for the last seven years, it is the largest ranch on Steens Mountain, with 146,000 acres […]
Posted inNovember 22, 1999: Go tell it on the mountain
The secretary’s must-do list for Western lands
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt’s Western road tour didn’t finish at Steens Mountain; in fact, no one seems quite sure where it will end. In addition to the Arizona Strip and the Missouri River Breaks, several other Bureau of Land Management sites could gain greater […]
Posted inOctober 11, 1999: A home-grown Water War
Another wilderness developer pops up
PARADISE VALLEY, Mont. – Chain saws are running in the middle of the Absaroka Beartooth Wilderness. There’s a miniature backhoe there, too, along with a regular series of noisy helicopters, hauling in work crews. The man responsible is having a blast, like a kid with a new toy. All this would be illegal on public […]
Posted inSeptember 27, 1999: The Millworker and the Forest
Battered borderlands
The Border Patrol seeks a conservation ethic
Posted inSeptember 13, 1999: Troubled Oasis
Agency cheerleader
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. John Singlaub is the manager of the Carson City, Nev., office of the BLM. During his 20 years with the agency, he’s worked in four states at every level of the organization, and he’s known as a man of action. In Colorado, when the […]
Posted inJuly 5, 1999: The new faces of the West
Trail-crew volunteers
The Colorado Fourteeners Initiative needs trail-crew volunteers willing to work weekends on Mount Harvard and Mount Bierstadt, two of Colorado’s most visited over-14,000-foot peaks. Contact Jennifer Tucker, Colorado Fourteeners Initiative, 710 10th St., Suite 220, Golden, CO 80401 (303/278-7525 ext. 115). This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Trail-crew […]
Posted inJuly 5, 1999: The new faces of the West
Wilderness developer Tom Chapman is back
VAIL, Colo. – One of Colorado’s best-known real estate speculators is back, but some say the deals he’s offering ought to be turned down. Tom Chapman has a history of buying private land in wilderness areas, threatening to build mansions, and then goading the U.S. Forest Service into buying him out or trading him valuable […]
Posted inJune 7, 1999: Mining the past
Court nixes land exchange
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 […]
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 […]