NEWS ROUNDUP

Third body found in Utah avalanches At least three people have been killed in weekend avalanches in Utah’s backcountry, and a fourth man remained missing. Rescue crews Sunday recovered the body of Melvin Denis, 32, who was snowshoeing with a friend a day earlier in Wasatch-Cache National Forest east of Salt Lake City when an avalanche trapped them, police said. A skier was killed Friday when he was swept up in an avalanche in the national forest. Saturday, a man died after being buried in four feet of snow while snowmobiling in Wasatch County....
Editorial: Prioritize land swap It's regrettable that Congress adjourned last week without passing the largest land exchange in Arizona history. The compromise bill was set and ready to go. It cleared the Senate, but the House, ready to adjourn once it passed legislation reorganizing the nation's intelligence community, simply ran out of time. It's little consolation for Yavapai Ranch owner Fred Ruskin. For five years he has worked hard, lining up support in the Verde Valley and in other communities in northern Arizona. The Arizona delegation is solidly behind the bill for the right reasons: It's good for economic development. It doubles the amount of U.S. Forest Service land for public access and recreation. And it imposes limits on the amount of groundwater withdrawals....
Judge forbids logging `live' trees A federal judge has ruled that an old growth tree cannot be logged unless it is dead, even if it is in the process of dying. U.S. District Judge Garr King sided with conservation groups Friday when he issued an injunction ordering a halt to a U.S. Forest Service plan to log more than 200 acres of old growth trees in an area of the Malheur National Forest burned in the 2002 High Roberts fire. By law, old growth trees that are more than 21 inches in diameter cannot be logged, unless the tree is dead....
Latinos criticize U.S. Forest Service hiring At the Angeles National Forest, where nearly one in three workers is Latino, employment discrimination may not seem like a big problem. But the forest's work force did not become diverse by accident. In fact, the Angeles and every other national forest in California is operating under a consent decree requiring it to go out of its way to hire and keep Latino employees. This fall, the workers wrote a letter to the Department of Justice asserting the agency is still not doing enough....
Forest users rally Bikers, snowmobilers and ATV riders need to start getting loud if they don't want to lose access to parts of the Gallatin National Forest, about 200 people were told at a Saturday rally. People need to "show up at the meetings and get in the face of the people who make the decisions," motorized use advocate Kerry White told the crowd. "That's what we have to do." White is running a new organization called Citizens for Balanced Use, which is fighting proposals by the Gallatin National Forest to close some significant areas to motor vehicles....
Editorial: McMustang burgers? MORE THAN 4 million head of cattle graze on the remaining open range of the American West. Their owners pay a cut-rate fee of about $1.35 a month for each animal feeding off this publicly owned resource. Yet there doesn't seem to be enough room to also accommodate the 37,000 wild horses for which the land has been home for centuries. Thus, Congress, in a midnight maneuver of which few lawmakers were aware, agreed to sell off some of the horses for slaughter so they can become gourmet meals overseas. They're used for grilled meat mostly, but horse sushi is quite the rage in Japan. This solution to the space squeeze is as simplistic as it is unseemly....
Editorial: Forbes agreement saves land A stunning Colorado landscape will be preserved thanks to an agreement between the non-profit Colorado Open Lands trust and Forbes Inc. to protect more than 80,000 acres on the west side of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The monumental deal is more than twice as big as the next largest conservation easement in Colorado. Combined with other easements and public lands, the Forbes pact means most of the western Sangres and eastern San Luis Valley have been permanently protected from development. The Forbes Trinchera Ranch is the largest remaining undeveloped private parcel on what originally was the 1 million acre Sangre de Cristo Mexican land grant of 1843....
Gibbons sees hope for mining reform U.S. Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Reno, says the time is right for significant reform of federal mining laws, including changes in demands for reclamation. “We need to do it now, when there is a narrow window of opportunity,” he said at the Northwest Mining Association’s annual convention in Spokane, Wash. Gibbons wants the law to include changes to allow mines in closure to leave the infrastructure behind for another use, rather than the entire site be cleared and reclaimed as now required. He also wants the law to include a “fee” that would be fair and across-the-board, including those who mine on public lands as well as private land. Spreading the fee out to all those who mine should help keep the fee low, Gibbons said....
State preparing for water battle Colorado will spend as much as $2 million in the next two years to build a legal war chest shoring up its rights to the drought-plagued Colorado River. The new initiative comes as Lake Powell and Lake Mead - the river's giant storage ponds - have reached historic lows, triggering anxiety over future supplies from Los Angeles to Denver. The money is being spent on new computer models detailing how the river's supplies will be affected by ongoing drought and on creating a computerized historic archive documenting Colorado's use of the river under the 1922 Colorado River Compact. It also will pay for new legal research to help guide the state in the unlikely event that the lingering drought prompts new claims to Colorado's share of the river's supplies, George said....
Cowboy museum a celebration of Western art Just don't call it the Cowboy Hall of Fame. Not that it's ashamed of its former name. This museum still is proud to wear its spurs and celebrate the riders of the range. But the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum changed its name in 2000 to show it wasn't just a bunch of plaques, said Lynda Haller, director of public relations at the museum. The 220,000-square-foot facility is much more than that. Visitors get a taste of the variety inside the museum when they step into the building and see "End of the Trail." The sculpture, which James Earle Fraser created for the Panama Pacific International Exposition in 1917, is 18 feet long and weighs four tons....