Forest Service Proposes to Close Over Half of Santa Fe National Forest Roads

The Santa Fe National Forest finally released its draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for Travel Management to the public today. The Forest Service is proposing to close over 2900 miles (53%) of the existing roads on the Forest. Even the most 'vehicle-friendly' alternative considered closes nearly half of the roads currently available. This will affect all motorized vehicles: cars, trucks, Jeeps, motorcycles, and ATVs. It will also have a profound impact on all members of the public who use the Forest including hunters. According to the proposal, there are currently 5458 miles of roads and trails that people are using. The Forest Service's drastic proposal reduces this to around 2500 miles. The public has 45 days to comment on these issues by submitting letters or emails...more

Forest Service Bans Humans From Caves

The U.S. Forest Service said Tuesday it was barring entry to caves on service-owned land in Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas and South Dakota because of white-nose syndrome, which has killed nearly a million bats in the eastern and southern U.S. and is spreading west. The agency said it took the action to help prevent humans from inadvertently spreading the disease. But thousands of people — professional and amateur — enjoy exploring the multitude of dark, damp underground crevices and caverns in the West. Many are chafing at the federal restrictions. "It's just like Prohibition," said Richard Rhinehart of Denver, who has a caving blog and has been spelunking since he was in high school in 1974. Deputy Regional Forester Tony Dixon said it was impractical for the agency to widely enforce the ban, given the vast number of caves in the Rocky Mountain region. He appealed to cave explorers to voluntarily adhere to the restriction and help the agency determine which caves and mines don't harbor bats...more

Song Of The Day #368

Hank Week on Ranch Radio will continue with Hank Thompson's 1952 recording of Waiting In The Lobby of Heart.

That's a sad song from Hank. But if you think that's sad, just listen to poor ol' Johnny Cash who sings I've Been Flushed From The Bathroom of Your Heart.

Now that's sad.

Border Violence Spills 80 miles into the U.S.

Here is the Fox News video report:

CBD files lawsuit against Salazar for BP Oil's affect on wildlife

The Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit today against Interior Secretary Ken Salazar for failing to provide an adequate risk assessment upon which to base a decision to allow the oil industry’s deep sea off-shore drilling program with respect to its impact on wildlife. “While Salazar’s conclusion that exploration drilling in the Gulf posed little risk of a large oil spill was dubious at the time it was made, in light of BP’s calamity that position is completely untenable,” said Miyoko Sakashita, the Center’s oceans director. “The public deserves disclosure and a full analysis of the true impacts of oil drilling off our coasts." Salazar made no changes environmentalists had been asking for regarding deep sea off-shore drilling when he was appointed to his current position. The Center for Biodiversity says Salazar should be held liable for not honoring the Endangered Species Act. This act requires all federal agencies, including the former Minerals Management Service, to ensure that any action they carry out does not “jeopardize” a threatened or endangered species...more

Are wolves on the prowl in Utah?

Are a growing number of wolves on the prowl in Utah? There's no exact figure for the number of wolves in the state, but recent sightings have some state officials on alert. "We're very concerned about the wolves coming to Utah," says Leonard Blackham, Utah Commissioner for Agriculture and Food. "Of course the last couple of months we've seen several come into the state of Utah and some damage done, and we're starting to have some serious challenges that way." Blackham says wolves are making their way into Utah, the animals seem to be slowly penetrating through our northern border. Idaho and Wyoming are known to hold a heavy wolf population. "It could become a safety concern for ranchers and recreation people if the numbers increase, but i think today its not," says Blackham, "but it's surely a challenge for livestock and livestock producers. they are very aggressive animals." Blackham says it doesn't look like there's a pack, yet, in Utah, just single animals. But, in the last few weeks there have been at least three incidents with wolves here in Utah. One of those incidents happened just last friday where a wolf was taken out in summit county after killing thousands of dollars worth of livestock...more

Range war pits paddlers against property owners on North Country rivers

It turns out this kind of feud between paddlers and landowners is common across the US. “They’ve told me to get out, given me dirty looks and threatened and I haven’t quite had a gun pointed at me whereas other people I know have had guns pointed at them. Eric Leaper is director of the National Organization for Rivers, a paddler advocacy group based in Colorado. Earlier this year, landowners in his state lobbied aggressively to defeat a bill that would’ve clarified the rights of paddlers to run most of that state’s navigable rivers, even if they pass through private property. “And rancher after rancher got up and said ‘this ranch has been in my family for 3 or 4 generations and now you’re going to come take my property,’ and I do have sympathy because they have this long-standing misunderstanding that the river flowing through their ranch is private. Now they know the county road going through their ranch isn’t private, but they think the river is,” Leaper said. This is the pivot-point of the debate: a tangled legal argument going on state-by-state over what rivers are. Are they part and parcel of the land that surrounds them, or are they travel corridors open to everyone for commerce and recreation? Phil Brown is editor of the Adirondack Explorer magazine and an avid paddler who’s written extensively about this topic. He says here in the state of New York there’s actually a lot of legal precedence supporting the idea that rivers are a kind of traditional public highway. “This common law right dates back to old England so in a way this represents our heritage. Their was a time when rivers were used as travel, a sense that you know, a private a landowner may doesn’t the rivers, or they may own the rivers but the public has the right to travel on them,” Brown said...more

Deep Underground, Miles of Hidden Wildfires Rage

Three blistering fires are blazing through Wyoming's scenic Powder River Basin, but firefighters aren't paying any attention. Other than a faint hint of acrid odors and a single ribbon of smoke rising from a tiny crack beyond the nearby Tongue River, a long look across the region's serene grassland shows no sign of trouble. That's what makes the three infernos, and the toxins they spew, so sinister. Their flames are concealed deep underground, in coal seams and oxygen-rich fissures, which makes containment near impossible. Shielded from fire hoses and aerial assaults, the flames are chewing through coal seams 20 feet thick, spanning 22 acres. They're also belching greenhouse gases and contaminants, contributing to an out-of-sight, out-of-mind environmental hazard that extends far beyond Wyoming's borders. A surprising number of us live close to them. According to a review by the Department of Interior's Office of Surface Mining Enforcement and Reclamation, more than 100 fires are burning beneath nine states, most of them in Colorado, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Utah and West Virginia. But geologists say many fires go unreported, driving the actual number of them closer to 200 across 21 states...more

Raw-food raid highlights a hunger

With no warning one weekday morning, investigators entered an organic grocery with a search warrant and ordered the hemp-clad workers to put down their buckets of mashed coconut cream and to step away from the nuts. Then, guns drawn, four officers fanned out across Rawesome Foods in Venice. Skirting past the arugula and peering under crates of zucchini, they found the raid's target inside a walk-in refrigerator: unmarked jugs of raw milk. "I still can't believe they took our yogurt," said Rawesome volunteer Sea J. Jones, a few days after the raid. "There's a medical marijuana shop a couple miles away, and they're raiding us because we're selling raw dairy products?" Cartons of raw goat and cow milk and blocks of unpasteurized goat cheese were among the groceries seized in the June 30 raid by federal, state and local authorities — the latest salvo in the heated food fight over what people can put in their mouths. On one side are government regulators, who say they are enforcing rules designed to protect consumers from unsafe foods and to provide a level playing field for producers. On the other side are " healthy food" consumers — a faction of foodies who challenge government science and seek food in its most pure form. They want almonds cracked fresh from the shell, not those run through a federally mandated pasteurization process that uses either heat or a chemical to kill off salmonella and other possible contaminants. They hunger for meat slaughtered on the farm. And they're willing to pay a premium — $6, $8 or more — for a gallon of milk straight from the cow. So despite research outlining the dangers of consuming raw milk and other unprocessed foods, they're finding ways to circumnavigate federal, state and local laws that seek to control what they can serve at the dinner table...more

Wine-fed cows a hit with chefs

The B.C. wine industry just got a big boost from a new market segment: Cows. Unfortunately, these cows meet a sad end -- but they do spend 90 of their last days living it up, drinking red Okanagan wine, and they do seem to like it. At least, they moo more and seem to "talk to each other." Could they be comparing vintages and talking about leathery notes in the wine of the day? The idea of feeding wine to cows was hatched by Janice Ravndahl of Sezmu Meats in Kelowna. (Sezmu is the Egyptian god of wine.) She introduced it to local high-end chefs who, in turn, became drunk with glee. It began one day when she was sitting around, having a glass of wine, watching The F Word, a Gordon Ramsay TV cooking show. She saw him giving a taste of beer to some pigs he was raising. Coming from five generations of cattle ranchers, she thought, "why not cows?" She phoned her brother, who told her exactly why not. "Because the carbonation would bloat them," he said. Ravndahl then thought: "Why not wine?" The Angus cows are each fed a litre of Okanagan red wine (granted, nothing our wine writer Anthony Gismondi would drink) every day. It's mixed into the feed but some like to drink the wine straight up. She says the beef is priced about 15-per-cent higher than regular free-range, hormone and antibiotic-free beef...more

Event marks National Cowboy Day

Cowboys, gunslingers, and outlaws came together Saturday at the Rusk County Youth Expo Center in Henderson to celebrate the National Day of the Cowboy. The Circle C Cowboy Church led by Pastor Pat Alphin sponsored the event in hopes to show how important cowboys have been to the United States. The event started Saturday morning with several venders setting up to sell handmade trinkets and live music, but a small group of surly looking hombres were camped across the parking lot. Several cowboys and badmen were all toting iron and dressed to the nines in old-fashioned western attire. They laid back in the shade listening to tunes from a truck nearby and swapped stories, mostly made up...more

Baxter Black: The Udder Side

A recent acquisition for my audio parody library is a CD entitled” The Udder Side,” composed, recorded and available by Judy Williams at judyntom@ixi.net. It contains such titles as the dystocia calf's lament, “Take These Chains From My Parts and Set Me Free!,” the grafted calf's favorite “She Can't Kick Me Now ‘Cause Mama's Tied!” and the spring-drive theme song, “Don't You Ever Get Tired of Herding Me!” Ms. Williams surely must be a cow psychologist, the way she can see inside their thinking. Since we all have global warming on our minds because the press and the Algorites keep pointing to cows as a major producer of greenhouse gasses, her song about “Vegan F ... Flatulations” was spot on. It seems to me that most of the urban animal rights activists, Defenders of Wildlife, Sierra Club zealots and politically correct Luddites proclaim themselves vegetarians. It is a trade-off to maintain credibility. I mean, if you want to remove all trace of humans in the wilderness, release endangered wolves in downtown Beverly Hills or Detroit, and think eating ice cream, cheese, hamburgers, spare ribs and chicken wings is tantamount to murder, then it is a sacrifice they should make. However, there is a corner they have backed themselves into, that must give them consternation. I would assume that omnivores (the human race) who restrict their diet to only plants might experience a change in their visceral bacterial population. Now, I don't know that as a fact. But if you've ever heard a faithful vegetarian claim that he got sick from eating broth that had been stirred with a spoon they'd used to serve the chile con carne, it might be proof that enteric conversion could happen in people...more

Song Of The Day #367

It's time for another Hank Week at Ranch Radio.

Here is Hank Snow's 1954 recording of I Don't Hurt Anymore.

The tune is on his 20 track CD The Essential Hank Snow.

Armed escorts join border ag inspectors

State agricultural inspectors are now accompanied by armed sheriff’s deputies while working in far southern New Mexico because of escalating violence along the U.S. border with Mexico. “We’re out in the middle of nowhere here,” livestock scale inspector David Turning of the New Mexico Department of Agriculture told KRQE News 13. Turning was one of two scale inspectors escorted by deputies Monday from the Luna and Hidalgo county sheriff’s departments in a program funded by the Homeland Security Department’s “Operation Stone Garden”. “We did a perimeter check making sure there’s nobody out hiding in the brush close by us,” Luna County Sgt. Steve Gallegos said. The inspectors’ job takes them to some of the most remote and dangerous sections of New Mexico.Law enforcement officers said the escorts are a good idea because certain sections of southern New Mexico are especially dangerous. “It’s pretty crazy out there,” Hidalgo County Cpl. Gary Lassiter said. “We have Mexican nationals that we have on our side with guns in the mountains.”..more

Here is the KRQE-TV video report:

Patrolling the route of smugglers

It's been called everything from a drug smuggling super highway to a pipeline for illegal immigration that leads straight to the Valley. News/Talk 92.3 KTAR's Jim Cross rode along recently with Pinal County Sheriff's Deputy Scott Abernathy on patrol. Pinal County is the size of Connecticut. Most of the county is ranches and wide-open desert. "They'll come out here and then there's hundreds of thousands of ways they can come up through here," said Abernathy, looking out over the barren land. Smugglers fear very little and that includes law enforcement, Abernathy said. "Ten or 15 years ago, a lot of coyotes and smugglers, they would go the other way and sneak around. Now, they don't care. They don't care if you see them." A rancher agreed to talk to Cross, but only on the conditions that he not be taped and that his name not be used because he fears retaliation from smugglers. On many occasions, the rancher said illegal immigrants have kicked in the windows of his home, cut his barbed wire fences, and held him in the gunsights of an AK-47. The brutality of smugglers knows no bounds, Abernathy said. "If they think they're going to get caught or whatever, the coyotes (human smugglers) will just leave them. Most of the females who come across will usually get raped, several times."...more

Prison chief allegedly sent inmates to conduct Mexico birthday party massacre

When gunmen burst into a private birthday party on July 18 and opened fired on guests, killing 17, the attackers were initially suspected to be members of one of Mexico's drug gangs, which have killed thousands of people in escalating violence over the past several years. Nobody could have guessed they were jail inmates on assignment from their prison director. It turns out that the gunmen behind the July 18 Mexico birthday party massacre had already been incarcerated for crimes in Mexico's drug wars. Prison guards reportedly lent vehicles and weapons to the inmates to carry out a 'revenge attack' in the northern city of Torreon. Afterward, the inmates drove back to their cells in the nearby city of Gomez Palacio. "According to witnesses, the inmates were allowed to leave with authorization of the prison director ... to carry out instructions for revenge attacks using official vehicles and using guards' weapons for executions," Ricardo Najera, a spokesman from the attorney general's office, revealed Sunday. The attack may have been motivated by rival drug trafficking gangs, Mr. Najera said, though innocent people were among the victims. The prison director and security guard, among others, have been put under house arrest...more

17 Slain in Mexico

Nine people were slain in the western state of Sinaloa, a spokesman for the state Attorney General’s Office told Efe Monday. Four bodies were discovered inside a burned-out SUV in Culiacan, the state capital, the spokesman said, adding that 22 shell casings from an AK-47 assault rifle were collected at the scene. In the town of Navolato, four people who had been kidnapped elsewhere were found shot to death near a technical training school. Another person turned up dead in the community of El Quemadito. News of the slayings in Guerrero and Sinaloa followed word that a dozen people were killed over the weekend in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico’s murder capital. Police found the bodies of five people who had been gunned down inside a hair salon in the northern border city, the Chihuahua state Attorney General’s Office said. Police homicide unit officers also found three bodies and a wounded man at a house in Juarez, located just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. The wounded man was taken to a hospital, where he died a short time later. Three other people were killed in separate incidents, the Chihuahua AG’s office said. Ciudad Juarez has witnessed more than 5,000 murders since 2008 and this year’s death toll stands at more than 1,600...more

Concerns in Juárez climb as bombing threat grows

The threat of more deadly car bombings like the one earlier this month has forced Juárez authorities to take measures to protect police stations, and authorities reported finding more explosives in Chihuahua on Wednesday. The bomb, made from about 22 pounds of Tovex, a water gel explosive commonly used as a replacement for dynamite in mining, was detonated by remote control. Authorities on Wed nesday found 55 pounds of the explosive in the mountains between Chihuahua and Sonora states following a shootout with gunmen. Officials did not say if the explosives were bound for Juárez. In response to the bombing, Juárez officials last week increased security at police stations and prohibited parking next to the buildings. A police spokesman said the identifications of people are checked and vehicles are inspected when entering the parking lots of stations, some of which have sandbags piled outside like bunkers...more

Sen. Kerry Predicts ‘Ice-Free Arctic' In '5 or 10 Years’

Speaking at a town hall-style meeting promoting climate change legislation on Thursday, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) predicted there will be “an ice-free Arctic” in "five or 10 years." “The arctic ice is disappearing faster than was predicted,” Kerry said. “And instead of waiting until 2030 or whenever it was to have an ice-free Arctic, we’re going to have one in five or 10 years.” However, the Web site of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says: “Using the observed 2007/2008 summer sea ice extents as a starting point, computer models predict that the Arctic could be nearly sea ice free in summertime within 30 years.” NOAA cites as its source on Arctic sea ice a study published in the April 3, 2009 edition of Geophysical Research Letters by J.E. Overland and Muyin Wang. Kerry’s remarks came during the second of three panels at an event sponsored by Clean Energy Works, an environmentalist coalition that brought supporters of to Washington, D.C., to show what it called “broad support” for a “clean energy and climate bill.” Along with Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, Kerry is the sponsor of the American Power Act, a bill that would cap carbon emissions in the United States in the interest of preventing climate change...more

Fight brews over drilling watchdog

Formerly the Minerals Management Service (MMS), the Obama administration has renamed it the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement. Plans are to further split the agency up into three separate divisions, all under the Department of Interior. The idea is to remove an apparent conflict of interest - charging one agency with both ensuring safety and maximizing oil revenues for the federal government. But the plan is drawing fire from nearly everyone involved. Environmentalists say the reforms don't go far enough. Offshore drillers say they are not being consulted. Government watchdogs say they lack transparency. And Congress says information has been slow in coming...more