NEWS ROUNDUP

Editorial: Lessons learned from Storm King Mountain Ten years ago, a raging wall of flame and smoke killed 14 brave federal firefighters near Glenwood Springs. Bosses at the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and other federal agencies say that they've absorbed the safety lessons from the Storm King Mountain tragedy and made important changes. But have they? On paper, the decision-making process has become clearer and more focused on protecting the lives of the men and women who battle wild infernos in the nation's forests and on other public lands....
Survivors look back, a decade after Storm King disaster By July 6, 1994, decades of wildfire suppression had forced firefighters to learn how fire behaves in rough terrain with thick vegetation acting as seemingly endless fuel. They had hours of training learning how to avoid getting into trouble where a fire shelter, a lightweight, silver metallic tent, might be needed. Yet 12 of 18 warning signs taught to all firefighters were either ignored or not recognized on Storm King, investigators found. Eight of 10 standard orders issued to ensure safety were not followed. The flames came so quickly that only one of the victims had time to crawl inside a fire shelter to no avail. What happened here that day?....
Ski-area sale triggers boom in Crested Butte In their first six months of ownership of Crested Butte Mountain, the couple have quietly studied the mountain, only recently announcing $6.5 million in improvements for next season. But homeowners, developers and real estate speculators are moving aggressively in their shadow....
Firefighters see impending disaster in woodland homes In California and Oregon, it's an old story: Flaming winds whip through the hills, decimating million-dollar dream homes, panicking communities and leaving dozens of people displaced. But in Western Washington, suburbanites are slowly waking up to the fact that their planned developments tucked into the foothills of Cascade timber forests look like potential disasters to firefighters....
Thompson's resolution focuses on wilderness dams access Adequate motorized access to repair, maintain or even replace the wilderness dams in Ravalli County should have been provided in the language of the Wilderness Act of 1964, and since it wasn't federal lawmakers should change it now, said Ravalli County Commissioner, Alan Thompson. "Technically (wilderness dams) should have been grandfathered because before the wilderness existed there was a need in our valley for irrigation water and without the dams being constructed obviously this valley would look a lot different than it does now," said Thompson. In two weeks, a resolution Thompson wrote for the National Association of Counties will come up for a vote at their annual convention....
Nevada, California in line to get air tankers returning to duty Two of five firefighting air tankers cleared to return to service after being grounded over safety concerns are headed for Nevada and California, federal officials said Saturday. The planes are expected to be stationed out of Battle Mountain, located about 220 miles northeast of Reno, and Lancaster, Calif., Bureau of Land Management officials said. "With only five of the tankers initially going back to service, it was a tough decision on where to station them," said BLM spokeswoman Jo Simpson in Reno....
Counterculture 'Rainbow Family' gathers in California forest to promote world peace This year's annual peace gathering got off to a bad start when one participant was jailed for allegedly beating another nearly to death with a shovel for driving too fast through a campground. But that was an aberration for an event where violations generally involve recreational drugs, occasional nudity or an unleashed dog, said participants and law enforcement officials, who have had 30 years of uneasy relations around the country. On Sunday, the high point of the July 1-7 conclave, more than 16,000 self-described hippies from at least 40 states and eight nations were expected to hold hands in a circle, silently praying for world peace from dawn until noon....
Cabin owners' rebuilding plans left to a lottery In an unprecedented move, forest officials plan to use a lottery system to determine which cabin owners who lost their homes in the 2002 Curve and Williams fires will be allowed to rebuild.
Dozens of cabin owners will have their names picked from a hat to find out which 10 can erect cabins on lots predetermined by the U.S. Forest Service. Forest officials devised the system after concluding they have only 10 or 12 lots available; the other lots are not developable because they are in riparian areas or flood plains, forest officials said....
Endangered Species Act's Protections Are Trimmed The Bush administration has succeeded in reshaping the Endangered Species Act in ways that have sharply limited the impact of the 30-year-old law aimed at protecting the nation's most vulnerable plants and animals, according to environmentalists and some independent analysts. The Bush initiatives, which have ranged from recalculating the economic costs of protecting critical habitats to limiting the number of species added to the protected list, reflect a policy shift that Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton calls the "New Environmentalism."....
Boy Scouts sell lemonade at $250 a glass A Boy Scout troop tried to put a dent in a potential $14 million judgment Friday by selling lemonade — at $250 a glass. The federal and state governments earlier this week sued the Boy Scouts of America to recover costs of the 2002 East Fork fire, allegedly started by Utah Scouts....
Wolves back in Washington? Howl, yes Wolves are about to return to Washington after decades of absence, and federal regulators have begun drafting a plan for their arrival -- addressing what to do when the howling canids scare people or threaten other animals. "It's a good thing to be prepared for that," said Doug Zimmer, information specialist for the Western Washington office of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service....
Researchers work to reduce wolf conflicts Removing a few problem wolves from a pack can dampen that pack's taste for livestock, at least in the short term, according to research presented during a recent public meeting. Liz Bradley, a postgraduate researcher, studied wolf and livestock conflicts and found, in part, that wolves generally kill livestock in areas of elk populations. She also said wolf packs that kill cattle have a high probability of killing again. Of packs where some wolves were removed after livestock attacks, 68 percent of packs killed again....
In North Dakota, Pelicans Leave A Breeding Ground for Mystery Yet this year, that perch's vista is instead one of baffling desolation, a plain of baby chick carcasses and hundreds of never-to-hatch eggs simply left behind for the snacking pleasure of hungry coyotes and gulls. In a quirky and unprecedented natural mystery, the world's largest breeding colony for the birds is eerily vacant. The more than 30,000 pelicans that usually spend the summer procreating at Chase Lake National Wildlife Refuge in central North Dakota returned in their usual droves in April from their winter residence on the Gulf Coast, but then they suddenly dispersed in May after starting an apparently normal breeding season. Nobody knows for sure why....
Fallon tribe seeks protection of prehistoric sites The Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe is pushing for a higher level of federal protection for three prehistoric sites in Churchill County. The tribe wants the Bureau of Land Management to designate the Sand Mountain Recreation Area, Grimes Point Archaeological Area and Stillwater Mountains as areas of critical environmental concern. If the request is granted, the agency would have to create a separate management plan for each....
West Nile virus poses dangers to wildlife Efforts to prevent the spread of West Nile Virus in California shouldn’t ignore the state’s wildlife, including majestic raptors and endangered sheep in the Coachella Valley and statewide, according to one authority. Walter Boyce, director of the Wildlife Health Center at the University of California, Davis, called on West Nile watchers statewide to be alert to the dangers the disease poses to animals, particularly some species of rare birds....
Column: Economic success, ingenuity a recipe for a better environment Simon's work led many other scientists and statisticians to examine environmental claims more critically. Some environmentalists eventually broke with the movement. They saw that the world was not collapsing - that our quality of life is getting better, not worse; that the creation of wealth and technology supports environmental quality, not undercuts it; and that the relationship between man and his environment is less a Darwinian battle than a mutually beneficial interaction powered by human ingenuity. The relationship between environmental quality and economic success breeds ongoing improvement. Quantitatively, we know not only that higher levels of income promote environmental quality but also that the improvement in quality is better than a 1-to-1 ratio. That is, if income rises 10 percent, the demand for environmental quality rises more than 10 percent....
In Montana, Gas Drilling Hits a Rare Roadblock This search, which affects about 60 million American homes that heat with gas, has a guiding rule: If companies can lease land, they can drill it. The rule has proved inviolable, even though the companies' newest drilling technique -- called coal-bed methane extraction -- has often enraged environmentalists and local ranchers by lowering water tables, souring streams with salt and scarring wild lands with wastewater pits and screaming gas compressors. One county in the West has had the temerity and the wherewithal to break the rule of lease it and drill. Not one gas well has been drilled here in Gallatin County, where the Old West ranch culture has been replaced by the recreating ways of the New West bourgeoisie. Affluent, well-educated newcomers from the East and West coasts have bought up and taken over this western Montana county in the past 15 years, turning it into a place where people go outside not to work the land, but to play on it....
Challis ranchers, farmers seem to like proposal Simpson has worked on the plan for more than three years, crafting a package that offers benefits to most of the groups that have fought over the future of the region for more than 30 years. For example, ranchers who give up grazing permits would be paid and motorcyclists would retain most of the trails they use, including a trail that runs through the heart of the Boulder-White Cloud Wilderness. Simpson has proposed transferring more than 1,000 acres of federal land to Custer County, which it could sell to pay for services and economic development....
Column: Wyo. says "no" to more wells The announcement this June that Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal opposed new oil and gas leases in the Upper Green River Valley startled both conservation groups and the oil industry. After all, Wyoming is one of the few states fortunate enough not to face a budget crisis right now, and it's because of oil and gas royalties. Yet, in the state's fastest-growing county of Sublette, even pro-development locals were having second thoughts about one more gas field....
Federal officials open up 1,500 miles of desert to off-roaders The Bureau of Land Management substantially increased the amount of public land open to off-road vehicles in Riverside and San Bernardino counties by approving 1,500 miles of roads in the Mojave Desert. The decision made Friday affects 1.3 million acres in the Mojave Desert and covers a large portion of critical habitat for the endangered desert tortoise. But officials said they made efforts to avoid sensitive areas....
Column: BLM must grapple with an ORV plan after court decision The Supreme Court overruled the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals last month and concluded that conservationists could not use a specific provision of a federal law to force the Bureau of Land Management to protect sensitive public lands, including Wilderness Study Areas, from off-road vehicles. A 1,000-fold increase in ORV use in Utah since the late 1980s had left a wide path of scars, water pollution, soil erosion, cross-country trails, trampled vegetation and teeth-rattling noise that the BLM had ignored for years. Before we filed the lawsuit, the BLM's own ORV expert could not tell us how much BLM land was protected from ORVs (turns out it was a paltry 6 percent); and not a single BLM field office had mapped an ORV trail system, or had a current environmental study of ORV impacts....
Stevens inserts $15,000-an-acre offer in military bill U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens recently slipped $2.5 million into the annual military spending bill to buy 160 acres on the North Slope that belong to Jacob Adams, the president of the powerful Arctic Slope Regional Corp., and two of his siblings. A paragraph Stevens wrote into the Defense Department appropriation bill in June said the Air Force will pay the Adams family in exchange for the land and "in consideration of its unauthorized use and contamination." The $2.5 million cost comes to more than $15,000 per acre....
Editorial: Renew Emerald Mountain effort Two years ago, local activists and government officials came together to preserve Emerald Mountain, a broad, velvety escarpment that rises behind Steamboat Springs. The deal hasn't been completed, though, because of bureaucratic footdragging. The vision and muscle of Interior Secretary Gale Norton is needed to unsnarl the logjam. In 2002, the land board and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management agreed to attempt a property swap. The pact looked like a win-win-win deal for the community, state and federal government. The BLM identified 106 isolated and hard-to-manage federal properties, most of them inaccessible to the public. The bureau planned to sell those parcels to adjacent private landowners and then, using the proceeds, buy Emerald Mountain. That plan would ensure that Emerald would remain open space....
Fort Belknap grazing rates soar After six years of crippling drought and the most brutal winter in 110 years, Doney and other Fort Belknap Reservation ranchers face a 51 percent increase in grazing fees on reservation land. He estimates the increase will cost him $25,000 this year. With the increase, Fort Belknap ranchers pay the highest grazing rate on any reservation in Montana or Wyoming. And they pay more than the average fee for state-owned land, federal Bureau of Land Management property in Montana and private land in the Treasure State....
Deep in drought It’s a drought that’s drying forests in Idaho, killing crops in Wyoming and spreading wildfires in New Mexico. Experts say it may be the West’s worst drought in 500 years, surpassing the Dust Bowl years in places like the Colorado River basin. “There’s really no clear indication when this thing is going to end,” said Don Wilhite, director of the National Drought Mitigation Center in Lincoln, Neb.. “It looks like it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.” Some states are now in their sixth year of drought, Nevada is in its fifth. In Southern Nevada, the situation is dire....
Preserving Iosepa's Heritage Hoopiiaina's ancestors were among the first Mormon Polynesian settlers who colonized the area 60 miles west of Salt Lake City in 1889. At its peak, Iosepa (pronounced Yo-seppa) had nearly 300 residents; now what remains is a cemetery. Hoopiiaina, 45, president of the Iosepa Historical Association, travels to Iosepa at least 12 times a year, often spending at least three days every visit....
Marking massacre site shifts direction The little-known massacre occurred in May 1887 at the mouth of Deep Creek where it flows into the Snake River on the Oregon side of Hells Canyon in Wallowa County. The Chinese miners were ambushed by a gang of seven rustlers and schoolboys. The killings still stir deep feelings in Wallowa County, where several of the killers were from well-known families....