NEWS ROUNDUP

Drought crimps grazing on federal lands Drought is again prompting the U.S. Forest Service to sharply reduce the number of cattle allowed to graze on federal land in western South Dakota this summer. The Forest Service is cutting back on grazing in an attempt to encourage recovery of the grass and other vegetation on the nearly 2 million acres of federally owned land in two national forests and three national grasslands in western South Dakota, range management officials say. The grazing cutbacks will affect more than 600 private ranchers who will have to find other pasture or feed for thousands of head of cattle....
Easements to protect 2 ranches along Front The Nature Conservancy has acquired more conservation easements to prevent development along the Rocky Mountain Front, an area prized for habitat that supports grizzly bears and other wildlife. The two new agreements increase to nearly 47,000 acres the amount of Front land covered by easements involving The Nature Conservancy. Statewide, the number of conservation easement acres approaches 1.4 million, placing Montana among the leading states for use of easements as a way to control development. Public and private groups that promote easements in Montana include the Montana Land Reliance; the state Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks; and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service....
Sportsmen's groups sever ties over elk slaughter program Two sportsmen's groups have parted ways over a program to test and slaughter diseased elk. The Dubois Wildlife Association voted recently to end a more than 20-year affiliation with the Wyoming Wildlife Federation because of the latter's support for a pilot program to round up, test and destroy elk infected with brucellosis, a reproductive disease also found in bison and cattle. "This is abuse of wildlife," said Robert Hoskins of the Dubois group. "They're treating (the elk) like bison in Montana." In Montana, livestock agents routinely round up bison that leave Yellowstone National Park and send to slaughter any that test positive. Hoskins said Wyoming's pilot elk program is part of a larger trend of wildlife agencies kowtowing to ranching interests to the detriment of wildlife....
The deadliest season By March 31, eight people had perished in slides, the most since 1951, when the U.S. Forest Service Utah Avalanche Center began keeping record. All eight were men, average age 35. Together, they comprise 30 percent of the 26 avalanche deaths in the United States this winter season. Gordon said he is surprised there weren't more deaths in an avalanche season he calls "historic." Between Oct. 24 and April 10, more than 300 slides broke in Utah. About 58 percent were triggered by people, mostly backcountry skiers....
Sierra report card will determine if campsites survive A recreational report card due out this year on the Sierra National Forest will determine how many of its campsites will survive into future vacations. The cash-strapped Stanislaus National Forest already shut down several campsites last year, and other national forests may follow suit. That's because the Bush administration is proposing to cut the U.S. Forest Service's facilities and maintenance budget by 27 percent. Future cuts will be made based on a 100-point rating system of recreational sites. Use, condition and cost of maintaining a site will affect a facility's rank. A seldom-used, costly facility will earn low ratings and likely be cut first. Ratings will be determined by forest managers....
Colton tries to pry land from fly habitat Every time Colton City Manager Daryl Parrish goes to Washington, D.C., he brings the same argument. The minuscule Delhi Sands flower-loving fly, just as it has done in past years, is "holding the city hostage," squashing economic development as if it were a 500-acre albatross, he tells federal officials and legislators. The annual trips have yet to force any change in the status of the endangered fly's habitat, but Colton officials continue to try, as they did this past week. In a weeklong lobbying trip that sought money for various projects throughout Colton, Parrish and four City Council members met with congressmen, senators and U.S. Department of the Interior supervisors about the fly issue. The city, as it has since the 1½-inch-long winged insect was placed on the Federal Endangered Species Act in 1993, wants a compromise that would allow development on the habitat without permanently trading in much of its remaining open space in return....
A hope of new heights for Yosemite During three decades as a rock climber, Ken Yager has amassed plenty of personal history on the towering granite walls framing Yosemite Valley. He has ascended El Capitan's wrinkled face more than 50 times and established scores of knee-quaking routes up other cliffs and sheer spires. But his biggest mark may come on flat terra firma. Yager is behind the push to build a museum celebrating Yosemite Valley's center-stage role in the development of modern rock climbing. If Chamonix in the French Alps is a birthplace of the sport and Everest its most celebrated conquest, then Yosemite is the Cape Canaveral of climbing, a place where Americans rocketed past the dominant Europeans in the 1950s and '60s with new techniques, tools, and raw tenacity....
Air quality cloudier in state's U.S. parks Air quality in three of Colorado's national parks has worsened over the past decade despite tougher rules and millions of dollars spent to fight pollution, according to new information released by the federal government. Rocky Mountain National Park, along with Great Sand Dunes in the San Luis Valley and Mesa Verde in the southwest corner of the state, have seen either increasing smog, worsening visibility or both in the 10 years from 1994 through 2003. But there also is some good news in the numbers. Visibility on clear days at Rocky Mountain National Park is improving. In addition, new regulations more tailored to the park's specific problems are expected to make at least a dent in the pollution that's dirtying its air. Of Colorado's four national parks, the data is most complete for Rocky Mountain. It shows smog levels rising and worsening visibility on the haziest days. It also shows that increasing levels of nitrogen compounds are falling on the park, chemicals that can gradually acidify park waters and soils....
Yosemite Debates the Nurturing of Nature Spawned by floodwaters and stalked by lawsuits, the long-awaited makeover of mankind's structural imprint on the Yosemite Valley has kicked into high gear and is now delivering its first major results. The biggest of several big-ticket projects is set for formal inauguration Monday as dignitaries dedicate the $13.5-million renovation of the beloved and crowded creek-side paths that serve as the front door to towering Yosemite Falls. A week later, the park will formally welcome its new fleet of 18 diesel-hybrid buses, quieter and more fuel-efficient replacements for a ragtag collection of smog-belching predecessors. Meanwhile, the remodeled visitor's center is open for business....
BLM, off-road group sparring A San Juan County off-road group says it had permission from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to do trail-maintenance work on a 1,100-foot section of the historic Hole-in-the-Rock trail near Bluff in February. Not so, says BLM Monticello Field Office Manager Sandra Meyers. Now, Meyers and Mike Washburn, president of San Juan Public Entry and Access Rights Inc. (SPEAR), hope confusion over the incident in southeastern Utah will lead to better relationships between public-lands managers and ATV users. The two groups have frequently sparred over access to public lands in San Juan County....
Raising the River by Razing the Trees Still struggling with drought on the Colorado River despite a winter of bountiful storms in the Southwest, water managers are dusting off provocative ideas for filling the river — among them, logging mountainsides to wring more runoff out of national forests and seeding clouds to pull more snow out of the sky. About 25 million people from Colorado to Southern California depend on the river for at least some of their water, and although a slew of winter storms loosened the grip of a historic drought this year, the basin's epic dry spell is far from over. Even without a drought, the time is approaching when use along the 1,400-mile river system will exceed the Colorado's average annual flow. The idea of opening up the forest to generate more runoff in mountain watersheds is not a new one. Experiments date from the early 1900s, and many have been conducted in Colorado, the main source of snowmelt for the Colorado River. "People have talked about it literally for over 100 years, and the reality is it becomes very hard to implement," said Lee H. MacDonald, a Colorado State University natural resources professor who co-wrote an extensive 2003 review of experiments to increase forest water yield. "Socially it's not particularly acceptable…. It's hard to cut enough trees to really make a substantial difference to the flow in the Colorado River."....
Ranchers to weigh in on Tomales Bay Fearing their livelihoods might be threatened, West Marin agricultural producers will air concerns about an ambitious 10-year plan to clean Tomales Bay water at a hearing in Oakland on Wednesday. Water board staff found the sources of pathogens in Tomales Bay include: faulty septic systems, small wastewater treatment facilities, boat discharge, municipal runoff, grazing and livestock farms, dairy farms and horse facilities. The plan requires all sources to take steps to identify their discharges and develop and implement a plan to reduce runoff. Specifically, it calls for the county to inspect septic tanks, a closer inspection by the water board of small wastewater facilities, better monitoring of waste discharged from boats by the National Park Service, ranch owners to keep cattle and their waste away from creeks, dairies to continue to keep manure away from creeks, equestrian facilities to keep manure from washing into the bay and the monitoring of municipal runoff into the bay. The plan would be voluntary for the first five years, but if it is found to be ineffective, the water board could require some actions be taken, officials said....
Water war out west But soon, he says, the pond and oaks may dry up and die — victims of an old-fashioned Southwest Texas water war. That war has rendered a bitter split, pitting the local water authority and its town-dwelling supporters against rural landowners — and, some accuse, water marketers with powerful political connections waiting in the shadows to buy up their water and sell it to San Antonio. Those suspicions have been fueled in recent weeks by a move in the Texas Legislature to dissolve the 3-year-old Kinney County Groundwater Conservation District and place the county under the supervision of the San Antonio-headquartered Edwards Aquifer Authority. One of the water companies, according to a lawmaker who supports the bill, had a hand in writing the bill....
Column: Meadow's End Cresting a small rise, I finally arrived at my destination: a curving, hundred-yard sweep of grasses and blossoms marked at all four corners by 10-foot steel towers connected by heavy steel cables. More cables hung crosswise, suspending the big array of infrared heat lamps strung up by U.C. Berkeley professor John Harte in 1990. Harte has kept the lamps on for 14 years now, baking this living swath of meadow to create real warming, in real time, in a real ecosystem. No fussing around with historical temperature records, no computer modeling of hypotheses, and thus no vulnerability to the claim that it's all conjecture; Harte has simply warmed a piece of the world and watched it change. So festooned is the meadow with data-collection boxes, and so riddled with multicolored wires plunging into its flesh -- sinking temperature and moisture monitors to three different depths -- that the whole thing looks less like a meadow than like a patient nailed to an operating table. The verdict? Sagebrush is already crowding out everything that makes a meadow a meadow in the first place -- the colors and textures and birds and bees. And similar experiments, not just in the Rockies and my own beloved Sierra, but also in the Alps and on the Himalayan plateau, suggest that all such dreamscapes, by century's end, will be as stark as the semiarid drive up from Gunnison. And sure, this might not be an economic disaster for anybody but ranchers and the denizens of mountain tourist towns, and it's nothing like the damage a fast-warming world will cause elsewhere, to the island nations and coastal cities sinking beneath the waves. Still, the drying up of our high mountain retreats -- and the fading away of other places equally lovely -- is the way that global warming will forever alter what Wallace Stegner called "the geography of hope."....
Biotech Company Bets on Cattle's Future At Cargill Inc.'s feedlots in Kansas and Texas, the cattle move through the chute one by one. They get their vaccines, their wormer. They're checked for lice. Their ears are pierced and tagged. Then blood samples are shipped to a California lab run by MetaMorphix Inc., of Beltsville, where they are run through a genotyping machine that quickly analyzes the animals' DNA. If it shows the genetic traits to produce the tender, thickly marbled beef that fetches top prices, it will get an extra few weeks of fattening on an expensive, high-energy diet. Otherwise it's off to a life munching cheap grass and hay, and a strong possibility of being ground into a meat pie. Upending a culture of cowboy boots, Stetson hats and pride in being able to choose the best beef cows from a herd by sight alone, MetaMorphix and a few other biotech entrepreneurs have developed DNA tests to tell with near certainty which animals will produce the juiciest steaks. With three companies working on different technologies, and major agribusinesses such as Cargill maneuvering to support them, the competition could be stiff....
Keeping tradition alive a big challenge for Montana ranch families Every spring, since the days when cattle first came onto the sprawling ranges of southwest Montana, the chore of branding has been a shared endeavor for ranch families. Friends and family recently showed up at the Anderson Ranch near Alder to lend a hand. "Everyone trades off helping out," said Ruby Valley rancher Jim Anderson. "It's a great way to keep a community together." It's been a tradition revived on the historic Anderson Ranch. For a few years, the family did the chore on their own, pushing the calves through a chute and over a branding table. But there was something missing. After all, the neighbors are starting to get spread a bit thin, and the dwindling number of ranch families in Montana need to hold onto all the traditions they can. All across the state, family ranches are being subdivided or purchased by wealthy out-of-state interests who don't have the same need to make a living from running cows. Anderson has seen it happen in the Ruby Valley. In Montana, cattle numbers have dropped dramatically since a high of nearly 3.4 million in 1974. According to statistics from the Montana Cattlemen's Association, there are about 2.35 million cattle in the state nowadays. On average, Montana is losing about 250 ranches a year, according to the association....
On The Edge of Common Sense: In spring, cowboys think of brandin' Springtime. Grass is greenin' up, wildflowers are blooming, long johns are comin' off, and it's brandin' time! It is a festive occasion on lots of ranches. For years it has become a time for neighbors to get together and help each other. The cows and calves have been gathered the day before. By daylight, horses have been unloaded, everybody's saddled up and the calves are sorted from their mamas. In the corral, propane burners and branding pots are set up, brands heating, vaccine guns loaded, ear tags laid out, and dad's knife is sharp enough to clean a hornfly's fingernails! Idyllic - right?....

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