You can search for alien life forms near Roswell, N.M., and not see them, but you can’t miss all-terrain vehicles. For the past 20 years, motor-bikers have carved tracks all around 3,530-acre Haystack Mountain. But unfettered roaming may end soon. The Roswell District of the Bureau of Land Management has finished a draft management plan […]
Recreation
Posted inNovember 10, 1997: Drain Lake Powell? Democracy and science finally come West
Continental Divide Trail
You don’t have to leave your home to experience the Continental Divide Trail. Exploring the trail is now as easy as typing www.gorp.com/cdts/ and hitting return. The Continental Divide Trail Society has created a Web page for hikers to exchange information, inquire about weather conditions and find hiking partners via the Forum, the site’s on-line […]
Posted inOctober 27, 1997: Deconstructing the age of dams
Monumental conflict continues
The saying, “time heals all wounds,” may not apply to Utah, at least not to its politicians. Though more than a year has passed since President Clinton created the 1.7 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah, the state’s congressional delegation continues to try to dismantle it. Republican Rep. Jim Hansen told the Salt […]
Posted inOctober 27, 1997: Deconstructing the age of dams
Snowmobiles remain an issue
Yellowstone is one of the few national parks in the world where snowmobiling is allowed, and about 100,000 people a year take advantage of that fact. But there has never been a formal study of how the noisy, smelly machines affect the park and its wildlife. That could change next year. The Fund for Animals, […]
Posted inSeptember 29, 1997: The timber wars evolve into a divisive attempt at peace
Microbes for sale here
As military bands, rangers on horseback and Vice President Al Gore marked Yellowstone National Park’s 125th anniversary in August, park officials signed a contract that formally opened the park’s famous hot springs to bioprospecting. The deal allows San Diego-based Diversa Corp. to collect samples of hot-water microbes, called thermophiles, in exchange for $175,000 over five […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 1997: Yellowstone at 125: The park as a sovereign state
Yellowstone at 125: The park as a sovereign state
Note: this front-page essay introduces this issue’s feature story. In June 1986, Max Peterson, then chief of the Forest Service, went to Yellowstone National Park. In the course of his speech, he mentioned how nice it was to be in Montana. Unfortunately, he was standing in Wyoming. The press hooted. We shouldn’t have. It’s a […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 1997: Yellowstone at 125: The park as a sovereign state
Bigger might be better for Utah’s parks
Lockhart Basin isn’t part of southern Utah’s Canyonlands National Park, but activists and park managers are saying it should be. Just outside the park’s eastern boundaries, the basin will soon be home to a drilling rig from Legacy Energy Corp., which has a permit from the Bureau of Land Management to explore for oil. Opponents […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 1997: Yellowstone at 125: The park as a sovereign state
Is nature running too wild in Yellowstone?
It’s June 5, and spring is hitting hard in Montana’s Paradise Valley. The Yellowstone River is over its banks. Water the color of creamed coffee washes around streamside cottonwoods and drowns fence posts. Storm clouds over the snow-heavy high country mean there’s more on the way. I’m riding shotgun with Richard Keigley, an ecologist with […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 1997: Yellowstone at 125: The park as a sovereign state
One scientist’s forbidden fruit
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. “This is the tree that started this mess,” says Richard Keigley, kneeling for a closer look at the trunk of a scraggly juniper. The tree stands on a hillside above Mammoth, just inside the northern gate of Yellowstone National Park. Its base is as […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 1997: Yellowstone at 125: The park as a sovereign state
Politics tangles with science
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. As bison pushed their way out of Yellowstone National Park last winter, Republican lawmakers from the surrounding states of Idaho, Wyoming and Montana blasted the Park Service for allowing the herd to get out of control. When the Park Service responded by citing a […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
Close those roads
Up Stevens Gulch near Paonia, Colo., some Coloradans want to drive all-terrain vehicles on logging roads the Forest Service once promised it would close off. Now, the agency is offering two more timber sales, which means even more road construction, and then more ATVs. The Colorado Wildlife Federation, Colorado Environmental Coalition and the Western Slope […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
Utah’s bumbling obscures a valid complaint
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Now that government has become show business, one must classify political activities not according to ideology, party or faction but by genre. Is the senator (president, governor, whatever) wearing the smiling comedy face today, or the gloomier mask of the drama? Sometimes, though, there’s little doubt, as is the case with the […]
Posted inAugust 18, 1997: The West that was, and the West that can be
Cold weather crowds
Winter is becoming like summer in the greater Yellowstone area, at least if you’re talking about crowds. The past two decades have seen a rising tide of winter visitors, especially snowmobilers and skiers, and with them new concerns for agency managers. This flood of visitors threatens both the health of the wilderness areas and the […]
Posted inAugust 18, 1997: The West that was, and the West that can be
Bear myths
-Human sexual activity,” claims a Forest Service brochure titled Backpacking, “attracts bears.” “I’ve never found any studies on the topic,” counters Alaskan author Dave Smith in his new paperback book, Backcountry Bear Basics: The Definitive Guide to Avoiding Unpleasant Encounters. “If you think about it, we’re often told to make noise to avoid surprising bears; […]
Posted inAugust 4, 1997: Vanishing habitat
A do-over in Telluride
Environmental activists may get a second shot at containing the ski industry in Telluride, Colo. Supervisor Robert Storch of the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison national forests has reversed his approval of a ski area expansion onto public land. “In the interest of fairness,” Storch wrote the regional forester on June 30, “I have agreed […]
Posted inAugust 4, 1997: Vanishing habitat
A Colorado reality check: lions roam and kill
On July 17, 10-year-old Mark David Miedema was hiking minutes ahead of his parents in Rocky Mountain National Park when an 88-pound pregnant female mountain lion attacked. The lion had fled by the time the family found the unconscious boy. Miedema, who choked on his own vomit, was dead when park rangers arrived. Three hours […]
Posted inAugust 4, 1997: Vanishing habitat
‘Thrillcraft’ leave a polluted, contentious wake
“What we ought to do is establish parks for motorized recreational use, and shove all the ATVs and all the jet skis in there and let ’em run over the top of each other and break each other’s eardrums,” says Ric Bailey, the outspoken director of the Hells Canyon Preservation Council, a coalition of commercial […]
Posted inJuly 7, 1997: While the New West booms, Wyoming mines, drills ... and languishes
No parking in the parks
The public has spoken: America’s national parks are crowded. Consumer Reports asked 40,000 of its subscribers to rate their experiences in America’s national parks. The survey found that along with spectacular scenery, Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon offered headaches over parking, bad roads and too many people. Yellowstone, the nation’s first national park, ranked 27th […]
Posted inJune 23, 1997: On the trail of mining's corporate nomads
Bills target Antiquities Act
Still seething over President Clinton’s 1996 creation of the 1.7 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument last fall, Utah lawmakers are trying to turn their anger into law. A bill co-sponsored by Utah Republican Senators Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett would require the president to get approval from a state’s governor and from Congress before establishing […]
Posted inJune 23, 1997: On the trail of mining's corporate nomads
Darkness un-Vailed
Night skiing on Vail Mountain is in the dark – for now. After four years of research, Vail Associates unveiled plans last month to light up Vail Mountain for evening skiers and snowboarders. But local residents – unimpressed by a high-tech Hungarian lighting system – forced the company to reconsider the proposal that had already […]