Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. For years, rafters and kayakers have paid to float the muddy Colorado River through Grand Canyon National Park. Typically, the trip cost private boating groups about $130. When the price jumped to around $1,500 per group for the trip last spring, boaters were shocked. […]
Growth & Sustainability
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
BLM gives trespassing farmers a break
Twin Falls, Idaho – When his boss here at the Bureau of Land Management made a personal business deal with a farmer cited for plowing up public land, Mike Austin, 52, thought he was doing the right thing by reporting a conflict of interest. Now he says he’s being punished for it. Austin, a realty […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
What’s underneath the Staircase?
With a pen stroke last year, President Clinton put to rest a decades-old conflict between extraction and conservation. He established the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and the threat of coal and oil development on southern Utah’s remote Kaiparowits Plateau blew away. So most people thought. But on June 6, Conoco Inc., the largest subsidiary of […]
Posted inAugust 18, 1997: The West that was, and the West that can be
Babbitt brings in new brass
In one fell swoop, the president and the Interior secretary have ushered in a new Interior Department. New directors of the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Office of Surface Mining and National Park Service were sworn into office Aug. 4, after easily surviving Senate confirmation hearings. All four face major challenges […]
Posted inJune 9, 1997: Chaos comes to Costilla County
How the West was destroyed
The Lochsa Story: Land Ethics in the Bitterroot Mountains Bud Moore. Mountain Press Publishing Co., Box 2399, Missoula, MT 59806, 1996. $20, paper. Illustrated. Many boys grow up dreaming of becoming a mountain man, to hunt, fish and trap in a wild country. Bud Moore lived the dream. As a boy in the 1920s, he […]
Posted inMay 26, 1997: The sacred and profane collide in the West
A negligent bureau?
What is the Bureau of Land Management doing in the woods? Not much good, says Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a national organization of resource management employees. The watchdog group’s latest project, a Comprehensive Study of the Public Domain Forestry Program of the Bureau of Land Management, details what it calls rampant negligence within the […]
Posted inMay 12, 1997: Planning under the gun: Cleaning up Lake Tahoe proves to be a dirty business
Utah Paiutes put the brakes on chaining
When over 250,000 acres of central Utah’s public lands burned in last summer’s wildfires, the Bureau of Land Management began its routine land-clearing procedure: chaining. But soon after the BLM tractors started up this spring, dragging a heavy chain between two vehicles to uproot dead trees and create a new seed bed of churned-up earth, […]
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
BLM ditches law-enforcement rules
With hundreds of millions of acres of federal land sprawled across a sparsely populated West, Bureau of Land Management rangers often legally fill in for state and county law officers. But last fall, when the BLM published “plain English” regulations that detailed the agency’s existing authority over gun use, drunken driving and other matters, some […]
Posted inMarch 31, 1997: Big Sky, big mess in Montana
BLM braces for Mormon pioneers
A million people – more than double Wyoming’s population – are expected to visit the state’s portion of the 150-year-old Mormon Pioneer Trail this spring and summer. The impending stampede has the Bureau of Land Management planning temporary closure of some trail sections. “At this point nobody knows the size of the elephant,” says BLM […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
Uproar over Owyhee
It’s been 15 years since the Bureau of Land Management wrote a management plan for the 1.3 million-acre Owyhee Resource Area in southwest Idaho, and the agency’s attempt to revise it isn’t sitting well with ranchers and off-road vehicle enthusiasts. BLM officials were caught off guard in November when several hundred critics showed up at […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
Drug smuggler’s ranch falls into public lands
CLARK, Wyo. – Stewart Allen Bost had a dream, he told his drug ring buddies while smuggling more than three tons of cocaine into south Florida in 1986. He wanted to own a ranch in Wyoming. So after retiring from the drug trade, he bought a secluded riverfront spread here, then guarded it and his […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
Jobs open up in Washington
A jumble of changes at the nation’s land-management agencies leaves two top posts empty. The opening at the Bureau of Land Management will be filled temporarily by Sylvia Baca, a New Mexico native. Baca’s permanent job is as deputy assistant secretary for Land and Minerals Management, also in the Interior Department. She replaces Michael Dombeck, […]
Posted inFebruary 3, 1997: Bringing back the bighorn
Columbia Basin plan staggers home
It was heralded as the flagship of an effort to launch ecosystem management in the interior Northwest, an unprecedented attempt to knit together the needs of people and nature. So far, the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project has languished for three years and cost taxpayers $40 million, with few tangible results. The first draft […]
Posted inFebruary 3, 1997: Bringing back the bighorn
The report is readable – and grim
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to another news article, “Columbia Basin plan staggers home.” Though politics may delay and water down the final plans of the Interior Columbia Basin Management Project, the science documenting the condition of the basin is strong and available. In late December, […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
Whiskey Peak: Great air, deteriorating ground
WHISKEY PEAK, Wyo. – Two hang-glider pilots ran into the air off the top of Whiskey Peak one day last summer and began circling over treetops. Just 20 minutes later they were soaring at 16,000 feet. “You just catch a thermal and blow downwind,” said Kevin Christopherson, who set two world distance records from the […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
Locals learn the value of a good view
STANLEY, Idaho – A proposal for two subdivisions on private land within the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, one of the nation’s scenic treasures, has stirred up long-held resentments between landowners and the Forest Service. A local outfitter’s plan to build 10 homes on a five-acre parcel has prompted a cease-and-desist order from the Forest Service. […]
Posted inNovember 25, 1996: Pollution in paradise
Ted Turner makes a deal
A land swap will keep the public off Turner’s new landholding’s near Bozeman.
Posted inNovember 25, 1996: Pollution in paradise
New Mexico environmentalists lease state lands
For the first time in the history of the West, environmentalists have won a lease for state-owned land. Forest Guardians and the Southwest Environmental Center submitted a joint bid for the 550-acre tract on the Rio Puerco River in northwestern New Mexico; much to their surprise, they got it. “Now we have to shift from […]
Posted inNovember 11, 1996: Cease-fire called on the Animas-La Plata front
BLM fills a hot job
As the first boss of the newly created national monument in southern Utah, the Bureau of Land Management’s Jerry Meredith won’t have to worry about filling anyone else’s shoes. But he’ll have plenty of other headaches. President Clinton’s recent designation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument sparked anger among locals and a flurry of controversial […]
Posted inOctober 28, 1996: Has big money doomed direct democracy?
Colorado voters decide fate of 3 million acres
Anyone who has read Amendment 16 in Colorado knows that it will fundamentally change the way the state manages its 3 million acres of school trust lands. Instead of maximizing revenues from these lands through leases or outright sales, the state land board would only be required to produce “reasonable and consistent income over time.” […]