NEWS ROUNDUP

Surface-use compensation issue resurfaces in legislature In a surface use showdown, two coalitions are working on separate solutions to the problem of the landowner impacts of oil and gas development. State Rep. Kathleen Curry, D-Gunnison, is preparing to introduce new surface-use legislation following the failure of a bill she carried last year. The state legislature goes into session on Wednesday. Meanwhile, the energy industry is working with agriculture interests in hopes of pursuing their own legislation. “We’re I think getting close to some things but no bill has been finalized yet,” said Calvin Roberts, a rancher outside New Castle who sits on the Colorado Farm Bureau board of directors. The Colorado Livestock Association, Colorado Wool Growers Association, Colorado Cattlemen’s Association and Colorado Association of Wheat Growers are working with the Colorado Oil & Gas Association on a draft bill. Curry said she doesn’t think such a measure meets the needs of landowners, and she is committed to run her own bill. Her measure last year was defeated in the House Agriculture, Livestock and Natural Resources Committee, which Curry chairs. Her new measure has been drafted by a coalition that includes associations representing homebuilders and Realtors, and several environmental organizations, including the Grand Valley Citizens Alliance, based in Garfield County....
Gold's rise revives desire to mine Buckhorn Six years ago, plans to extract more than a million ounces of gold from Buckhorn Mountain — one of the biggest and most controversial mining proposals in state history — collapsed amid opposition by state regulators, environmental groups and neighbors. Now a Canadian firm is floating a new plan for mining the mountain, propelled in part by a worldwide gold rush that has pushed prices to more than $500 an ounce — the highest in almost 25 years. Kinross Gold, the seventh-largest gold producer in the world, is offering a very different — and it says, environmentally cleaner — plan than the earlier, contentious Crown Jewel mine. Instead of blasting away the top of the 5,500-foot-high mountain and leaving behind a vast open pit, Kinross says it will operate a smaller, underground mine....
Judge stops timber sales A federal judge in Seattle has halted more than 140 Northwest timber sales -- about half of them slated for increasingly rare mature or old-growth forests. Over the next two years, the order Monday by U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman could stop the cutting of up to 289 million board feet of timber. That represents more than half the annual cut coming out of the region's national forests, according to a lawyer for environmentalists. Pechman had previously rejected the Bush administration's policy that made it no longer necessary to look for rare plants and animals before letting loose the chain saws. The timber industry contends that the surveys for about 300 rare plants and animals were never required by law or authorized by regulation. The industry is now considering reinstating a lawsuit that aimed to have the requirement declared illegal, said Chris West of the American Forest Resources Council. "We're not surprised, but we're disappointed (that the judge) went as far as she did, because she didn't distinguish between the projects that have nothing to do with old growth" and those that do, West said. "She did a meat-ax approach."....
New Uses for Glut of Small Logs From Thinning of Forests Slowly, however, the small-diameter movement, helped along by federal grants and Forest Service research, is helping to find new uses for smaller trees, like heating schools and hospitals and construction materials, including particle board, flooring and laminated beams. Peter Stark of Missoula, a freelance writer, wanted to thin his 80 acres of forest clogged with downed timber and crowded trees to prevent a fire but could not afford to do it, since clearing usually costs $300 to $1,000 an acre. He eventually found someone to remove the trees, most six or seven inches across, and the money he was paid for them covered the cost of thinning. At the same time, he was building a dance floor for his wife, Amy Ragsdale, who teaches dance at the University of Montana. Shocked at the cost of hardwood, Mr. Stark realized that he might be able to turn the waste trees into flooring. Mr. Stark bought back 25 tons of the larch trees and found a custom sawmill that could handle small diameters to turn them into tongue-and-groove flooring. The floor turned out so well that Mr. Stark formed a company, North Slope Sustainable Wood, with two partners, to market small diameter larch, the hardest of the soft woods, from forests being thinned. He sees such activity as a solution to the controversy over logging in Western forests....
Conservation Groups Challenge Heliskiing Plan A coalition of concerned citizens and conservation groups today filed a lawsuit in Idaho federal court challenging the U.S. Forest Service’s issuance of a permit that would dramatically increase the amount of commercial helicopter skiing allowed in a Wilderness Study Area on the Caribou-Targhee and Bridger-Teton National Forests. “We are fortunate to live in a region where there are still wild places that allow people to get away from it all, and where wildlife that is extinct in the rest of the country still maintains a toehold,” said Mark Poe, an attorney for Earthjustice, the law firm representing the plaintiffs. “If the Forest Service plan is carried out, we will have one fewer such place.” The helicopter skiing, or “heliskiing,” activity would be centered in the Palisades portion of the Snake River Range that spans the Idaho-Wyoming border between Jackson Hole, Wyoming and the Swan Valley in Idaho. Congress has designated the majority of the Palisades a Wilderness Study Area. Under the permit, a single commercial heliskiing company based in Jackson Hole would have exclusive use of the Palisades for up to 1,200 skier-days of service every winter for the next decade....
Grizzly delisting divides greens People in and around Wyoming are staking their ground over the federal government's proposal to remove grizzly bears from Endangered Species Act protection. Even as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans public open houses this week to gather input, conservation groups are divided. The National Parks Conservation Association came forward with an opinion last week, allying itself with other conservation groups that contend the scientific and legal requirements have been met to merit delisting of the grizzly. Still, Tim Stevens, Yellowstone program manager for the association's regional northern Rockies office, said the group still believes there are "pervasive threats" to the recovery of the grizzly, primarily in the form of secure funding and habitat. The group also wants to make sure future management of the grizzly is driven by the most accurate science....
Supreme Court Rejects Challenge To Buffers Around Salmon Streams The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal of a ruling that banned the use of pesticides around Western salmon streams. "We're very happy," Patti Goldman, an attorney with the environmental law firm Earthjustice, said Monday. "There have been many attempts by the chemical industry and the growers to get rid of the buffers; we now know they will remain in place." In January 2004, two years after finding that the Environmental Protection Agency had failed to consider the effect of pesticides on protected salmon, U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour in Seattle imposed a 100-yard buffer for aerial spraying and a 20-yard buffer for ground application of three dozen pesticides, from agricultural sprays to household weed-killers. His injunction also required that stores selling pesticides in 500 communities in the West post warnings about the potential effect of seven common pesticides on salmon and steelhead. The signs read: "SALMON HAZARD. This product contains pesticides which may harm salmon and steelhead. Use of this product in urban areas can pollute salmon streams." The judge's conditions will remain in effect until the EPA comes up with rules governing the use of pesticides around the streams in question....
Group rips agency for Mojave policies An environmental watchdog group claims a federal agency has failed to protect such sensitive species as the desert tortoise in the Mojave Desert while focusing on off-road-vehicle activities. The Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, Ariz., says federal rangers assigned to the Barstow office of the Bureau of Land Management are devoting excessive time to off-roaders at places like the Dumont Dunes north of Baker, Johnson and Stoddard valleys south of Barstow, and El Mirage dry lake near Adelanto. "(Meanwhile), sensitive areas with high natural-resource and wilderness values receive scant attention," said ecologist Daniel Patterson, the center's desert program director. "We believe BLM rangers . . . devote an inordinate amount of time and resources to patrol and enforcement activities within (these) designated off-road-vehicle open areas." He said rangers focus on vehicle registration, drug activity and public safety in the areas, which contain critical habitat for various endangered animals and plants....
Bone-dry winter is bad news Zeroes dominate the year's first report on Arizona's snowpack, a crucial element of the state's water supply. Except for the tippy top of the state's highest peaks, there's no snow to measure, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service, the federal agency that monitors 38 sites across Arizona's high country. In Flagstaff, only a trace of snow has fallen this winter. The city's first measurable snow has never occurred this late since record-keeping began in 1898, according to the National Weather Service. Over the past 15 years, there's always been at least some snow at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon on Jan. 1, even during years of extreme drought. But as 2006 began, the ground there was bare. "It looks like we're going back into the drought," said Larry Martinez, a water supply specialist with the conservation service. Ranchers and farmers who depend on stream diversions will feel the effects of a dry winter this spring, he said....
Hunting for reasons more elusive every year Riding home from a deer hunting trip to Oregon's Ochoco Mountains, the teenage boy answered his ringing cell phone, paused, then said, "I've been at a family gathering in Eastern Oregon." After he clicked off his phone, the boy glanced at his dad, sighed and said, "It's just easier that way." So it is. Hunting and fishing are declining in Oregon because it's easier to skip the whole hassle -- the rising costs of licenses and tags, the phone-book-thick regulations, the blizzard of no-trespassing signs, even the arguments with your non-hunting friends. Ask the thousands of Oregonians who stop hunting every year why they gave up the sport, and many will answer that it just got too hard. Hard to justify the costs, which average more than $1,400 annually. Hard to navigate the complex regulations and limited-entry tag drawings, which break up hunting parties and keep many eager hunters at home every fall. Hard to find farmers, ranchers and other landowners who welcome hunters the way they used to....
Bolting from bovine bondage A curious drama played out in the wilderness two weeks ago when a helicopter rescue spared the lives of four heifers stranded near 12,000 feet in the high mountains near Aspen. The cattle were discovered by a backcountry skier who notified the owner. This set off a series of feeding forays where skiers carried flakes of hay bales on their backs and literally hand-fed the hungry bovines. These cattle were wild. There is no other word for it. They had evaded numerous roundup attempts by the rancher and his family, stubbornly and elusively sheltering in the rugged mountains that gave them their freedom, but which ironically assured their doom. The rancher who spent all fall searching for them said that the wild heifers were more evasive than the native elk herds he encountered. These heifers held a strain of wildness that came alive during a summer of grazing in the wilderness, removed from man and his barbed wire....
Cowboy country saying 'whoa!' to 'Brokeback' Ask one of the locals like Julie Greer how they feel in rural Wyoming about "Brokeback Mountain," the gay-cowboy movie, and you don't have to wait long to get a reaction. "Yeah, we're offended!" she shoots back. "Because they called those sheepherders cowboys." It doesn't get any worse than that. But a close second is to call a cowboy gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that (as Seinfeld says). Well, actually, they think there is, and they don't care if city slickers like it or not. If you want to see a cowboy get out of his saddle in a nanosecond, ask him if he is dating the guy on the next horse. "People are offended that nothing is sacred anymore," says Greer, who works at the Hyattville post office. "People are talking about it. They won't go to the theater to see it." You knew this movie wouldn't go over big in the Broken Back Mountain area of Wyoming, where the same families have worked the range for more than 100 years. "Almost everyone on the crick has been here for at least a couple of generations," says rancher Maurice Bush, whose grandfather arrived here in 1898. They are salt-of-the-earth people. They live quietly. They see more cattle than people. They scratch out a living in hard-bitten country. They are blue collar and Republican, and they mind their own business. So when "Brokeback Mountain" hit movie theaters around the United States, they wondered exactly how they got dragged into this thing....
‘Texas Ranch House’ saddles up in May Saddle up, we're headin' to the ranch! "Texas Ranch House" is the name of the upcoming edition of these addictive living-history reality shows. The cast will live as Texas settlers did in 1867. Some will be cowboys, some ranch foremen, some cooks, others family members. The show is set after the Civil War's end, so freed slaves may also play roles in the show. The show's official site says "our volunteers will be fully immersed in the inner workings of a ranch house: building corrals, rounding up and branding cattle, taming stallions, and preparing for a two week cattle drive -- all the while tending to the daily needs of themselves and their livestock." The site's FAQ also notes that children will be home-schooled, as was common on Texas ranches that were often far from formal schools. Interestingly, the FAQ also addresses guns, stating "Our participants will not be permitted to use guns. It is something of a myth that all cowboys carried guns, and in fact guns were banned from most early ranches because they terrified cattle and could cause stampedes. Our show is about living the life of real 1867 cowboys and ranchers, not movie gunslingers." "Texas Ranch House" was shot in the summer and fall of 2005, and will air beginning May 1. Check your local PBS stations for specifics....
It's All Trew: Canning remains popular throughout time As long as I can remember, my grandparents, parents and kinfolk gathered and canned fruit of all kinds. Whether wild-grown or tame, whether canned or frozen, special efforts were always made to save and preserve these crops. Fortunately, I married Ruth who has continued the practice as she was also raised with this tradition. One of my early growth accomplishments came when I was strong enough to carry a 10-pound sack of sugar from the car into our pantry. I felt like Tarzan as Superman had not been invented at the time. Boy, did we use the sugar during canning season. Another of my chores was taking a milk bucket to the cellar and fetching empty fruit jars back to the kitchen. That was how I learned the difference in pints, quarts and half-gallons. I just missed the era of green glass jars with glass or galvanized lids. Every jar we owned had Ball or Mason written across the bottom. I can remember when every burner on our stove was busy steaming jars or lids or heating bubbling pots of fruit....