NEWS ROUNDUP

Hunter mauled by bear north of Gardiner A bow hunter was mauled by a grizzly bear north of Gardiner this morning. It prompted the Forest Service to close the Beattie Gulch area for the second time in three weeks. Mel Frost is a spokeswoman with the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks. She says the man was bow hunting for elk with two friends when a grizzly bear with three cubs "got a whiff of him" and rolled him over. The hunter had some bites on his shoulder and leg, but wasn't injured too badly. The mauling occurred within a mile of where another bow hunter was mauled by a grizzly with three cubs on September 14th. Officials say there's no way to find out of the same bear was involved....
Money allows bear study in western Montana to continue Wildlife biologists can track where grizzly bears roam in Montana using radio and satellite collars for another five years, thanks to some funding from the U.S. Forest Service. The "genetic population study" has been under way since 2004, and is aimed at giving researchers a better idea of bear populations and migration patterns in northwest Montana. However, last spring, officials with the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks said they wouldn't have enough cash on hand to keep the multiyear study going beyond 2007. Officials say the Forest Service has come to the rescue with a promise to contribute nearly $400,000 to the program.
Wolves in the fold: Ranchers struggle to co-exist with an old Montana predator Gayla Skaw tells of the day last winter when her husband Lee and a neighboring rancher were in the hills cutting wood. Half a mile or more away, gray wolves from the Willow Creek pack were lying in snow in an open meadow. The men watched them through spotting scopes. “Pretty soon they got up and kind of started running along,” Gayla said. “Lee said the sun was shining on them and the snow was blowing up and he said, ‘You know, they were beautiful. It's hard to hate them. “ ‘But at the same time, you don't want them out there in your cows.' ” Cultures, world views and even centuries are colliding in this ranching country now that the wolves have arrived. They're spinoffs of packs reintroduced in central Idaho a decade or more ago, and they're in hot water. Nine wolves from the burgeoning Sapphire pack west of Philipsburg and the Bearmouth pack southwest of Drummond were killed by federal agents in a two-week span in September. The Bearmouth pack was eradicated, while the Sapphire pack was trimmed to 14, 11 of them adults, according to Liz Bradley, a wolf management specialist for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. The Willow Creek pack is between the other two. “They've denned on private property the last couple of years, and there have been a lot of concerns from those landowners,” Bradley said....
Judge dismisses rancher's lawsuit A federal judge has dismissed a long-running lawsuit between a Wyoming rancher and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management over federal land grazing permits. U.S. District Court Judge Clarence Brimmer of Cheyenne on Friday granted a judgment against Harvey Frank Robbins Jr., who sued six BLM employees of trying to coerce him into granting an easement on a road leading to the Shoshone National Forest. Brimmer dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning it cannot be refiled. In the case, Robbins had maintained that BLM workers pulled his grazing permits and otherwise persecuted him to try to get him to give the government road access. Robbins, who owns 55,000 acres of private land and leases about 55,000 acres from the BLM, has filed a number of lawsuits against the federal government. In this case, Robbins had appealed a decision from the U.S. District of Wyoming to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, which sided with his contention that federal employees are not immune from lawsuits under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations law. Government attorneys appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled 7-2 in June that Robbins, of Thermopolis, did not have that right to sue individual federal employees. That decision sent the case back to the 10th Circuit and then to Wyoming for Brimmer to act on the Supreme Court's opinion....
BLM Director Backs Western Drilling The Bush administration foresees no letup in the aggressive pace for Western oil and gas drilling, despite some voter backlash from people tired of seeing more and more rigs in their Rocky Mountain states. "There's absolutely no doubt that the interest in oil and gas is going to continue. I mean, it is where it is," Jim Caswell, the new director of the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management, said in an interview Friday with The Associated Press. He took office in August. Public lands managed by BLM produce 18 percent of the nation's natural gas and five percent of its oil. BLM manages 258 million acres, about one-eighth of the land in the United States. Most of that land — grasslands, forests, high mountains, arctic tundra and deserts — is in the West. It also oversees about 700 million acres of minerals below the land's surface. Five basins in Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico contain the nation's largest onshore reserves of natural gas. BLM has been approving about one of every four applications it receives for permits to drill. But states also approve leases; in Montana, about 120 of the 750 wells producing coalbed methane are on federal leases....
Salazar Hears From Both Sides On Pinon Canyon Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar is hearing from both sides on the Pinon Canyon issue: those who think his bills on expanding the military training site went too far and those who don't think they went far enough. The Democrat and fellow Sen. Wayne Allard, a Republican, teamed up on a bill requiring the Army to study whether it needs to nearly triple its 368-square-mile training site in southeast Colorado. The two split on a second bill requiring the Army to wait a year to push ahead with the expansion, with Salazar backing it and Allard opposed. Many people at a public meeting Saturday on the Colorado State University-Pueblo campus said they were unhappy with the bill giving the Army six months to justify its plan to enlarge the Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site. "We think you should take that amendment back that allows the Army another opportunity to expand," said Lon Robertson, president of the Pinon Canyon Expansion Opposition Coalition. Residents of southeast Colorado fear that nearly 200 ranches and farms could be wiped out by the proposed expansion near La Junta. They and other property owners also worry the Army will force them to sell their land, despite assurances from the military that it hopes to get the acreage from willing sellers....
Permian Basin rancher wants to transform land into wind farm Through his own initiative, J.B. Whatley hopes to transform his ranch into a wind farm. "Nearly two years ago, I erected a big MET tower, put all the equipment on it and started recording wind to see if the potential was here for wind development," Whatley said. A MET is a meteorological tower that measures wind speed. His was 270 feet at its center -- as tall as one of the turbines. Most ranchers sign with a developer and they do the wind study to see if they're interested. Instead, Whatley hired a lawyer to put out bids to companies. He signed with American Shoreline of Corpus Christi to develop the $340 million 2W Whatley Ranch Wind project. "I just took a chance. I've got a little entrepreneurial spirit about it. I thought, 'I'll find out for myself, that way I'll know,'" Whatley said. PSEG of New Jersey is considering participating in project, proposed for 1,650 acres in Andrews and Ector counties. Turbines could be up and running by December 2009, company spokeswoman Jennifer Kramer said. 2W Wind LLC proposes to construct 80 to 106 wind turbines, Andrews County Judge Richard Dolgener said. Andrews County commissioners have approved a resolution to authorize a reinvestment zone in the area....
Sharp price drop puts brakes on ethanol boom A 40 percent drop in the price of ethanol this year is reining in the galloping growth of the industry and adding a twist to the debate over the future of biofuels. The wholesale price of ethanol is about $1.50, down from about $2.50 late last year. Along with high corn prices, that is pinching the profits of ethanol companies and pushing them to scale back their expansion plans. Brookings-based VeraSun announced last week it would suspend construction at a plant in Reynolds, Ind. - one of the five it is building - because of poor market conditions. Some in the industry say the declining price is part of a normal swing, accentuated by the undue influence of oil companies. But transportation issues and an increasingly complex marketplace also factor in, leaving plenty of room to keep arguing the politics of ethanol. Observers widely agree that basic supply and demand is driving the price decline. Production of ethanol grew from 1.6 billion gallons in 2001 to 4.9 billion in 2006 and could reach 6.5 billion this year....
Judge says land goes back to Williamson Co. family A judge ruled Friday in a Williamson County land dispute that the land goes back to the family. The fight was over land rancher Will Wilson gave away ten years ago. In 1991 he deeded an area of less than three acres to a California-based conservancy group. The Archeological Conservancy was supposed to protect Native American artifacts buried there. The judge ruled that the Conservancy did not live up to conditions in the original agreement. The family thought the land would be open to the public, but the Conservancy said they do not publicize such sites in order to protect them. Two years after his father's death, Will Wilson, Jr claimed the land was his, sparking the court battle. According to him, his father was unhappy with the Conservancy's work and had filed court papers backing out of the deal. Will Wilson, Jr. said the family will wait to see if there is an appeal....
Seattle man rides a trail that leads back to 1848 It wasn't about the money back in 1848, when Francis X. Aubry entered cowboy lore by winning $1,000 on a horse race. Then, the 26-year-old rode 800 miles on the Santa Fe Trail across streams, prairies and high country — even encountering a scalped dead man — in a record-setting five days, 15 hours. And it wasn't about the money for Seattle developer Scott Griffin, 47, who recently won the 2007 version of the Great Santa Fe Trail Horse Race. If you haven't heard of the 2007 event, that's because this was the inaugural race, dreamed up by Rob Phillips, of Lawrence, Kan. Phillips, 62, is a onetime hotel owner who describes himself as, "I guess, a little bit of a promoter ... I like horses and I like history." And if it brought in some tourism, that was great, too. Griffin won an engraved cowboy belt buckle. There were no cash prizes. For that belt buckle, Griffin rode 515 miles in a race that went from Sept. 3 to Sept. 15. Griffin is now back home, after trailering his two horses to where they're kept at a ranch in California....
How a Western changed the way Cubans speak For most American fans of classic Western cinema, Delmer Davies' 3:10 to Yuma (1957) is simply a cult favorite, one recently rescued from obscurity by the $55 million remake that is packing multiplexes from coast to coast. In Cuba, however, the original 3:10 to Yuma has had a major impact on everyday conversation. Take a walk down any of Havana's main thoroughfares and you'll hear American visitors hailed as yumas, while the United States itself is affectionately dubbed La Yuma. You won't find those phrases in any state-issued dictionary, and Cuban leader Fidel Castro stubbornly opts for the more derisive yanqui in his own public speeches, but outside of bureaucratic circles it's yuma that holds sway. How on earth did this happen? During the late 1950s, American-owned "United" firms such as the United Fruit Company maintained high-profile holdings in Cuba. Since the word united doesn't exactly roll off the tongue in Spanish, Cubans adopted the moniker La Yunay. Likewise, when referring to their neighbor across the Florida Straits, Cubans sometimes opted for a Spanglish version of United States—Yunay Estey—rather than the formal Estados Unidos. When the original 3:10 to Yuma hit Cuban cinemas, it inspired a spin on the already extant yunay, and the new slang term quickly took off....