NEWS ROUNDUP

Parks' top billing EVERY year, film crews roll into national parks. They set up actors and products beneath towering redwoods or sandstone buttes and use the scenery to sell cars, beer or a blockbuster movie. Hollywood makes millions of dollars from these images, ad agencies get rich and actors get paid. With no costly sets, nature provides a dirt-cheap stage for motion pictures, TV shows, commercials and documentaries. In exchange, the National Park Service gets nearly nothing. But Congress once cared. It adopted a law five years ago authorizing the Interior and Agriculture departments to charge daily fees for film shoots. But since then, nothing has changed. The Park Service blames bureaucratic inertia for the delay. Now the Government Accountability Office wants to know what went wrong. Congress' nonpartisan watchdog is investigating and expects to release its findings next month....
Top forester who altered Sierra forest plan retiring Regional Forester Jack Blackwell, 58, will step down June 3 and be replaced by Bernie Weingardt, the deputy regional forester for resources. The Pacific Southwest Region oversees 20.6 million acres in 18 California national forests – a fifth of the state's land area. Shortly after Blackwell took the post in December 2001, he said the plan approved in the waning days of the Clinton administration to manage 11.5 million acres in the Sierra did not do enough to prevent catastrophic wildfires. He developed a new plan to triple logging in the 11 national forests that straddle the 400-mile-long range....
Vandals Strike Loggers "Get Off The Mountain" was spray painted on several pieces of equipment owned by Arrowhead Enterprises of Blue Jay this past weekend. Vandals struck sometime Friday evening or early Saturday morning at the proposed site of Church of the Woods on Highway 18 near Bear Springs Road in Rimforest. "We have nothing to do with the proposed Church of the Woods complex," said Arrowhead Enterprises spokesperson Vic Leader, "we're conducting a bark beetle tree removal project for San Bernardino County and are a local logging company. "They used a stencil to put the warning to get off the mountain on the windows of two of our tractors, on the side of skidders and on the side of my roll offs also," Leader stated. "In all, four different pieces of equipment were tagged with the slogan."....
Column: It's Fire Season Again We're in the seventh year of drought in the Northern Rockies, with precipitation deficits running about 20% annually. At the same time poor management of the regional national forests has left them brush-choked and bark beetle-ravaged and susceptible to wildfire. The Bush Administration's 2003 "Healthy Forests Initiative" is designed to prevent these conflagrations by streamlining the bureaucratic "analysis paralysis" when processing timber sales. But the scope of the problem is such that these conditions will remain for years to come. In this year, the centenary of the United States Forest Service, the woods are a wreck. How did our national forests get into this predicament? For a century it's been the policy of the U.S. Forest Service -- simply put -- to fight forest fires. This seems like sound practice, but in the end it has disrupted the natural benefits of small fires -- usually caused by lightning strikes in remote areas -- that are useful to keep brush and ground fuel down. This constant fire suppression over a century has been detrimental to forest health. In the last few years 51 wildland firefighters have lost their lives in the West. In 2002 alone, some 7 million acres burned. In 2003, a record 6,800 "structures" (mostly private homes) burned. And this summer big swaths of the public domain will go up in smoke....
Alaska fire season off to a blazing start Alaska's fire season has already heated up, with crews scrambling to battle numerous blazes, including a fire from last year's record season that smoldered all winter. Fire managers said Sunday the outbreaks in Homer, Interior Alaska and Hoonah hit even before some crews have completed their annual training and safety refresher courses held at the beginning of each season....
Water decision to benefit steelhead Officials at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have cranked up water releases into the North Santiam River from Detroit and Big Cliff dams. Releases of up to 1,350 cubic feet a second (cfs) from the previous 900 cfs began Wednesday to help threatened, naturally spawning native winter steelhead. The request for the increased flows came from officials at the request of National Marine Fisheries Service, according to corps officials. The releases were bumped up to 1,500 cfs on Thursday. Corps officials said the plan is to manage flows at 1,500 cfs through May 15 at a minimum, and could continue as late as May 31, to provide adequate spawning habitat for winter steelhead. After that flow schedule, releases are scheduled to drop to 1,200 cfs and hold at that rate until July to ensure incubation of the eggs on the nests, known as redds....
Ducks Move Upstream From Treasury Dept. The hottest new tourist site in the nation's capital is no more. After a boffo four-week run, the Treasury duck has been moved from her prime nesting spot in the midst of heavy tourist traffic a block from the White House to a more peaceful setting along a quietly flowing stream. The mallards in the classic children's book "Make Way for Ducklings" may have only needed the help of the Boston police department for their relocation, but their Washington relatives got assistance from several federal agencies. The Secret Service uniformed division provided security during the four weeks the mother mallard, given various nicknames from T-bill to Quacks Reform, was sitting on her eggs. A metal barricade was constructed and then expanded as the tourist crowds wanting to get a look grew larger....
Park Police Face Growing Challenges With Fewer Officers As Teresa Chambers awaits the outcome of her case for reinstatement, the National Park Service is staging a four-hour ceremony for the formal investiture of her former deputy as the next Chief of the U.S. Park Police, according to invitations posted today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). As he is sworn in, Dwight Pettiford inherits an organization that is smaller than it was on September 11, 2001 but with much greater responsibilities than ever before. In December 2003, Chief Chambers was suspended for confirming to the Washington Post that protection of national monuments aggravated shortages of officers available to patrol parks and parkways. Since that time, there are even fewer sworn U.S. Park Police officers yet demands on those officers have grown....
Agencies working to protect Old Spanish Trail After 150 years, it could be difficult to pinpoint the exact route of the Old Spanish Trail that linked Santa Fe, N.M. with Los Angeles. The route was used between 1829 and 1848 by Mexican and American traders exchanging commodities, including woolen goods and horses. Historian John Hockaday of Lytle Pass said the Old Spanish Trail broadened through Cajon Pass as eastbound horse traders and thieves scattered along diverse routes to evade incensed owners shortchanged in their deals. "They were heading back (to Santa Fe) as fast as they could and picked the shortest way through the pass,' he said....
Wilds impasse to end? Republican Sen. Bob Bennett has agreed to draft legislation protecting some of Utah's sculptured canyons and soaring cliffs as wilderness, breaking a political stalemate to safeguard public lands around Zion National Park. Bennett's involvement, confirmed Monday by The Associated Press, was solicited by Gov. Jon Huntsman's office and Washington County commissioners and signals a breakthrough in Utah, where no representative or senator has been willing to touch a comprehensive Utah wilderness bill for decades. By tradition Congress defers to a state delegation in designating wilderness, but advocates have had to rely on an upstate New York congressman to carry a comprehensive Utah wilderness bill. Rep. Maurice Hinchey's sponsorship of the failed Redrock Wilderness Act each year since 1993 is symbolic of the political stalemate in Utah dating to 1984 — the last year Utah allowed Congress to designate any wilderness....
Taking no chances at Interior Bureau of Land Management officials have established an Incident Command Center to strengthen the agency's computer systems defenses and restore Internet access. Senior agency officials cut off BLM's Internet access last month after the Interior Department's inspector general issued a report warning that the agency's computer systems are susceptible to cyberattacks. The April 8 shutdown, which came two days after the report's release, is the latest blow in a long-running dispute about securing Indian trust fund data stored on departmental computers. Interior's IG found that poor network security and weak access controls could easily compromise "the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the identified Indian trust data residing on such systems."....
Wet Winter Doesn't Douse Water Wars The issue Norton must decide seems extremely technical: how many million acre-feet of water federal engineers will shift this summer from Lake Powell to Lake Mead, the two main reservoirs that control flow on the Colorado. That hydrological determination, though, reflects intense competition in a region where, as the saying goes, the whiskey is for drinkin' and the water is for fightin'. A seven-state compact created in 1922 governs allocations of Colorado River flow. For most of its life, the agreement was fairly easy to adhere to, because there was more water in the river than the people, factories and farms in the Southwest could use. But a tidal wave of population growth -- coupled with a drought that made a dry region even drier -- has aggravated the water wars. The Colorado River begins as a foot-wide trickle of melting snow in Colorado's Never Summer Mountains, northwest of Denver, and flows 1,500 miles southwest toward Baja California. Fed by major tributaries such as the Green, Gunnison, Yampa and San Juan rivers, the Colorado cuts through 200 miles of rock to form the Grand Canyon; it once poured billions of gallons each year into the Gulf of California in northern Mexico....
Norton won't cut Colorado River water releases from Lake Powell In a victory for California, Arizona and Nevada, Interior Secretary Gale Norton on Monday rejected a plea by four other states to cut releases of Colorado River water from drought-depleted Lake Powell. In letters to governors and water officials in seven Colorado River basin states, Norton said melting snow is projected to be slightly above average for the rest of the year and reservoirs have more water now than had been projected last year. "We have concluded that an adjustment to the release amount from Lake Powell during the next five months is not warranted," she said....
Editorial: Gale Norton takes easy way out The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation issued an ultimatum last year to the seven Western states that share the Colorado River: Come up with a drought-management plan by April 30 or live with a federal plan that will divvy up the water for them. With the states still feuding, Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton finally weighed in Monday, but her status-quo decision does little to alleviate the simmering conflict over the river's future and could actually hurt Colorado's efforts to protect its supply during a drought. The Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico had balked at the requirement of delivering 8.23 million acre-feet a year of Lake Powell's reserves downstream, saying they have long exceeded that amount and that the faster-growing Lower Basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada have grown dependent on the extra water. It's true the river this year will receive nearly normal runoff for the first time in six years. But that's precisely why it's a good time to reduce deliveries from Lake Powell. After all, California and other states could tap local water supplies before calling on Colorado River water from Powell....
The return of Glen Canyon The desert's own extreme makeover began March 13, 1963. Diversion tunnels closed, and the flow of the Colorado River began flooding sandstone gorges near the Arizona-Utah border. The new reservoir transformed Glen Canyon, "The Place No One Knew," into Lake Powell, "Jewel of the Colorado." A rafter's river became a boater's haven. Although the aquamarine lake augmented access to the blushing tapestry of canyon country, many of the area's grandest cliffs, slots, arches, bridges, windows, domes, pits, alcoves, grottos, seeps, springs, fins and falls lay seemingly drowned forever beneath the wakes. Times have changed. The West's lingering drought has dropped Lake Powell more than 130 feet, and formations that have been waterlogged for more than three decades now stand high and dry. Boaters today have what may be truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see sights unseen since the year Neil Armstrong sauntered on the moon. It may not last. Already, with the spring runoff just beginning, the lake has risen 3 feet. And it could, according to a National Weather Service forecast, rise another 42 feet by July 1....
El Paso, New Mexico take a year off from drought A spring blizzard that caused havoc for Colorado and New Mexico last month may have a positive trickle-down effect for those who depend on the Rio Grande in southern New Mexico and far West Texas. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation estimated this week that the spring runoff in the Rio Grande would be 162 percent of normal. "We have not had a runoff of that magnitude since 1995," a bureau news release said. As a result, the agency predicted a full supply for irrigation this summer. The past two years, the Rio Grande Project water users were allocated 34 percent to 38 percent of a full supply. Project users, the Elephant Butte Irrigation District and the El Paso County Water Improvement District No. 1, took the news with caution. The districts are talking about not using their full allotments but leaving some water behind the Elephant Butte dam in New Mexico for next year....
Leading scientific journals 'are censoring debate on global warming' Two of the world's leading scientific journals have come under fire from researchers for refusing to publish papers which challenge fashionable wisdom over global warming. A British authority on natural catastrophes who disputed whether climatologists really agree that the Earth is getting warmer because of human activity, says his work was rejected by the American publication, Science, on the flimsiest of grounds. A separate team of climate scientists, which was regularly used by Science and the journal Nature to review papers on the progress of global warming, said it was dropped after attempting to publish its own research which raised doubts over the issue. The controversy follows the publication by Science in December of a paper which claimed to have demonstrated complete agreement among climate experts, not only that global warming is a genuine phenomenon, but also that mankind is to blame....
Column: Environmentalists Thrive on Mayhem An important lesson, I learned about environmentalists, is that they "play" dirty. One example of the underhandedness this lumber company endured, at the hands of environmentalists, pertained to a false claim that a wolf’s footprint was found on a remote road that went through a timber sale my client had recently secured (in a nearby national forest). Based upon the "discovery" of this footprint, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) shut down this sale and called in wildlife biologists to investigate the matter – after all, wolves are an endangered species and hadn’t been seen in this particular national forest for decades. Several months elapsed and it was finally determined that the footprint was either that of a coyote or some hiker’s pet dog. By the time the USFS gave my client the approval to harvest the timber, winter was upon us and the timber would have to be harvested in the ensuing summer. The environmentalists knew that the trees would eventually be harvested; yet, they had accomplished the goal of inflicting economic damage on this family-owned business – for the revenues, profit, and cash flow this timber contract would have generated, in the current fiscal year, had to be pushed into the next year....
At the Derby, Racing Is Facing Its Drug Problem Beneath its twin spires, Churchill Downs has completed a sparkling $121 million makeover in time for the 131st running of the Kentucky Derby, America's most famous horse race. But this year's Derby, which will be Saturday, may be best remembered for the plainclothes investigators roaming the dusty barn areas and for testing the horses for illegal performance-enhancing drugs before and after the Run for the Roses. After decades of rumors about "juiced" thoroughbreds and ineffective attempts at regulation, the horse racing industry has acknowledged that it has a drug problem. "It's a very serious problem, and the public perception is that it is a huge problem," said C. Steven Duncker, chairman of the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association's Graded Stakes Committee, which mandated the increased postrace testing for the Derby and the rest of the most important races in the United States. "I don't know if you can put a dimension on how widespread it is because, like in every other sport, our testing seems to be a step behind the cheaters."....
It's All Trew: Some old-time superstitions prevail When I began asking friends about this subject I learned many early-day superstitions are alive and well today. As my research continued, I had problems differentiating between superstitions, old sayings, old wives' tales and plain old exaggerated lies. Most agreed it was not superstition but stupid to walk under a ladder where something could fall on your head. However, these same people agreed that breaking a mirror most certainly brought seven years of bad luck. Even those who scoffed at superstitions remembered to say bless you when someone sneezed and took detours when a black cat tried to cross their path. They might not believe, but wanted to be safe, just in case....

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