NEWS ROUNDUP


Park chief, residents spar over pass plan Yellowstone National Park Superintendent Suzanne Lewis faced tough questions Thursday from Cody business leaders opposing a draft proposal that would close Sylvan Pass to snowmobiles and snow coaches. Speaking to a group of Cody Country Chamber of Commerce members, Lewis cited a tight park budget and declining winter traffic numbers through the East Entrance as factors behind the proposed pass closure. She rejected the notion that the National Park Service was overstating avalanche risks as an excuse to close the pass. A study submitted by Park County commissioners found only one minor incident related to avalanches on the pass over the past 30 years. "Thirty years of not doing the right thing doesn't mean we should continue 30 years more of risk," Lewis said. Bob Coe, owner of the Pahaska Tepee resort near Yellowstone's east gate, said many park activities are risky, ranging from hiking in bear country to burns from thermal features....
Editorial - A blunder THE DEPARTMENT of Defense is starting to look pretty ham-handed in its handling of the Army’s proposal to expand the Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site. Most recently it turns out that no further extension is to be granted ranchers and other people living near the maneuver site for comments on an environmental assessment of more troops using the training grounds. In October, the U.S. Department of Defense released a draft report on the possible impacts from an expected influx of 8,000 additional soldiers to Fort Carson who are expected to train at the Pinon Canyon training site. Comments on the study were due Nov. 27 but that deadline was extended to Jan. 11. But after raging blizzards struck the region last month, ranchers had asked for another extension. Ranchers have spent the past four weeks trying to dig out from snowstorms so severe the region has been declared a federal disaster area. Those ranchers have had an immediate concern, to save as many head of cattle as possible. Those animals are their livelihoods. A spokesman for a group opposing the expansion says letters from GOP Sen. Wayne Allard and Democratic Sen. Ken Salazar asking for a further extension went unheeded by Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey. What a public relations blunder....
This city knows the drill LIKE many Western towns, Rifle is a plain-looking community in a remarkable location. The town is wedged into a gulley carved by Rifle Creek as it trickles from the northern plateaus into the Colorado River. Most of Rifle consists of a narrow grid of modest clapboard and midcentury houses. It's the scenery that commands attention here. Looming above town are enormous sagebrush-studded plateaus, framed by rocky triangular hills that recede into the horizon. Winding roads lead into notches and hollows that cradle ranches and homes. The setting is spectacular in another way too: One of the richest natural gas fields on the continent lies beneath the ground. The gas deposits of the Piceance Basin lay trapped beneath hard sands, too costly to extract for decades. But technological advancements and sky-high gas prices changed that just as the Bush administration opened more public lands for exploration. Drilling rigs have mushroomed on the wind-swept mesas here. Big-rigs hauling drilling equipment and waste rumble down dirt roads that previously saw cattle drives. Rifle is prospering. Its population has risen 20% in the last six years to 8,500. The state projects it will reach 40,000 by 2020. Talk of the town's changing character is thick at the Elks Lodge and in cafes and butcher shops. Locals still can't get over downtown's two-hour parking limit imposed last May....
Millions of Texans want water rights in Oklahoma After a leisurely drive through the countryside between Dallas and the Red River, it's not hard to see why Texans want so badly to buy southern Oklahoma water rights. Thousands of large houses are going up in what used to be Texas pastureland. The Texans don't want to wait until the state's water sale moratorium expires in 2009. They sought permission to take 460,000 acre feet from three Oklahoma water basins and have filed a lawsuit in federal court to break the five-year ban. That moratorium came about after a proposed water sale drew the interests of ranchers, Native American tribes and civic interests throughout southern Oklahoma. The moratorium, first passed in 2002, was extended in 2004 until 2009. It passed the House in 2004 by a margin of 96-1 and the Senate 46-0. The water sale ban was designed to give Oklahomans time to complete a water plan that will determine the state's water supply and needs for the next 50 years. State Rep. Jerry Ellis, D-Valliant, who represents McCurtain County, in the Oklahoma House, said the amount of water sought exceeds the amount used by Oklahoma City and Tulsa combined....
Groups look to revive bill for drilling damages Agriculture producers and some environmental groups are negotiating with the state’s oil and gas industry to revive legislation to compensate private landowners for property damages caused by drilling. The New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association, the New Mexico Environmental Law Center, the New Mexico Farm and Livestock Bureau and the Oil and Gas Accountability Project banded together last year to push legislation called the Surface Owners Protection Act. The House approved the bill, but it never reached the Senate floor for a vote, according to New Mexico Oil and Gas Association President Bob Gallagher. “We’re close to an agreement that both sides could live with. But close is not there,” he said. “Also, we thought we had an agreement last year and the other side walked out at the 11th hour.” Local oil and gas companies say they supported the original bill and spent hours negotiating for it, even though they had no legal obligation to do so....
Boarder's speed a factor in crash? A witness to Sunday's backcountry accident might clear a snowmobile driver of any suspicion of negligence in a collision with a snowboarder, according to a source familiar with the investigation. The witness on Wednesday accompanied investigators from the Pitkin County Sheriff's Office and U.S. Forest Service to the scene of the accident near Hurricane Point on Richmond Ridge and helped them piece together what happened. Based on his information, it is believed the snowmobile was traveling up a groomed route around 12 mph during the collision with snowboarder Doran Laybourn, who was heading down the same route, according to the source. The person wanted to remain anonymous because the investigation is ongoing. Law enforcement officials have deemed the witness credible. His name wasn't released, but it was disclosed he is a member of Mountain Rescue Aspen....
Report: Confusion marred search Kati and James Kim ripped the visor mirror out of their car and tried directing reflected light at airplanes flying over them. They shouted and struggled in vain to relight a fire, in the rain, when a helicopter passed overhead. They hoped that somehow, someone would respond to the note they had written with a crayon and stuck in a zip-lock bag to a gate on a federal wilderness road in southern Oregon: "Low on Gas, Low on Food, 2 Babies." When none of that worked, Kati Kim told investigators in a report issued Thursday, her husband left to seek help, believing, she said, that there was a town with amenities only about four miles away. He had barely eaten for the past week, she said, "saving the food for the babies."...The 150-page report, ordered by Kulongoski in the wake of international attention directed on the tragedy, concluded that the search for the family had been marred by "frequent confusion" over just who was in charge. The report provides details of factors leading to that confusion: the number of governmental bodies involved in the search, personality conflicts between officials, sensitivities about comparative ranks, and one particularly inexperienced search official. In addition, it states, vital information from cellphone records might have helped searchers locate the family a day earlier. But the report did not conclude whether the death would have been prevented if these defects in the search process had not occurred....
Editorial - Trust in mining here toppled a long time ago The felling of San Manuel's twin smelter stacks can be seen as a metaphor for the crumbling of community trust in the entire mining industry. It's a trust that Augusta Resource Corp. must re-establish if it hopes to open an 800-acre open-pit copper mine south of Tucson. Wednesday, with a boom and a cloud of smoke, the 500-foot twin stacks of the former smelter complex at San Manuel slowly listed and crashed to the ground in a plume of dust. The stacks were a highly visible part of a 50-year mining and smelting operation about 45 miles northeast of Tucson. The Star's Richard Ducote reported in Wednesday's paper that at full production San Manuel's underground copper mine, a part of the former Magma Copper complex, was the largest in North America. During the smelter's lifetime, it produced 14 billion pounds of copper, Ducote reported. Economics, not lack of copper, brought the stacks down....
Aircraft deicing chemicals studied U.S. scientists have found aircraft deicing chemicals are toxic to aquatic life forms. The U.S. Geological Survey has been examining toxicity of a variety of formulations used to remove or prevent dangerous ice buildup on aircraft. The study confirmed proprietary additives are responsible for the observed toxicity. The USGS scientists compared nine different formulations of deicers and found neither the primary ingredients -- ethylene glycol and propylene glycol -- nor the known additives accounted for all observed toxicity. Additives are included to improve a formulation's effectiveness. Those that are proprietary have compositions known only to the manufacturer. Although research conducted in the 1990's revealed the toxicity of proprietary additives, the new study compared numerous deicers and anti-icers and confirmed most still have toxic additives that have not been publicly identified....
Environmentalists seek to join case over Death Valley roads Six environmental groups filed legal papers Thursday to join Death Valley National Park in fighting a federal court lawsuit that, if successful, could open miles of desert canyons and valleys to motorized vehicles. Last October, Inyo County sued the federal government seeking to re-establish its access to four dirt roads near the Nevada border that park officials seized when the national park was established in 1994. The environmentalists say the old mining roads were washed away years ago, and allowing vehicles into those areas now could endanger sensitive animal and plant species found in remote stretches of the desert. If Judge Anthony Ishii grants the motion to intervene, the Sierra Club, Friends of the Inyo, California Wilderness Coalition, Center for Biological Diversity, The Wilderness Society and the National Parks Conservation Association would become parties to the suit. If the county prevails, the groups believe the park's fragile ecosystem could suffer, to the detriment of the federally protected desert tortoise, desert bighorn sheep, mountain lions and other rare wildlife that roam there....
Naturalists tell their failures, successes The first attempt to reintroduce black-footed ferrets into the wild flopped. Coyotes gobbled up the polecats, which once lived across the Great Plains but were on the brink of extinction, because the cage-born ferrets never learned about natural predators, how to hunt prairie dogs or to take over their burrows for homes. The second time around, biologists used stuffed owls, remote-controlled "robo-badgers" and domestic dogs to chase the ferrets around, teaching them fear. They also brought in prairie dogs to teach the ferrets to catch food and live underground. With that help, the ferrets regained a solid foothold. "These are some of the problems we deal with," said Lincoln Park Zoo zoologist Rachel Santymire at a conference Thursday of about 100 biologists and nature resource managers from zoos, non-profits, nature centers, universities, state governments and Chicago-area forest preserves....
Evangelicals, Scientists Join on Warming Saying they share a moral purpose, a group of evangelicals and scientists said Wednesday they will work together to convince the nation's leaders that global warming is real. The Rev. Rich Cizik, public policy director for the National Association of Evangelicals, and Nobel-laureate Eric Chivian, director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School, were among 28 signers of a statement that demands urgent changes in values, lifestyles and public policies to avert disastrous changes in climate. "God will judge us for destroying the Creation. Therefore, we as evangelicals have a responsibility to be even more vigilant than others," Cizik told a news conference. "Science can be an ally in helping us understand what faith is telling us," he said. "We will not allow the Creation to be degraded, destroyed by human folly." Among the project's supporters are Edward O. Wilson, a two-time Pulitzer prize-winning scientist and author; James Hansen, a prominent NASA climatologist; and Calvin B. DeWitt, president of the Academy of Evangelical Scientists and Ethicists....
Pelosi Creates Global Warming Committee House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sought to create a special committee Thursday in an effort to jump-start long-delayed government efforts to deal with global warming and produce a bill by Independence Day. Pelosi, D-Calif., said the committee would hold hearings and recommend legislation on how to reduce greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide generated by fossil fuels, that most scientists blame for a gradual warming of the earth's climate. "I promise to do everything in my power to achieve energy independence ... and to stop global warming," Pelosi said. Pelosi set a goal of the Fourth of July for finishing a global warming bill that would "truly declare our energy independence." The committee will be led by Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., who shares Pelosi's goals, said a Democratic leadership aide, speaking on condition of anonymity because Pelosi had yet to announce her choice. Actual bill-drafting duties will be left to committees that have a say in the matter. That could be several because global climate change could affect virtually everything....
AMS CERTIFIED WEATHERMAN STRIKES BACK AT WEATHER CHANNEL CALL FOR DECERTIFICATION Well, well. Some “climate expert” on “The Weather Channel” wants to take away AMS certification from those of us who believe the recent “global warming” is a natural process. So much for “tolerance”, huh? I have been in operational meteorology since 1978, and I know dozens and dozens of broadcast meteorologists all over the country. Our big job: look at a large volume of raw data and come up with a public weather forecast for the next seven days. I do not know of a single TV meteorologist who buys into the man-made global warming hype. I know there must be a few out there, but I can’t find them. Here are the basic facts you need to know: *Billions of dollars of grant money is flowing into the pockets of those on the man-made global warming bandwagon. No man-made global warming, the money dries up. This is big money, make no mistake about it. Always follow the money trail and it tells a story. Even the lady at “The Weather Channel” probably gets paid good money for a prime time show on climate change. No man-made global warming, no show, and no salary. Nothing wrong with making money at all, but when money becomes the motivation for a scientific conclusion, then we have a problem. For many, global warming is a big cash grab....
Rancher tends to buffaloes in Sandia Pueblo Lovato is a rancher of a different kind. He tends to 45 buffalo that aren't his. Officially, they belong to Sandia Pueblo, but in truth they belong to the land. It's a sacred kinship, a relationship more to be respected than understood. Lovato, 52, is caretaker of this buffalo preserve, a 1,000-acre swath of open range running along Tramway Road Northeast, just east of I-25 across from the growing Sandia Resort & Casino. His job is to maintain the sacred, prehistoric connection between American Indians, the buffalo and the land they coexist upon. Lovato isn't a member of the pueblo. He's not even American Indian. It took some time to build a relationship with the buffalo. They're still wild animals, after all, and smarter than the cattle he grew up tending. "They charged me for a year and a half," he says, walking along ground scattered with hay and buffalo droppings. "They get hot really quick. It's that wild temper that flares up. "It's that gene pool that's trying to survive."....
Life is a windmill for repairman Chuck Jones For the past 27 years Jones has owned and operated Flint Hills Windmill Repair, and said what he enjoys most about repairing windmills is working on a wide variety of windmills, being outdoors, and traveling the back road roads ofKansas. What does Jones enjoy least about working on windmills? “worrying about falling off” and “fixing the wrong windmill.” “We do a six county area,” Jones said, “and every day seems to be a little different.” Jones said they work on a wide variety of windmills, such as Aermotor, Dempster, Stover, and Challenge windmills and will soon work on a Samson Oilright near Goessel. “Finding this particular model was like finding an Edsel,” Jones said. Jones’s said that he takes care of between 1200 to 1500 windmills, has repaired many more than that, and has worked on windmills as short as nine feet — it actually pumped water, Jones said — and as tall as 50 foot....
It’s The Pitts: Exposed When it comes to remembering bad pictures everyone has a photographic memory. I know this because at the tender age of 21 I was handed a camera and the title of “field editor” without having the faintest idea how to write or take photos. Most of my problems were the camera’s fault. It had all sorts of dials, lenses and f-stops and at the time I didn’t know the difference between an f-stop and a Quick Stop. (Still don’t for that matter!) So I developed the technique of taking a picture using every conceivable combination of settings, figuring one had to be right. Surprisingly, this was seldom the case. I learned real fast that to take a good picture required hard work, patience, several rolls of film and focus. Which, by the way, most of my photos lacked. Keep in mind these were the days before digital cameras and I couldn’t see right away how bad my photos were. No, I had to wait three days for them to develop to make this discovery. I was okay when taking pictures of people, other than the occasional red dots for eyes, but with animals I never could get on their good side. You see, a beef animal is supposed to be photographed headed uphill with their hind legs offset. But whenever I’d line up a shot and say “cheese” (which is a silly thing to say to a cow in the first place) I’d end up with a grotesque looking photo of a Far Side cartoon cow. And this was back in the days when cattlemen largely made up their mind on which animal to buy based on the animal’s picture in an ad or a sale catalog. Needless to say, my photos have ruined the careers of many an aspiring bovine....