Recreation

UTAH If Utah Rep. Jim Hansen has his way, northern Utah forests may become a Mecca for ATV riders. In April, the 11-term Republican and chairman of the House Resources Committee introduced a bill that would create the Shoshone National Recreation Trail along hundreds of miles of backcountry roads mostly in the Wasatch-Cache National Forest. […]

ARIZONA A land-exchange referendum slated for the November ballot could set the stage for shifting the borders of the Sonoran Desert and Ironwoods national monuments, two of President Clinton’s 11th-hour designations (HCN, 1/29/01: Monumental changes). Interior Secretary Gale Norton and Arizona Gov. Jane Hull have conferred several times in the past year about how to […]

MONTANA When then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt visited Montana’s Missouri Breaks on a rafting trip down the Missouri River in 1999, he roused fears among some that if the area were declared a monument, it would be put off-limits to oil and gas leasing. Shortly thereafter, the Bureau of Land Management awarded a series of leases […]

OREGON Rock climbers are clinging a bit more tenaciously to crags on federal lands now that the U.S. Forest Service has all but outlawed climbing at a network of caves outside of Bend, Ore. To protect dwindling populations of bats and to preserve the caves, which are sacred to the Confederated Tribes of the Warm […]

NEW MEXICO Albuquerque, N.M., is growing so quickly that Petroglyph National Monument, currently on the outskirts of town, is likely to be enveloped by the city in the next 20 years. Some planners want to build a road through the monument, which now divides the west side of Albuquerque from the rest of the city […]

MONTANA When hard-pressed, even the most antagonistic foes can reconcile their differences, as snowmobilers and wilderness advocates demonstrated in their recent agreement on motorized access in Montana’s Flathead National Forest. Early last year, months of legal wrangling between the Montana Wilderness Association, Montana Snowmobile Association and the Flathead National Forest ended in a ruling that […]

COLORADO Rural communities often cringe at the prospect of the federal government owning more land. But residents in Colorado’s San Luis Valley are breathing a sigh of relief now that their valley is one step closer to becoming home to a new national park. In January, The Nature Conservancy signed an agreement to buy a […]

UTAH After President Clinton used the Antiquities Act to establish Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 1996, Gov. Mike Leavitt railed against the move as an abuse of executive power. But during his State of the State address this Jan. 28, Leavitt asked President Bush for something that made environmentalists’ jaws hit the floor: a 620,000-acre […]

ARIZONA The Grand Canyon stretch of the Colorado River has become an ideological and regulatory war zone, as debates rage over the use of motorized boats, and private and commercial boaters fight for their share of the river-permit pie. In 1997, the Park Service tried to chart the future of the Colorado by starting work […]

WYOMING Last summer, a group of snowmobilers, wildlife advocates, cross-country skiers and business owners embarked on an ambitious adventure: to work out a collaborative plan for managing winter use in the Medicine Bow National Forest’s Snowy Range. By early September, two environmentalists had defected. Eric Bonds of Biodiversity Associates and the other green, University of […]

COLORADO The Boy Scouts, with their image as resourceful, courteous, “leave no trace” outdoorsmen, seem an unlikely focal point for an environmental controversy over public land use. But that is where the Western Colorado Council of the Boy Scouts of America has found itself since proposing a new Boy Scout camp in the White River […]