For hundreds of years, the spruce forest in the mountains north of Steamboat Springs, Colo., close to Wyoming, endured everything Mother Nature could throw at it: deep winter snows, severe drought, lightning strikes and gusty winds. But on the night of Oct. 24, the forest got hit by something new: 120-mile-per-hour winds blowing from the […]
Wildlife
Posted inNovember 10, 1997: Drain Lake Powell? Democracy and science finally come West
Taxpayers subsidize cheap vacations
In one of the most beautiful – and affluent – parts of central Idaho, 182 cabins on the Sawtooth National Forest have for decades been the best real estate bargain around. Many of the cabins are in stunning locations like Petit Lake, a remote body of water at the northern tier of the 2.1 million-acre […]
Posted inNovember 10, 1997: Drain Lake Powell? Democracy and science finally come West
Serious trouble for snow geese
The skies over Midwestern states will be dotted white this fall by snow geese moving south for the winter. But many biologists have concluded that the birds are too prolific for their own good. The goose population has skyrocketed over the past 30 years, up from 750,000 in 1969 to almost 3 million today. As […]
Posted inNovember 10, 1997: Drain Lake Powell? Democracy and science finally come West
Plumas lake poisoned despite civil disobedience
The California Department of Fish and Game poisoned Lake Davis despite a last-minute barrage of legal assaults and pre-dawn civil disobedience hours before the Oct. 15 treatment occurred. A week after pumping Nusyn-Noxfish and powdered rotenone into the lake north of Lake Tahoe, state officials had collected 15 tons of dead fish, including an 18-pound […]
Posted inNovember 10, 1997: Drain Lake Powell? Democracy and science finally come West
Another wild opportunity
The Bureau of Land Management has pushed 180,000 acres of Colorado outback a step closer to becoming wilderness study areas. The agency recently labeled the areas “roadless’ after completing new surveys. The surveys were prompted by the Colorado Environmental Coalition, which said the areas should have been included in the BLM’s 1980 survey of potential […]
Posted inNovember 10, 1997: Drain Lake Powell? Democracy and science finally come West
Dollars, Sense and Salmon
The Idaho Statesman is offering reprints of its landmark editorial series that argues for breaching four dams on the Lower Snake River to help save salmon populations. The series, titled Dollars, Sense and Salmon, ran three days last July, and helped push the dams issue to the forefront of Pacific Northwest political debate. Copies cost […]
Posted inNovember 10, 1997: Drain Lake Powell? Democracy and science finally come West
Y2Y: A vast concept gets a hearing
WATERTON, Canada – The irony wasn’t lost on anyone attending the Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) conference in Waterton/Glacier International Peace Park Oct. 2-5. As some 300 environmentalists, wildlife biologists, federal, state and provincial employees and Native North Americans met, mountain goats scavenged for garbage in the heart of town and three grizzly bears munched on […]
Posted inNovember 10, 1997: Drain Lake Powell? Democracy and science finally come West
On a Montana ranch, big game and big problems
DARBY, Mont. – It’s almost September, and dozens of “shooter bulls” have been turned into the shooting enclosure of Big Velvet Elk Ranch, just south of here, in western Montana’s Bitterroot Valley. Ranch owner Len Wallace has booked 80 clients for the fall and every one of them is going to shoot a trophy elk, […]
Posted inOctober 27, 1997: Deconstructing the age of dams
Big trees fall in contested sale
Big ponderosa pine trees came crashing down Sept. 30 near Ojo Caliente, N.M., after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco denied yet another attempt by the environmental group Forest Guardians to stop part of the La Manga timber sale. “This is the last 3 percent of the forest that has old-growth […]
Posted inOctober 27, 1997: Deconstructing the age of dams
Burning down the woods
An Arizona timber company that accidentally burned 8,000 acres on the Coconino National Forest last year will be allowed to bid on a salvage timber sale in the burned area. The fire began in May 1996, in a smoldering slash pile left by Stone Forest Industries. The fire burned 8,000 acres north of Flagstaff and […]
Posted inOctober 27, 1997: Deconstructing the age of dams
Activists wade through mudslides
Idaho environmentalists say that while the Senate debated cutting subsidies for logging in September, the Forest Service withheld politically damaging evidence that logging on steep slopes harms forests and native fish. After heavy rains triggered 905 massive mudslides during the winter of 1995-96 on the Clearwater National Forest in central Idaho, agency officials ordered an […]
Posted inOctober 27, 1997: Deconstructing the age of dams
Locals rally against logging
Northern New Mexico’s Chama Valley is the last place to expect a battle over a logging operation. The valley is full of people who for generations have harvested the resources of the land. But in July, that started changing when hundreds of “No Trespassing” signs went up on the thickly forested mountains that are part […]
Posted inOctober 27, 1997: Deconstructing the age of dams
Grizzlies and the male animal
The crowd of several hundred area residents who gathered in a school auditorium in Salmon, Idaho, recently was almost totally united in its opposition to the proposal. No one wanted the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to introduce some 25 subadult grizzly bears into the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness on the Idaho-Montana border over a several year […]
Posted inOctober 27, 1997: Deconstructing the age of dams
Salmon says no bears, no way
SALMON, Idaho – The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s proposal to reintroduce grizzly bears to the Northern Rockies got a tense reception at a public hearing in Salmon, Idaho, Oct. 8. For more than four hours, speakers blasted the plan before an audience of 200, saying grizzlies have no place in Idaho. At issue is […]
Posted inOctober 13, 1997: The land is still public, but it's no longer free
Least loved beasts
-A coyote danced. Perhaps not. Reason tells me that he was catching his breakfast. Voles, moles, meadow mice, ground squirrels, chipmunks, and other rodents abound in the Sierra meadows. But still, his dance was a study in grace and sinuous acrobatics: A leap to clear the grass, a pounce, a toss of the head and […]
Posted inOctober 13, 1997: The land is still public, but it's no longer free
A timber country memoir
It’s hard to make straight lines stick to the earth, writes Robert Leo Heilman in Overstory: Zero; Real Life in Timber Country, and even harder in hilly Douglas County, Ore. In his book of 32 essays, Heilman returns to this theme again and again; he likes the earth’s reluctance to bend to blueprints, whether he […]
Posted inOctober 13, 1997: The land is still public, but it's no longer free
Flattened fauna need help
For decades, Route 93 between Missoula, Mont., and Glacier National Park has earned a reputation as a dangerous stretch of highway. A bumper sticker from the 1960s reads: “Pray for me, I drive 93.” Now it seems drivers aren’t the only ones in danger. Hundreds of western painted turtles that live in pothole wetlands are […]
Posted inOctober 13, 1997: The land is still public, but it's no longer free
Rafters vs. fish
River outfitters and their supporters rallied in Stanley, Idaho, Sept. 23 to say that the Forest Service had gone too far. Led by owners of The River Company, some 50 central Idaho residents protested the agency’s shutting down of the Salmon River. The agency has been periodically closing off parts of the river to floaters […]
Posted inOctober 13, 1997: The land is still public, but it's no longer free
Big stink over northern pike
A battle over poisoning Lake Davis to rid it of non-native northern pike appears headed for a shoreline showdown. The courts have endorsed a California Department of Fish and Game plan to poison the lake 70 miles north of Lake Tahoe. A Plumas County ordinance is now one of the last obstacles, short of civil […]
Posted inSeptember 29, 1997: The timber wars evolve into a divisive attempt at peace
Trees refuse to croak
When Forest Service officials approved logging on 10,000 acres of Idaho’s Payette National Forest under the salvage logging rider in 1995, they said the trees had been killed by a 1994 wildfire or bark beetles. Now, they admit “dead” was an overstatement. “People may see what appear to be green, healthy trees removed from the […]