NEWS ROUNDUP

Plaque honoring hero must come off Utah mountain The Salt Lake City Police officers who slogged up Kings Peak on Saturday to place a 14-pound plaque honoring a fallen comrade may soon have to venture there again - this time, to lug it down. U.S. Forest Service officials say the police failed to get proper permission and, in effect, broke the law. Leaving human-made objects on Kings Peak, which is inside the High Uintas Wilderness Area, violates the 1964 Wilderness Act and Forest Service wilderness regulations, said Clark Tucker, district ranger for the Ashley National Forest. On the Sept. 11 anniversary, seven police officers trekked to the peak, the highest point in Utah, to memorialize James Cawley. A police detective and Marine reservist, Cawley died during the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The officers were accompanied by Cawley's brother, Mike Cawley....
Forest officials close motorcycle trail in Bridgers A motorcycle trail in the Bridger Mountains will be barricaded this weekend for the second time in a year. The trail leads from Sypes Canyon to the top of Mount Baldy and there is disagreement over whether it is a legal trail. Whatever its status, motorcyclists have been damaging plants and soils so it will be barricaded, according to Brian McNeil, trails and roads supervisor for the Bozeman district of the Gallatin National Forest....
Forest service to shut down mountain bike courses The U.S. Forest Service this week shut down two mountain bike trails on Kingsbury Grade that are steep, fitted with jumps and platforms, but are near creeks and allegedly damaging water quality. "The level of damage to resources has become out of control; we can't stand by and let it happen," said Garrett Villanueva, civil engineer and trail planner for the Forest Service. "It's gone over that threshold from not so bad to pretty serious impacts to water quality."....
Dry Canyon ATV use shut down What do you get when you combine booming population growth and the runaway popularity of all-terrain vehicles in a small mountainside community? A real mess on the hill. ATV use above this Utah County city has gotten so out of hand that U.S. Forest Service and Lindon officials on Thursday announced that all vehicle access will be shut down in the Dry Canyon area. They hope to eliminate what has grown into 13 miles of ATV trails on the bench above the city....
Oil lease pullback comes as surprise People across the state expressed surprise Wednesday at the U.S. Forest Service's decision to withhold oil and gas leases in northwest Wyoming just three weeks before the scheduled auction. Curt Parsons, division operations manager with EOG Resources in Big Piney, said he was "chagrined." Tom Darin, an attorney with the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance and a critic of the lease sale, hailed Tuesday's decision....
State, Feds Will Attempt To Save Golden Trout Federal and state officials plan to announce Friday an agreement to spend $1.3 million over the next five years to save California's state fish. If it's successful, the effort would avoid having to list the golden trout as a federally threatened or endangered species. Recent DNA testing by University of California, Davis, researchers found such alarming interbreeding among all remaining populations that there is a real possibility of extinction, according to the assessment and recovery strategy to be released Friday....
Editorial: No salvage rider: Smith should withdraw Biscuit salvage proposal It's hard for parties in any dispute to negotiate a balanced, reasonable compromise when one of them has a 500-pound gorilla standing behind it. If court-ordered mediation fails to resolve legal challenges to logging of old-growth forest reserves burned in Southern Oregon's 2002 Biscuit Fire, a key reason will be the gorilla that is Sen. Gordon Smith's threat to introduce legislation that would summarily end all existing and future legal challenges to the Forest Service's salvage plan....
Laney enters pleas; faces minimum of five months in jail Rancher Kit Laney faces a minimum sentence of five months in jail and five months of house arrest after pleading guilty to assaulting or resisting a federal officer and obstruction of a court order. The Catron County rancher had been charged with eight counts, including assault with a deadly weapon, assault on federal officers and obstruction of justice. At sentencing, which will be in October, federal prosecutors are to dismiss the remaining six counts against him under a plea bargain agreement....
Yellowstone Club Warren Miller had been trying to get me to visit the ultra-exclusive Yellowstone Club ever since he sold his home in Vail, Colo., two seasons ago and moved to Montana to become the club's director of skiing. "Just spend one day here and it will change how you think about skiing forever," Warren promised. I wasn't taking the bait. The price of admission is well beyond what most of SKI's readers could ever afford. Even the U.S. Senate has more members than the Yellowstone Club, where the initiation fee alone is $250,000 and prospective members at first were expected to have at least $3 million in liquid assets-a lot of Dom Perignon....
Democrats help stall vote on Cape Fox bill Democrats on Tuesday walked out of a U.S. Senate committee hearing on a bill to privatize acreage at Berners Bay, stalling a vote on the proposed Cape Fox Corp. land exchange. At least until next week, the Cape Fox bill and two other bills left in limbo will remain in committee, said Chuck Kleeschulte, a spokeswoman for U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, who is trying to push the Cape Fox bill and another controversial piece of Native land legislation onto the Senate floor. Three other Murkowski natural resource bills affecting Southeast Alaska already have been approved by the Senate....
Federal undersecretary joins in Biscuit mediation sessions The president's point man on national forests is expected in Eugene today for a closed-door mediation of lawsuits that have blocked logging of trees burned in the 2002 Biscuit Fire in Southern Oregon. The talks led by U.S. Magistrate Thomas Coffin aim to clear the legal thicket surrounding one of the largest sales of federal timber in recent years. Sawmills want access to the burned timber, but environmental activists say the Bush administration wants to log far more than the scorched landscape can stand. Mark Rey, the administration's undersecretary of agriculture over the U.S. Forest Service, will join the talks, along with droves of attorneys, environmental representatives, timber companies and representatives of the governor....
Forest Service plan upheld despite objections, appeals from all sides The U.S. Forest Service's Washington, D.C., headquarters has upheld the vast majority of a new management plan for the White River National Forest over objections of several diverse groups, according to the forest supervisor's office. Numerous parts of the plan were appealed by groups seeking everything from more protection for roadless areas to more places to ride off-road vehicles. An appeal was even made by the Colorado Department of Natural Resources in an attempt to open more lands to logging on the theory that the practice would allow more spring runoff to reach streams and be tapped for human uses....
Editorial: Parks in peril In 1997, Congress established the Recreational Fee Demonstration Program allowing most national parks to charge entrance fees and each individual park to keep 80 percent of the amount collected. The other 20 percent is to be spent on projects throughout the Park Service system and for maintenance of smaller parks that are not part of the demonstration program. The fees are collected by the National Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service. Prior to 1997 only 133 areas under the National Park Service charged admission fees and they were capped at $5 per vehicle and $3 per individual....