NEWS ROUNDUP

Early season avalanche prompts warnings A weekend avalanche in Little Cottonwood Canyon has prompted authorities to warn skiers that it doesn't take much snow to create a slide and that resorts have not yet started their avalanche control. Bruce Tremper, director of the U.S. Forest Service's Utah Avalanche Center, was taking pictures at Alta Ski Area on his day off when the slide triggered about 11:30 a.m. Sunday. The slide was released from Mount Baldy, with a peak elevation of 11,066 feet and 5 feet of snow. An Alta official checked the area and believed no victims were buried under the snow. Normally, the ground should be bare. "This is the earliest snow I can remember in the almost 20 years that I've been here," Tremper said....
Natural gas activist training seeks balance between interests The natural gas industry gives Garfield County residents access to many modern-day conveniences including heating and electricity. There's no denying the usefulness of natural gas - more than 70 percent of U.S. residents use natural gas to heat their homes, according to the 2003 Census Bureau - but concerned residents want to find ways for oil companies to produce natural gas while respecting the environment. That was evident Saturday morning as a group of people from around Colorado attended a gas activist training in Carbondale to learn how to force oil and gas companies to comply with environmental standards....
Report used to justify water transfers called “political science” Late last Friday evening, as is tradition with bad news, the National Marine Fisheries Service (also known as NOAA Fisheries) released a finding that would allow more Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta water to be exported from Northern California to Southern California. The finding, known as a biological opinion, determined that the proposed water transfers would not jeopardize the survival of five fish species including the endangered winter-run Chinook salmon, the threatened spring-run Chinook salmon and the threatened Central Valley steelhead. Today, Earthjustice charged that the opinion is politically motivated. The opinion would allow the federal Bureau of Reclamation and state Department of Water Resources to send more Delta water to Southern California urban and agricultural water districts despite the impacts on protected native California fish species....
Canola Oil Kills Grasshoppers Raw canola oil can combine with a fungus to get rid of grasshoppers, a researcher says. Stefan Jaronski, who works at the Agricultural Research Service in Sidney, Mont., has found that the raw canola oil has fatty acids that will attract grasshoppers to deadly fungi known as Beauveria bassiana and Metarhizium anisopliae. Jaronski mixed spores of the fungi with the oil, and he found grasshoppers were drawn to plants sprayed with the mixture. They became infected with the fungi while feeding on the sprayed plants, and usually died within a week, he said....
Column: Bush Interior Dept. Pepper Sprays Top Cop Theresa Chambers has become a poster child for the destruction of enduring American institutions. In this case, the National Park Service and the national monuments it protects. Until last July, Theresa Chambers was the U.S. Park Service Chief of Police. She was responsible for security and public safety at U.S. National Parks and Monuments in urban centers, including the Washington Monument and the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials on the Washington Mall along with many other parks and monuments in the nation's capitol....
Creationism and Science Clash at Grand Canyon Bookstores Roger Kennedy, former director of the National Park Service, is hardly a practitioner of secular humanism. Meals at his house begin with grace, and in a recent talk on environmental politics he chided his audience for not paying enough attention to the way the wonders of nature inspire wonder at their creator. But when it comes to selling, in stores at a national park, a book propounding the idea that God created Grand Canyon in Noah's flood, he pauses. "If there were a person, which I doubt, qualified in geological science, who said it is perfectly plausible, that would be one thing," said Mr. Kennedy, who led the park service from 1993 to 1996. But, he said, such a book would have to have "a respectable scholarly basis." Mr. Kennedy has not seen "Grand Canyon: A Different View," but others who have, including geologists on the Park Service staff, say it does not meet that test....
Stealing from the Sierra, a sky-high page at a time Since 19th-century explorers first scrambled to the top of Sierra Nevada summits, climbers have felt compelled to mark their peak accomplishments in writing. In notebooks, on loose sheets of paper and scraps of Kodak film cartons, they have recorded moments of pure exhilaration, marveled at the knifelike ridges and wind-polished domes, jotted down climbing routes or simply signed their names. But today, those informal archives of achievement, tucked away in sardine cans, glass jars, baking powder tins and even custom-made Sierra Club metal boxes, are vanishing....
Leaching for gold: Some say cyanide leaching mining is safe, some disagree When the now-bankrupt Zortman and Landusky cyanide heap leach gold mines opened in the 1970s, the best minds in science and industry thought cleaning up after them would be a simple affair: Wash off the cyanide, deal with the pit and be done. But they were wrong, according to Warren McCullough, chief of the Department of Environmental Quality's Environmental Management Bureau. What happened next depends on your point of view and is a central issue in the debate over Initiative 147, an effort to repeal the state's ban on cyanide leach mining....
Editorial: Rocky Mountain Politics Interior Secretary Gale Norton has moved aggressively to open up the public lands for oil and gas production, just as Vice President Dick Cheney asked her to do in his 2001 energy report - 6,000 drilling permits in the last fiscal year alone, an all-time record. And while much of this has been unobjectionable, Ms. Norton has not been at all shy about invading environmentally sensitive landscapes that her predecessor, Bruce Babbitt, would almost surely have let alone. In recent weeks, however, controversial plans for new drilling in areas of great importance not only to environmentalists but to hunters and anglers who form part of President Bush's core constituency have been shelved until after the election. These include proposals to open up thousands of acres of the fragile Otero Mesa in New Mexico, big chunks of the Roan Plateau in Colorado and the Green River Basin in Wyoming, an already heavily exploited region rich in wildlife and natural gas. (No similar reprieve was granted to Utah, where 40,000 acres were recently auctioned off as part of the Interior Department's colonizing of Utah lands that Mr. Babbitt had protected as potential wilderness.)....
Rustlers running rampant in Jerome County More than 60 calves have been stolen from Jerome County ranchers this summer. And Sheriff Jim Weaver concedes that rustling is out of control. Heifers and bulls are disappearing at about the same rate. Weaver says his deputies are doing all they can. But it's also up to ranchers to take precautions. Too many aren't branding their stock, and Weaver says ranchers need to move pens away from roads and keep them well lit....
It's All Trew: Autos gave new meaning to learning curve The period from 1924 to 1930 might well be named The Transition Era, as everyone of age was trying to learn how to drive the "new-fangled" automobiles. Forgetting life-long habits of yelling "whoa" when you want to stop instead of stepping on the brake took concentration and training. Trails traveled by wagons and buggies for centuries did not lend themselves to the swift-running horseless carriage. This learning period, converting from four-legged horsepower to gasoline power, made for some interesting and classic old Route 66 stories....