NEWS ROUNDUP

Column - An attack on ranch water rights If you have a well, or if you draw water from a river, what would your land be worth without the water rights? I know at my place, we’d be hard-pressed to survive. The system governing water rights in the West has been in place for over a century in order to help conserve and allocate scarce water resources. But that system is under attack right now and it could create a big mess for all Montanans. Western water law was developed to clarify who had a right to use water, and how much. Just as important, water law prevents the wasting of water by requiring that water rights only be granted when the water is put to a beneficial use. But today, the “beneficial use” doctrine is under attack here in Montana, and this attack threatens to create a dangerous precedent that could stand Western water law on its head. Coal bed methane drilling removes huge volumes of water in the process of extracting the methane gas. That extracted water contains enough sodium products to create serious impacts to soil. Although much of this groundwater has too much sodium to use it for irrigation, local people rely on it for livestock watering. Dewatering aquifers through large-scale drilling will create long-term lowering of water tables....
Water rule decision nears They get it. What they'll do about it, no one knows. But the wait may not be long. Rules guiding the regulation of water pumped from coal-bed methane wells in the Powder River Basin could be modified by the Environmental Quality Council as early as February. Kate Fox, an attorney representing the Powder River Basin Resource Council, said the seven-member citizen council seems to understand and appreciate the complexity of the issue -- and the need to modify the state's current regulatory framework that has failed to protect some ranchers from being flooded with highly saline coal-bed methane water. The council heard some 12 hours of testimony over two days last week on the proposed rule changes, including testimony from industry representatives who argue that placing more stringent stipulations on the industry could render some operations uneconomical. Based on questions that the council asked during the two-day hearing, Fox said it seemed to her that they understand there's room for more protection without bankrupting Wyoming's coal-bed methane industry....
Calaveras mountain lion sightings spur calls to law enforcement An unusual spate of mountain lion sightings were reported last week in Calaveras County, where ranchers steadily struggle to keep livestock protected from wildlife. The Calaveras County Sheriff's Department received two calls reporting the cats: one with a cub in a front yard on John Eaph Trail in West Point on Monday, the other lazing under a tree in the Payless Market parking lot in Copperopolis on Tuesday. A Mountain Ranch resident said she saw another cougar crossing Jesus Maria Road over the weekend. According to the California Department of Fish and Game, all but the far western border of Calaveras County is prime lion habitat, though sheriff dispatchers say three sightings in one week is unusual. The department said the animals prefer to hunt deer, but given the chance, some also eat pets and livestock. Attacks on humans are extremely rare....
New Forest Service director wants more discussion Gail Kimbell hopes she can take some of the things she's learned managing national forests in the northern Rockies and make them work nationwide. As the incoming director of the U.S. Forest Service, Kimbell said she wants to get people with an interest in public lands - loggers, environmentalists and ranchers among them - to start talking instead of always ending up in court. She's seen it happen more and more while serving as regional forester for the Northern Region out of Missoula. "I'm just really encouraged by what I've seen in North Dakota, Idaho and Montana, with folks coming together instead of swinging at one another," she told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle in a recent telephone interview. "People on all sides of an issue are very interested in resolving things at a local level so that folks will have a say about what goes on on their national forests."....
Timber industry focuses on biomass projects After nearly 90 years of sawing pine and Douglas fir logs into lumber, Rough & Ready Lumber Co. is branching into the energy business, building a $5 million plant to burn logging debris and to produce electricity that it can sell at a "green tag" premium to the regional power grid. "It's ripe," said Rough & Ready President Link Phillippi, who hopes to have a 1.5-megawatt plant up and running by the fall. "There are the economic benefits, the benefits of healthy forests, and the benefit of a country needing renewable energy -- clean energy." The idea of burning wood waste -- known as hog fuel -- to produce energy at wood products and pulp mills is an old one that was going nowhere as long as fossil fuels were cheap, and logging was cut back to protect fish and wildlife habitat. But leaders in the timber industry realize that energy production can help finance widespread thinning of national forests to combat wildfires and insect infestations. And the concept has a newer, catchier name -- biomass energy -- that helps align it with the wider movement linking economic and environmental concerns, including reducing dependence on fossil fuels....
Gov: Federal wolf stance won't fly in Wyo Gov. Dave Freudenthal says Wyoming can't agree to a pending U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposal for managing wolves in the state unless the federal agency gives the state a better way to stop wolves from savaging elk herds over the next several years. In an interview on Friday, Freudenthal said he's reviewed a proposal that the federal agency submitted to the state this week detailing the agency's plan to create a permanent wolf-management area in northwestern Wyoming. If the state accepts the federal proposal, there likely would be a period of several years between the time the federal government takes formal action to remove wolves from protection under the federal Endangered Species Act and the time when litigation over that action is completed in the courts. Mitch King, regional director for the Fish and Wildlife Service in Denver, told Freudenthal's office this week his agency expects that landowners and the federal wildlife managers would continue to address wolves that prey on livestock while litigation is pending....
A burning question Inside the cavernous sawmill, a big log thundered across a metallic platform. Bam! It crashed into position on a cutting track. Shriek! A band saw sliced it into thick, cream-colored slabs. Another log rolled into place. The result: more noise, more boards and more conifer-scented sawdust that hung like a woodsy perfume in the air. The pace of the action was frantic. But it was also misleading. For by June, the Sierra Forest Products mill here may be out of business, stilled by years of dogged environmental opposition that have throttled the flow of national forest timber from the southern Sierra Nevada. If that happens, something more may disappear than the last sawmill south of the Tuolumne River. With it could go the best hope of managing the forest by thinning the dense stands of smaller trees sapping the health from the Sierra Nevada and fueling massive wildfires....
Editorial - The Thirtymile fire burns on and on T his is the offseason for the nation's wildland firefighters, yet from Oregon to Montana to New Mexico there is a palpable fear and anxiety among the men and women responsible for quelling Western forest fires. Federal prosecutors have filed manslaughter and other criminal charges against a former fire commander, Ellreese Daniels, the fire boss in the 2001 Thirtymile fire in north-central Washington that claimed the lives of four firefighters. The criminal charges signal a dramatic change in the way the U.S. government responds to deaths of wildland firefighters. Throughout history, investigations into wildland firefighter deaths have centered on only one goal: Learn from every tragic mistake so it is never repeated. But the charges against Daniels, on the heels of the criminal prosecution of a commander in the 2003 Cramer fire in Idaho, in which two firefighters died, suggests that the government now intends to hold fire commanders personally and criminally liable for fatal misjudgments....
Wyo's cloud-seeding gamble Weather modification has come a long way since the Dust Bowl days when charming hucksters, like Burt Lancaster’s "Bill Starbuck" in the 1956 movie “The Rainmaker,” conned desperate farmers with a few fancy fireworks and a mishmash of science and faith. Since those days, there have been growing advances in weather modification -- and a growing number of small-scale, short-term experiments that have shown that cloud-seeding can make a difference. Today, something much more scientific and long range is under way in Wyoming's Medicine Bow, Sierra Madre, and Wind River mountain ranges. A scientific consortium is using $8.8 million and a five-year project to definitively prove that cloud seeding can build up the snowpack reservoirs in Wyoming’s mountains -- the source of most surface water used by irrigators, industry and municipalities. This program involves ground-based and aerial cloud-seeding operations, to be implemented by {M3Weather Modification Inc. based in Fargo, N.D. Supporters of the project hope it will increase snowpack and runoff within Wyoming's Green River, Wind River and Platte River basins....
Off-road battle revs up in Utah Some call Swing Arm City, near southern Utah’s Factory Butte, God’s gift to motor bikers. Others call it ugly, desolate and good for nothing but a great time with dirt and a throttle. It’s “the baddest badlands in America,” said Caineville business owner Randy Ramsley. A popular riding spot for western Colorado off-roaders, Swing Arm City is the unofficial name of a 2,600-acre motor sports playground riddled with Mancos shale hills, bike-tracked, knife-edge ridges and rutted ravines. The badland is part of a 144,000-acre tract of public land in Wayne County between Utah Highway 24 and Capitol Reef National Park, known all over the West as one of the greatest cross-country riding areas on the Colorado Plateau. But when the Bureau of Land Management told off-roaders to stay on trails last September to protect two endangered cacti, it angered Wayne County officials so much that they’re proposing to allow motor bikers to ignore the BLM’s closure and ratchet up the vitriol in the off-highway vehicle community that already is hopping mad about all-terrain-vehicle trail closures throughout the San Rafael Swell region of central Utah....
Scientists: Climate change could be 'catastrophic' The January wind whips down from the peaks that ring the northwest shore of Lake Tahoe, the snapping cold and snow-covered grandeur of the mountains providing a somewhat misleading backdrop to Brant Allen's task. While all around him are the certain signs of winter, the marine biologist is reading other signs that tell him winters in the Sierra Nevada aren't what they used to be. At the end of a wooden pier, he checks a metal box filled with wires and computer chips that gauge the temperature in the nation's deepest glacial lake. The data recorded at this pier and at four buoys tell an alarming story of a lake that has been warming gradually over the past three decades, due at least in part to global climate change that scientists say has led to shorter winters in the Sierra. The potential consequences of those changing winters are profound, for Lake Tahoe and all of California, especially as temperatures are predicted to rise markedly over the next century. "It's not a place where we would be comfortable," said Connie Millar, a historic scientist for the U.S. Forest Service. "If we don't lasso this thing, it could ramp up into catastrophic conditions."....A "historic scientist"? What the hell is that?
Beef Row Threatens Free Trade Pact A potential free trade agreement between the United States and South Korea hinges on something not even officially part of the intense negotiations: the complete resumption of American beef imports into the world's 10th-largest economy. "These are separate discussions from the FTA," Assistant U.S. Trade Representative Wendy Cutler said Friday, referring to so far unsuccessful efforts to get U.S. beef back onto the plates of South Korean consumers. "But as the United States has made clear from day one of these negotiations, in order for the FTA to happen we're gonna need to see a full reopening of Korea's beef market," she told a press conference. Cutler, besides being Washington's chief negotiator in the effort to forge a free trade deal with South Korea, is also responsible for bilateral trade issues with the country, the United States' seventh-largest trading partner....
USDA investigating cattle sale The U.S. Department of Agriculture is investigating whether Canadian cattle were bought in a South Dakota sale barn and sold to a packer in Nebraska. The USDA does not allow selling Canadian cattle on the open market, such as at a livestock sale barn. Jim Rogers, a USDA spokesman in Washington, D.C., said Friday that the agency is looking into the situation but could not provide details. According to a news release from the South Dakota Stockgrowers Association, a South Dakota rancher purchased the cattle at an auction barn in South Dakota and sold them to a slaughter plant in Nebraska. The packers would not pay him for seven head of cattle because, they said, the cattle were from Canada. Seven head of the 87 sold to the packer had Canadian ear tags. The innards of all 43 head in the same semi, including the disputed seven, were condemned for an estimated loss of $11,000, according to officials with the Stockgrowers Association and the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund....
Sheriff puzzled by cattle-country shootout that left 2 dead It was an old-West-style shootout, with saddled horses and cattle standing in the snow nearby. And when the smoke cleared, a northeastern Oregon rancher and cowhand were dead. Two other people were injured, although not by gunfire, in the deadly confrontation Thursday afternoon at a cattle ranch north of Enterprise. "This was a real tragedy; it was senseless," said Wallowa County Sheriff Fred Steen of Enterprise, who was still trying Saturday to sort out what happened and why. Allegations of cattle theft might have caused an argument to turn violent between Dennis Alan Beach, 55, and Shane Howard Huntsman, 40, the sheriff speculated. Rustling has been reported recently in the north end of the county, although there is no evidence cattle rustling took place in this instance, he said. "It is a possibility that is what triggered this," Steen said. "This is a complicated situation." The gunplay occurred near the snow-covered old settlement of Flora, half of which is abandoned buildings at an elevation of 4,330 feet on a broad mountain plateau 35 miles north of Enterprise. Beach and his son Travis, 28, apparently had gone to a ranch nearby to retrieve some cows and got into an argument with Huntsman, Steen said....
Sales searing for brand book Brand Wilma Kite a delighted woman, basking in the contentment of having finished a seven-year project that reaped immediate rewards. In 1999, the rancher from south Redding began pulling hundreds of pieces of leather and rawhide from some dusty boxes at the Shasta Historical Society with the hopes of researching old cattle brands. The result was "Shasta County Brands," a publication of livestock brands used by pioneering families of early Shasta County. The 50 copies she had printed sold out so quickly that she's now looking for sponsors to print more, and she's taking names of those who want to buy a book. The book, which is still available on CD-ROM, identifies 1,643 brands used in the county between 1850 and 1936. During that period, the owners of cattle, horses, mules, goats and other animals seared the brands into scraps of hide, which were registered and kept at the county records office. Since 1936, brands have been registered on paper in Sacramento....
Sculptor exhibits love of the West When sculptor D. Michael Thomas opens the door of his studio, a newcomer could easily assume the tall, lanky Wyoming native to be a rancher. His studio a few miles east of town looks like a horse barn, and the mustached Thomas in his denim shirt, well-worn jeans and cowboy boots fits the profile of a Western man. Thomas's main focus now is to complete a bronze of LeDoux "large enough to stand as a monument to him" in his hometown of Kaycee. His initial piece will serve as a pattern for the finished monument, which will be life-and-a-half sized. LeDoux stood a little over 6 feet tall, so the completed monument piece will be massive. In order to add additional character to the bronze, Thomas has placed the bucking horse LeDoux is riding on a guitar-shaped stand. “The horse and guitar together just seem to honor Chris’s notoriety," Thomas said. With a slight tremor in his voice, Thomas speaks about the warm, caring personality of his late friend. Then he adds that 200 smaller-sized bronzes will be for sale to help in raising money for the Chris LeDoux Memorial Trust to be placed just off Kaycee’s Main Street....
Riding into the next century Hulda Mahnke's eyes met those of her great-granddaughter Kady's horse, Ginger, as she stretched out her hand and stroked her face. She made the human-equine communion as only a country girl can. Friends and family members then hoisted the former rancher from her wheelchair and guided her right leg over the saddle with straps embossed with Kady's name. With reins in hand and freedom from mens' touch, Hulda Mahnke's countenance shined as she rode Ginger back in time around the yard of the Poplar Living Center to celebrate her 100th birthday on Sunday. "When she was a kid, all she talked about was her and her brothers getting the horses and riding bareback," her daughter Frances Park said. "And no one could catch her." Scores of family members, friends and members of Mount Hope Lutheran Church gathered at the Poplar Living Center to celebrate her centenary, and coincidentally the 79th birthday of her son Don who also lives there. They cheered, clapped and waved at her, and she waved back....