NEWS ROUNDUP

Resurgent Wolves Now Considered Pests by Some The cattle are down in the valley now, but as the snow here melts and winter is nudged out of the mountains, they will move to pasture in the wild meadows and timberland between the Gros Ventre and Wind River Mountains. That is where wolves kill the most calves, said Charles Price. Mr. Price and the 15 other ranchers in the Upper Green River Cattlemen's Association, as well as others in the state, want the freedom to kill wolves without any restrictions. "That's the way we took care of them before," he said. "It's the way my grandparents took care of them. They roped them, shot them, anyway to get rid of them." The federal government, however, will not allow that. Wolves here are descendants of the animals reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park in 1994, which have since repopulated parts of the surrounding states: Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. They have done so well that the federal Fish and Wildlife Service wants to take them off the list of endangered species. The service has handed management responsibilities to Montana and Idaho, which have a plan to assure the wolf's survival. Wyoming, however, has a different idea. Outside of Yellowstone and federal wilderness areas, wolves would be considered predators....
Western energy boom has growth in population, industry colliding On a blustery winter day on the rolling plains north of Denver, a herd of cattle stood grazing a few yards from an idled natural gas pump in a dormant field as traffic rumbled by. Just down the road are shopping centers and subdivisions packed with new homes, gobbling up land around this once-sleepy town atop the Wattenberg gas field, one of the nation's most productive. Ed Orr knows this land well. A rancher and developer whose family roots in Colorado date back more than a century, Orr says the real estate business is growing increasingly difficult because gas producers want access no matter what the plans are for the property. Twin engines of growth -- in population and within the oil and natural gas industry -- are colliding in Greeley, the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the nation. Developers looking to cash in on rising land values are running into companies eager to sink more wells and drawing up plans for multibillion-dollar pipelines to carry gas to the East Coast. Similar conflicts are playing out from Montana to New Mexico because the Rockies' energy boom is in full bloom, prompting worries about the environment, property rights and the changing character of towns with new workers. Many fear that another Western rush to fortune will be followed by hard times -- again....
Gas boom collides with rural ways Ask cattle ranchers Dan and Cheryl Johnson how much money they make an hour and they will tell you it’s a pittance. Ask them to put a value on their life along winding Piceance Creek in western Colorado and they answer simply — priceless. These days, the Johnsons are worried their operation will end up worthless. Energy companies hunting for natural gas are snapping up land all around them, either through old oil shale claims or through federal auctions. Some now have claims on minerals under the same land the Johnsons lease for grazing their cattle in the pasture-dotted hills northwest of Rifle. Roads are being built and plans are in the works for new wells. Dan Johnson fears that if the companies drill in the narrow gulches around his property — the conduits for moving cattle from pasture to pasture — he’ll lose precious grazing land and be out of business. He and his wife, both in their late 40s, can feel their dream of passing their business to their two daughters slipping away....
Drilling buffers weighed again The drilling boom brought Lloyd and Rita Jane Moore an unwanted dirt road snaking through their pasture to a 3-acre pad with seven wells. It put a bottled-water dispenser in their kitchen when their well ran dry. It brings noises. The worst was a dynamite blast that spooked one of their horses, who bolted into a barbed-wire fence and opened a bloody gash under one shoulder. "He was torn up real bad," Lloyd Moore said, clasping his callused hands into a triangular wedge. "You could probably put both your hands in it." The Moores live on 37 of the more than 5 million acres of Colorado's "split-estate" land - where homeowners, farmers and ranchers own the surface, and government, energy companies or others own the minerals below. The battle between homeowners such as the Moores and the energy companies drilling on their land has spilled into the halls of the state legislature. For the second straight year, Western Slope lawmakers are pushing a bill to give landowners more protection from oil and gas development....
Ranchers as biologists Longtime Sublette County rancher John Andrikopoulos knows he has an awful lot of sage grouse on the more than 15,000 acres of private and leased land used by his cattle operation. And there are neighboring ranches with good sage grouse habitat as well. But unfortunately -- when it comes to the big decisions made by government agencies about how best to manage species such as sage grouse considered for special protection under the Endangered Species Act -- just knowing you have sage grouse on your land doesn't really count for much. Not without hard data to back it up. Andrikopoulos and other western Wyoming ranchers are going after that hard data through a four-year project developed under the auspices of the Wyoming Wildlife Heritage Foundation. The pilot project aims to develop programs and methods to help ranchers compile much-needed data about wildlife and wildlife habitat on their land. With that data, ranchers could then integrate agricultural land use with wildlife habitat management planning -- and maybe get a bigger say in federal decisions that affect wildlife on private lands in Wyoming....
Room to Roam: Freeing Yellowstone's Wild Bison As the Buffalo Field Campaign approaches the tenth anniversary of documenting and protesting the bison management practices in and around Yellowstone National Park, its efforts may finally be paying off for bison and those who hold them sacred. BFC Cofounder and Campaign Coordinator Mike Mease is encouraged by the actions of Montana¹s newly elected governor, Brian Schweitzer, a democrat from Whitefish. "We¹ve been talking to the governor¹s office quite a bit," Mease said. "He does listen to what we have to say, which is a hell of a lot better than what happened with the last two administrations." Schweitzer¹s advisor, Hal Harper, emphasized that the governor¹s "number one concern" is maintaining the state¹s brucellosis-free status, which, livestock officials and ranchers contend, is jeopardized by freeroaming bison. But unlike previous Montana administrations, Schweitzer favors hunting and habitat over a heavy-handed approach to bison management....
BLM land sale plan criticized While the proposed sale of National Forest lands has outraged many Western residents, a second plan to sell off public lands to raise money to offset the federal budget deficit has gotten little attention. Tucked into President Bush’s 2007 budget is a proposal to raise $182 million in the next five years by selling Bureau of Land Management property and a total of $351 million in the next decade. That by itself isn’t a change in policy, because the BLM already is tasked to sell off isolated parcels of public land that don’t fit within the federal agency’s management plans. As part of the Federal Land Transaction and Facilitation Act — or FLTFA — 80 percent of the money raised by the sale is used to acquire inholdings within national parks, national monuments, national forests, and BLM conservation areas. The remaining 20 percent is used to cover the BLM’s administrative costs. But the new Bush budget calls for 70 percent of the BLM’s land sale receipts to go into the national treasury instead, to be used to reduce the federal deficit....
Column: Last roundup for wild horses In 2005, President Bush signed legislation that will destroy our greatest icon -- the wild horse. In 1971, President Nixon signed legislation protecting it. This was the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burro Act, a hard-fought bill brought to lawmakers by ''Wild Horse Annie," a Nevada character who saw blood spilling from a truck hauling mustangs to the slaughterhouse, then dropped everything and spent the rest of her life trying to save them. Now those trucks are revving their engines again. Starting on March 10, 7,200 wild horses in government pipelines will begin to make their way to the three horse slaughterhouses in this country -- which are owned by France and Belgium. In 1900, about 2 million wild horses roamed the West. By 1950, there were 50,000. Today, there are about 25,000 -- perhaps spelling doom for the mustang. What happened? World War I, the pet food industry, and cattle ranchers, who contend that the remaining wild horses steal food from 3 million cows on the range. In the old days, they hired contractors to gun down mustangs and bring them the ears. Today, Big Beef still hires guns -- politicians who set policy for the Bureau of Land Management, the agency that presided over a recent fixed grazing study yet is supposed to protect the wild horse. Now, the animal America rode in on is facing its meanest battle....
Forecasts unpredictable Up in Leadville, there has been so much snow that the 4-foot fence around Dan Eller's house is buried, allowing his springer spaniel Boast to just walk out of the yard. "It seems like it's been snowing a foot every three days since Christmas," Eller said. Meanwhile, down in Trinidad, it has been so dry that ranchers have had to haul water for their cattle. "If we don't get moisture, I'll have to sell my herd," said rancher Tom Miller. "We need to pray for rain. Without it, it doesn't look good." The weather bedeviling Eller, Miller and the rest of Colorado is caused by a mass of Pacific Ocean cold water, about the size of the United States, stretching for 5,000 miles off the South American coast - called La Niña....
Film about Animas-La Plata project receives mixed views Film goers filled every seat at the Abbey Theatre Thursday, and 30 people were turned away at the door, for the Durango Independent Film Festival's first showing of "Cowboys, Indians and Lawyers," a documentary about the politically charged Animas-La Plata (A-LP) project. The project was designed the satisfy a treaty about water made between the government and two local Indian tribes decades ago. Environmentalists argued building a dam and reservoir would ruin the environment and allow for excessive development on land west of Durango. Proponents of the project argued the dam must be built to give the tribes back what had been taken from them. Many who attended the film's premier said they wanted to know whether the film would accurately portray events that have unfolded over the past three decades, adding that they looked forward to the visual aspect un
available in newspaper or radio coverage....
'Open ranges' idea rides again In Slope County, in a pasture south of Amidon, there's an old stove with the door hanging open and a sign that reads "open range." It's good for a chuckle, but some ranchers are pretty serious about it. They've asked the Slope County Commission to designate some parts of the county as open range, though technically in state law it's called a grazing area. The request comes from ranchers in western Slope County, out where the land is beautifully carved by the Little Missouri River and people are interested in buying small pieces for cabins and recreation. If the land is open range, people who buy some acres and don't want cattle grazing would have to fence the cows out....
Historic ranch sells for $6.8 million With a barely perceptible nod of his camouflage hunting cap, Ike Rainey of Lady Lake, Fla., bought a historic West River ranch for what is probably a historic price, $6.8 million. He outbid other individuals and groups for the Mattie Goff Newcombe ranch in an auction that lasted slightly less than three hours Thursday and packed the Central Meade County Community Center at Union Center with about 400 bidders and spectators. Neighboring ranchers and others were curious, awed and, in some cases, worried about the $590 an acre that Rainey and his Florida partner paid for the 11,570-acre ranch begun in the late 19th century by the Goff and Newcombe families. The ranch also includes grazing rights to 3,611 acres of Bureau of Land Management land and 616 acres of Homestake Mining Co. property. "It will be the most historic land auction the West River area has ever seen," said Kenneth Wilson, who ranches about 20 miles up the Cheyenne River from the old Newcombe place. But Wilson and others said they are worried that the increasing influx of big money from out-of-state hunting interests could make it more difficult for them to continue ranching and for young people to get started in ranching....
They'd walk a country mile for love Phyllis Schwarz hopes for a long-term relationship with someone who doesn't "smoke, chew, spit or cuss." Union Pacific conductor Ed Binau would like a sweetheart to come home to once his train rolls in. Kristina Shuford, a future law student, wants to meet a brainy horseman who knows a fetlock from a forelock. What do these lonely-hearts have in common? They are among the Northwest's geographically challenged singles. For them, living in small, rural communities not only limits their chances at love, it also drastically reduces the pool of potential mates with similar values and lifestyles, particularly as Washington's rural population dwindles....
Collector sees art in antique cowboy gear When the topic turns to art, most people don't immediately think of saddles, chaps and spurs. But American craftsmen of the 19th and early 20th centuries created exquisite works out of such utilitarian cowboy equipment. Mort Fleischer has the collection to prove it. The chairman and co-founder of Scottsdale-based Spirit Finance Corp. started collecting saddles and related items about 15 years ago and now owns hundreds of pieces, including those showing intricate leather carvings, silver inlays and other embellishments. "Some of these guys were great artists," Fleischer said. "It's truly an American art form because saddles, spurs and chaps are as American as apple pie."....
Lookin' Back: Canoa Ranch cattle baron loses grip on money, wife Frederick Maish shared a malady with a sizeable number of other wealthy and successful pioneer Tucsonans: An inadequate grip. Like freighter Estevan Ochoa, politician Charles Poston, farmer/rancher "Pete" Kitchen, miller Solomon Warner, merchant John B. "Pie" Allen and many others, Maish couldn't hold onto his money. In an era when some families survived on a few hundred dollars a year - or substantially less, the man who once pulled $60,000 in cash from his hotel safe to pay overdue government livestock import fees lived, at the time of his death in May 1913, in a hovel on Meyer Street. A couple of decades earlier, he and long-time partner Thomas Driscoll owned thousands of head of cattle that grazed on the vast Canoa Ranch along both sides of the Santa Cruz River, on the 17,000-acre Buena Vista Ranch and the Fresnal Ranch that extended for many miles from Fresnal to Gunsight on what now is the Tohono O'odham Nation....
It's All Trew: Brick chimneys a favorite memory A recent experience gained while installing a wood stove in my workshop brought back memories of early day brick chimneys and flues. Almost every dwelling I can remember contained at least one brick chimney, venting smoke and fumes up, up and away. This simple square brick vent was fireproof, insulated enough to protect the nearby wood and was usually located centrally for service to more than one heating stove. Most chimneys were located in the corner of a room with vent inlets opening through the walls to other rooms. Unused inlets were covered with round decorative metal covers with flowers painted on the surface. Some bricks were left raw, some varnished and ours was papered over with wallpaper that sagged after the glue gave way....

Will catch up on the rest of the news manana...