How a Popular Hunting App and a Conservation Group Forced a Public-Access Issue

Sample OnX map.

An article on "corner-cutting," public access, and whether landowners own airpace over property corners makes it to the New York Times.

I am giving you a link to an archived copy so that you won't have to deal with the paywall: "It's Public Land. But the Public Can't Reach It."

Not bad reporting, but I bet Hal Herring is mighty pissed off over having a quote edited to make him sound anti-hunter.

First, the app:

This was the “game changer,” he has said. By collating state and county data and putting it on a microchip, [OnX founder Eric] Siegfried turned the project in the scrapbooking room into a company that just received more than $87 million from investors and that understands the American landscape arguably better than the government does.

It turned OnX almost overnight into a popular tool for the nation’s 15 million hunters.
In answering the question of who owns what, OnX helped bring to light how much public land — often highly coveted — is not reachable by the public. That’s because private landowners control access.

Enter some Wyoming hunters who "corner-crossed" from one section of public land to another to access a highly desirable but "land-locked" public land for elk hunting. They were arrested for trespass, acquited, but then sued by the landowner, "Fred Eshelman, a drug company founder from North Carolina."

The "boots on the ground" conservation group Backcountry Hunters & Anglers got involved.

Backcountry Hunters & Anglers helped the Missouri hunters find lawyers, rallied its 35,000 members for support and started a GoFundMe page, which has raised more than $110,000 to pay the hunters’ legal bills

“What judge, jury or person with two firing brain cells is going to say that crossing that airspace is worth $7 million?” [BHA's Wyoming co-chair] said. “That’s not going to happen. It’s absurd.”

Mr. Eshelman did not respond to an interview request for this article. Discussing the case in an email statement to The Wall Street Journal this month, he said “forcible trespass” was a safety issue and could affect the property value.

If OnX supercharged the question of who gets to go where — though the company declined to take a side in the case — Backcountry Hunters & Anglers gave it an influential platform.

 Read the whole thing and stay tuned.

Blog Stew—But You Had Better Bring a Gallon of Water

• The subtitle of Southwestern writer Craig Child's book The Secret Knowledge of Water is "There are Two Ways to Die in the Desert: Thirst and Drowning."

For this Mesa County mountain biker, it was the former. And his would-be rescuers were not in much better shape.

• Wyoming sheep rancher and author Cat Urbigkit deals with a documentary film crew: 

The last time a film crew came to the ranch, a videographer tried to follow behind a guardian dog while holding a large piece of recording equipment low to the ground, getting a dog-level view. The dog, Panda, had barked and warned the guy to back off, but when he persisted, I had to quickly step in as the enraged dog wheeled around to take out the equipment.

This visit worked out better, with cameos by the livestock guardian dogs.

• Thanks to legislative changes, the medical (not recreational) cannabis market in Colorado is cratering, with businesses closing down.

Medical marijuana sales in Colorado are down by 43% in the first four months of 2022 compared to the same span in 2021 . . .  According to the state’s Department of Revenue, wholesale prices and overall sales volume have gone down and overall sales volume has declined for the 11th month in a row.

Wolverines! They Might Be Coming Back to Colorado

Wolverine in Glacier Nat. Park (NPS)

Fictional southern Colorado high schools may no longer be accused of using an almost non-existent animal (in this state) as their mascot.

The last confirmed wolverine sighting — and it was a rare one—  was in 2009. A tagged male wolverine left northwestern Wyoming, wandered intp Colordo, and then headed for North Dakota.

Indeed, from his starting point near Jackson Hole, M56 took less than a month to arrive in the Centennial State, where his kind was last reported in 1919.

The venture confirmed what was believed of wolverines’ tendency to cover vast ground. Still, researchers were astonished by the speed. And more than that, they marveled at watching in real time the animal of mythological lore that had always evaded their view. (Recent estimates suggest low densities, small numbers in big places — between 250 and 350 moving across rugged, remote fringes of the Lower 48 states.)

Colorado Parks & Wildlife (back then the Colorado Division of Wildlife) formulated some reintroduction plans, but did not carry through. Now, wolverines are back on the table, so to speak. (You would not want a live one on your table.)

Wolverine reintroduction has not come up in Colorado Wildlife Commission meetings for more than a decade. The agency began a wolverine reintroduction process in 2010 and created “an extensive plan for how reintroduction could be accomplished,” said CPW spokesman Travis Duncan. 

Recently, the agency has been reviewing that plan and process to find possible update and what remains workable, Duncan said. 

“We will be working with a wolverine expert who is going to take on updating and providing greater detail on a wolverine restoration and management plan,” he said. “The contract isn’t in place yet, but we hope to be able to say more on this soon.”

Meanwhile, in Lewistown, Montana, urban wolverines? We're not there yet. 

UPDATE: And in Utah this month, a wolverine killed or wounded 18 sheep in one morning before being captured, radio-collared, and released.

Fictional Game Wardens and the "Natural Resources Mystery Novel"

I have just started reading Above the Waterfall by Ron Rash.

Rash, a poet and novelist, has deep roots in western North Carolina. I chose this book because I like "natural resource mystery novels," and the protagonists are a newly retired county sheriff and a state park ranger. 

The honorary parents of the "natural-resources mystery novel" might be Tony Hillerman  (1925–2008) and Nevada Barr. Hillerman's two Navajo tribal policemen, Lt. Jim Leaphorn and Officer (later Sgt.) Jim Chee, deal with all sort of crimes, but a percentage of them involve people wanting to exploit something about the Big Reservation—archaeological sites, minerals, whatever. (His daughter, Anne, carries on the series.)

Barr (b. 1952) worked in theatre and television before taking a job as a seasonal National Park Service ranger at Guadalupe Mountains National Park in Texas, the site of her first mystery novel, Track of the Cat (1993), which introduced protagonist Anna Pigeon, a Park Service law-enforcement ranger.

All I can say about Ranger Pigeon is that she is extraordinarily physically resilient. Any actual NPS ranger with her list of injuries — all logged here — would have retired on full disability five or six books ago. Wikipedia sums up Barr's plots: "The books in the series take place in various national parks where Pigeon solves murders that are often related to natural resource issues."


So it would seem that natural-resources crime would be perfect for mystery writers. It does not always work out that way.

Wyoming writer C. J. Box created state game warden Joe Pickett, who first appeared in Open Season (2001), followed by eighteen more. As the series moves on, Joe Pickett quickly spends less and less time catching poachers, etc., and more being a sort of special investigator for the governor of Wyoming, although that gig ends when the governor leaves office.

A typical plot involves Joe getting in over his head facing a family of criminals, drug-cartel sicarios, or some other baddies, only to be rescued by his own personal "noble savage," the mystic falconer/special-ops veteran Nate Romanowski, who appears suddenly to save the day, eliminating bad guys with his .454 Casull revolver by shooting offhand from half a mile away.

Box can write a tight thriller — the Cassie Dewell novels, starting with The Highway, are better-plotted and less repetitious than the Joe Pickett series.

Maine is not Wyoming, and Paul Doiron's series about Maine warden Mike Bowditch seem more rooted in nature and culture than Joe Pickett's Wyoming.  Maybe that is because Doiron used to edit Down East, "the magazine of Maine." The series begins with The Poacher's Son (Mike, of course)

The next one I need to read is The Precipice. Here is the synopsis:

When two female hikers disappear in the Hundred Mile Wilderness — the most remote stretch along the entire Appalachian Trail — Maine game warden Mike Bowditch joins the desperate search to find them. 

Hope turns to despair after two unidentified corpses are discovered, their bones picked clean by coyotes. Do the bodies belong to the missing hikers? And were they killed by the increasingly aggressive wild dogs?

Soon all of Maine is gripped by a fear of deadly coyote attacks. But Bowditch has his doubts. His new girlfriend, wildlife biologist Stacey Stevens, insists the scavengers are being wrongly blamed. She believes a murderer may be hiding in the offbeat community of hikers, hippies, and woodsmen at the edge of the Hundred Mile Wilderness. When Stacey herself disappears along the Appalachian Trail, the hunt for answers becomes personal.

Real police work is bureaucratic — and so is being a game warden or park ranger. But because they so often work alone, far from back-up, they make appealing protagonists with a dose of "What would I do out there?"

Bird Festival, Cattle-Rustling, and Elk in Beetle-Kill Forests

• Plan now for the Mountain Plover Festival.

• You’ll get the chance to mingle with farmers and ranchers who choose to live in the local community and learn about their lifestyle.
• Eat home-style food at every meal. Most meal are prepared by the community non-profit organizations.
• Saturday evening includes a chuck wagon dinner with authentic Western entertainment.
• Learn about conservation practices and history of the area.
• Tour Private Land that would normally not be accessible.
• Make new friends! Here's the website.

Sounds perfect if you are allergic to cities.  

• Cattle-rustling still happens in 21st-century Colorado.

But even keeping a close eye on livestock sales doesn’t prevent Colorado ranchers from experiencing their share of losses. Annual reports of missing or stolen livestock — the vast majority being cattle — average a little over 100, with losses ranging from a little over 400 to more than 650 head over the past four years. But that’s where the numbers get a little fuzzy.

• Pine beetles and the fungus they carry have killed huge amounts of lodgepole pine forest in the northern Rockies. As the dead trees drop their needles and become just standing trunks, more grass comes up between them. So that would be good for elk, right?

The evidence, however, is mixed. Some species do benefit, but not much the elk.

Looking at elk daytime use during the summer in Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest in south-central Wyoming, [University of Wyoming researcher Bryan G.] Lamont’s team expected to find mixed results. The loss of canopy would likely mean a loss in thermal cover, and more downed trees would make it difficult for the elk to move, forcing them to expend more energy. On the other hand, with new understory growth, elk would have more vegetation to forage. They expected elk might avoid the densest areas of downed trees but take advantage of the forage in other places.

Instead, elk tended to avoid beetle-killed areas overall, resulting in much less forest habitat that the elk use to keep cool during summer days. Beetle kill, researchers found, was different for the elk in important ways from wildfires or other disturbances.

 Time on the elk's side, however, as the dead trees start to fall and decay. Read the whole article here.

Heading onto the Prairie

Northbound, breaking free of the Colorado Front Range corridor

I don't drive Interstate 25 north of Denver very often, but when I do, it reminds me more and more of Interstate 95 in New Jersey. Like how many shopping malls can there be? Or how about RV dealerships the size of Army posts?

There comes a time, though, when you leave all that behind. It's like Fort Collins just sucks three-fourths of the vehicles off the road.

I stopped briefly at the Sierra Trading Post mother ship in Cheyenne for a cappuccino and to browse the discounted hiking pants. Lots of great deals for short, tubby guys there! Bought some socks.

Somewhere south of Newcastle, Wyoming

I continued north on US 85 along the western edge of the Black Hills, Inyan Kara mountain, and so on. One of my favorite drives.

Tomorrow, some serious prairie melancholy.

Bears Are Hungry in the Fall

Grizzly bears (US Fish and Wildlife Service)

• Tennessee: A black bear killed a man in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Some confusion ensues.

Park officials have shot and killed the bear associated with the investigation into a man's death.

Spokeswoman Julena Campbell said it happened around 9:45 Sunday morning [Sept. 9].

A news release Wednesday said the National Park Service had euthanized a male bear after finding it near a man's body in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. On Friday, the park said rangers actually had not yet found and killed the bear.

• Wyoming: A bowhunter and his guide were attacked by grizzly bears in the Teton Wilderness; the guide was killed.

As initially reported, a grizzly bear attack on an elk hunter and his guide wounded the client hunter Corey Chubon, from Florida, and left the guide, Mark Uptain, dead. His body was recovered yesterday from the scene in Turpin Meadows at approximately 1:15pm.

After interviews and visiting the scene, Undersheriff Matt Carr said Uptain was rushed by a grizzly bear in “a very aggressive manner.”

“They were field dressing this elk. They were in thick timber and this bear was on them very quickly,” Carr said. “There was apparently no time to react.”

UPDATE: More information on the incident. Apparently bear spray was used.

• Oregon: A woman hiking was killed by a mountain lion in the Mount Hood area.

The hiker who went missing on Mount Hood in late August and was found dead at the bottom of a ravine Monday was likely killed by a cougar, authorities said — a shocking twist in the missing persons case. 

The body of Diana Bober, 55, was found Monday [Sept. 10] at the bottom of a 200-foot embankment on the famous Oregon mountain's Hunchback Trail, the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office said Tuesday.

We'll Build a Sheriff's Office, and We'll Get Texans to Pay for It.

A friend was driving into the county a couple of months ago on a certain road, and I warned him to s-l-o-w  d-o-w-n about about mile marker 55, because that road is the sheriff's favorite speed trap.

The sheriff actually said in a recent meeting that traffics fines pay for one deputy's salary, not that he has a lot of deputies.

And Texans hurrying up from the south to get to the ski areas pay a good share of that.

According to the county weekly, these Texas communities were recently represented in our revenue stream:

• Pilot Point
• Hays (County?)
• Fort Worth
• Cypress
• Galveston
• Trophy Club

Trophy Club? To get there, do you go through Trophy House and Trophy Wife?

Of course, our little county is nothing compared to the effort that Wyoming law enforcement makes during the annual Border War. I heard that even Sheriff Longmire was down there writing tickets.

Fighting for the Flock — The Life of Livestock Guardian Dogs

“Where the Dogs Are, the Wolves Cannot Be” (A Turkish shepherd) 

I grew up with hunting dogs, and I knew a few herding dogs. I knew about the world of little dogs riding in big motorhomes, the world of mutts who went everywhere, and the world of generic black-and-white farm collies who never sat paw in the main family house but still had full, purposeful dog lives.

But there is another dog world about which I knew little, and that is the world where dogs fight wolves.

Cat and Jim Urbigkit raise sheep on private land and public-land leases in western Wyoming. Living south of Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, their flocks must contend not just with “mesopredators” such as foxes and coyotes, but “apex predators” as well: wolves, black bears, and grizzlies, all enjoying some degree of legal protection. Nor do Cat and Jim wish to exterminate those wolves and grizzlies, merely to keep them off the sheep.

Rena was there to meet them when the wolves leapt into the pasture. One hundred thirty pounds of determined Akbash sheep guardian dog, she met the wolves head-on, brawling in the distance from the herd, in the darkness, in the rain. When the wolves attacked, Rena could face one, as the other attacked her rear. The wolves sunk their teeth into her haunches, nearly severing her tail at its based and biting her tender underside. Fighting for both her own life as well as the lives on her sheep, Rena battled on, keeping the wolves from reaching the herd.

Rena was the subject of her own book, The Guardian Team: On the Job With Rena and Roo, Roo being a guardian burro (effective against coyotes but not bears or wolves).

A few years ago the Urbigkits received funding from the state of Wyoming to study livestock guardian dogs in other countries, including Spain, Turkey, Bulgaria, Lesotho, and Central Asia — all places with long traditions of using guardian dogs in addition to herding dogs.

These dogs grow up alongside the sheep. They must guard the sheep against predators, yet not be too hostile to humans and other dogs. It is a difficult balance.

In her new book Brave and Loyal: An Illustrated Celebration of Livestock Guardian Dogs, Cat Urbigkit writes not just for the livestock producers who could use guardian dogs, but for anyone who might encounter them on the range — or for anyone who likes reading about dogs. You hear not from them, but from the herders and dog breeders (usually the same people) of Bulgaria, Turkey, etc.

She told one interviewer,

“The thing I liked most was that I got to meet Spanish mastiff dogs in Spain, and I wasn’t expecting how effective or large they are,” she says. “The dogs are very effective against wolves, and we visited ranches in central Spain that had bands of sheep living with packs of wolves on the same ranch. When you have 11 Spanish mastiff dogs with a thousand head of sheep and very few losses, that’s an amazing record.”

Finally, if you are out on the range and encounter guardian dogs, keep your distance. If you are bicycling, dismount. The dogs (and wildlife) regard a bicycle as a predator — it is quiet, fast-moving, and has big eyes in front (sunglasses, goggles, and they may react appropriately.

How to Write a Northern Rockies Mystery Novel

After reading a lot of mystery novels by Peter Bowen and Keith McCafferty (Montana) plus Craig Johnson and C. J. Box (Wyoming), I have assembled enough ideas for a decent undergradate paper with a simple compare-and-contrast methology.

Although her novels are set in Wyoming, Margaret Coel lives in Colorado. Still, much of what I will say applies to her works too.

1. The Protagonist. The idea of the "wounded  detective" is common. Fictional dectectives are often divorced, widowed, deeply depressed (especially in Scandanavia), using or recovering from too much booze & drugs, or fired from a job in law-enforcement, among other possibilities. Coel's Catholic mission priest, John O'Malley, a recovering alcoholic, is isolated by both his clerical vocation and his location on the Wind River Reservation.

Often they are marginalized in some respect.  Bowen's Metis brand inspector-deputy sheriff, Gabriel Du Pré, is Métis, descended from the French/indigenous mixed-blood ethnic group who originated around the Great Lakes, but some of whom moved to eastern Montana in the 1860s–70s, before and after the Red River Rebellion. Father O'Malley is a white priest on the reservation, while Box's Joe Pickett is frequently in conflict with his superiors in the Wyoming Game & Fish Department.

2. The Milieu. A low population is essential. Gabriel Du Pré operates in a fictional locale somewhere north of Miles City. Johnson's Sheriff Longmire patrols the thinly populated fictional Absaroka County, somewhere in northern Wyoming, not far from the district where Box's game warden protagonist, Joe Pickett, enforced wildlife laws.

The Wind River Reservation's population exceeds 40,000, thinly spread, but you do not feel their presence in the novels. Sean Shanahan, McCafferty's artist-fishing guide amateur detective, pops into Ennis, West Yellowstone, and other towns, but spends more time on the rivers.

All seem allergic to cities. Gabriel Du Pré hates going to Bozeman, while Joe Pickett regards Cheyenne as just slightly better than Mordor. 

3. The "Animal Helper." Although several protagonists often have a dog riding with them, what I mean here is the old folkloric theme of the animal who establishes a special relationship with the hero — for example, the hero is a hunter pursuing a fox, but he spares the fox who then protects him or helps him to secure wealth.

I extend the term "animal helper" to include people who are bonded to the hero somehow yet also appear to be closer to nature — even feral. (The Hollywood equivalent is the Magical Negro, another version of the Noble Savage.)

• Gabriel Du Pré has Beneetse, an elderly Crow (?) shaman who appears and disappears mysteriously and who brings past and present together. (His name probably comes from someone mentioned in Dan Cushman's The Great North Trail, one of Bowen's source books.)
• Joe Pickett's feral helper is the falconer Nate Romanowski, a mysterious ex-special operations soldier who lives in isolated places and has no visible means of support, but who pops up in the nick of time of save Joe, dropping bad guys at 800 yards offhand with a .454 Casull revolver or something similar. For a time Romanowski lives with an Arapaho woman until she is murdered.
• Father O'Malley has Vicky Holden, the Arapaho lawyer who connects him with the reservation and its people.
• Sheriff Walt Longmire's closest friend is Henry Standing Bear, a Cheyenne. Although Lou Diamond Phillips ably portrays Standing Bear in the TV series, in the books Standing Bear is more like Beneetse — in touch with ghosts and ancestors and also seemingly able to materialize, like Nate Romanowski, when Longmire is in desperate straits.
• McCafferty's detective, Sean Stranahan, has no Indian helper, but possibly the fishing outfitter  Rainbow Sam, Sean's sometime employer, could fit the bill, for by comparison to the past-haunted hero, Sam is hard-drinking, pleasure-seeking, and present-oriented.

4. The Plots. Many of these are recognizable from the last thirty years' news. At least two of these authors have used each one of these.

• The Cult. Clearly inspired by the Church Universal and Triumphant's operation north of Yellowstone Park in the 1980s, this plot has some mysterious but well-financed group building a headquarters in an isolated area. Murder usually ensues. See also "The Anti-Government Group." C. J. Box in particular  shows some degree of sympathy with small-L libertarian types, however, which leads to some plot twists.
• The Evil Energy Company. Enough said. See also "Evil Rich People."
• The Scheming Archaeologist. No, Tony Hillerman did not own this one. Suppose that an archaeologist had a major, career-capping find that somehow places him in conflict with the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act. . .
• Ecoterrorists and Animal Rights Extremists. They mean well, but people get hurt and they are trying to shut down the struggling local ranchers.  
• The Dinosaur. Inspired by the story of the T-Rex skeleton called Black Hills Sue, this one involves a spectacular fossil find with disputed ownership — various people want to profit from it. It puts the "skull" in skullduggery.
• The Outsiders.  All these people want to ruin Wyoming or Montana, and the hero fights a rear-guard action. Peter Bowen is the strongest here, sending a message to his readers that might as well read, "You readers are a bunch of Subaru-driving, Patagonia-wearing recreationists who just ought to keep the hell out of eastern Montana. Don't come here. Don't look for a real Gabriel Du Pré. Just stay on Interstate 90 and keep going to Bozeman. Oh yeah, buy my books."

Well, there you have it. Just add more examples and analysis. A guaranteed A-.

Transhumance Today

From northwestern Wyoming, Cat Urbigkit posts a brief video of her family's sheep coming down from summer range. The dogs, of course, are at the end.

She writes,

This video demonstrates transhumance — the season movement of livestock and people, something that occurs throughout the American West. Most range flocks include about 1,000 ewes, accompanied by their lambs.

This Wyoming flock is owned by a family ranch, one of 600 range outfits in the West. Last week was the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, and this was my family's way of celebrating what wilderness means to us — cheers to man and beast!

All the dogs with black coloration are herding dogs (5 or 6 with this herd). There were 7-9 livestock guardian dogs with this bunch as well - both white and some red-coloration (representing Akbash and Central Asian Ovcharka lineages).

Wyoming Mountain Living—More than 2,000 Years Ago

Archaeologists find a series of Archaic mountain villages in Wyoming, and the dates lead them to wonder if Numic-speaking people (ancestors of the Comanche, Ute, Shoshone and Northern Paiute) migrated from the Rockies to California, instead of the other way around, as had been assumed.

It reminded me of a trip that I made to the Windy Gap site in Colorado's Middle Park back in my newspaper-reporter days. It dated back at least 5,000 years, and the unusual feature was that it showed evidence of a hut with wattle-and-daub walls. The elevation, as I recall, is at least 9,000 feet.

Wattle-and-daub construction has been found around the world, but its presence suggests at least semi-permanent seasonal occupation, as opposed to building a quickie shelter or small tipi for a hunting camp.

High altitude living probably was not a winter proposition — Fraser, Colo., near Windy Gap, used to claim it was the "Icebox of the Nation." (So have some other towns elsewhere.) The Wyoming sites were probably too chilly too, if one had the option of going lower down.

What Kind of Water Year Was It?

Click to enlarge

Hydrologists measure "water years" from October through August, so this diagram shows the year that just ended.

Rena and the Wolves

I am on the road. So go read Wyoming sheep rancher Cat Urbigkit's story of her livestock guardian dog Rena's battle with a wolf pack.

Blog Stew in the Petroglyph Bowl

¶ An article on the possibly oldest petroglyphs in North America associates them chronologically with a set of human remains known as Spirit Cave Man. The interesting thing is that Spirit Cave Man (like Kennewick Man) does not appear to be an American Indian but looked more Caucasoid, perhaps like the Ainu of Japan and Far Eastern Russia.

¶ An update on the "North(ern) Colorado" secession movement. It's going to the voters in some counties.

¶ A recent spate of bear attacks. Bear spray was used in Yellowstone, but maybe not quickly enough?

¶ Couple in Divide successfully start a goat cheese business. The site is the former Alpine Lakes Resort north of town.

"We did not intend to make it on this level," Bob McMillan said. "It started as a harmless retirement thing that got out of control."

Mange, Distemper Hit Yellowstone Wolves

An online Scientific American article says that both canine distemper and sarcoptic mange are affecting wolf populations in Yellowstone National Park and surrounding areas.

I could not help but think of the unlucky coyote pup we transported last Wednesday. It seems likely that the distemper caused him to fall behind, be abandoned, and be discovered by a person who wanted to help him.

On the Road: Newcastle, Wyoming

Donna's Main Street Diner — the classic knotty pine-and-deer heads Western cafe.

What did I eat? Some kind of scrambled up eggs-potatoes-meat combination.

Coal trains rumbled past the motel all night, but whereas highway traffic bothers me, trains do not so much. When I was a college student, a friend and I rented a house in Portland, Oregon, of which we said, "The Southern Pacific runs through the kitchen."

The trains kept me awake for one night, but never again thereafter.

Nourished at Donna's, I set out for a day poking around in the Black Hills.

Wolves Expanding Territory in Wyoming.

More than thirty wolf packs now live in Wyoming outside Yellowstone National Park—a report with statistics on population and livestock depredation from Cat Urbigkit's Wolf Watch.

Federal Appellate Court Upholds the 2001 Roadless Rule

Doesn't enough of Wyoming look like this already? (Source: The Wilderness Society)

A federal appellate court has upheld the 2001 Roadless Rule on national forests in a case brought by the state of Wyoming.

The state tried to argue that by protecting roadless areas — which is a Good Thing for animals like elk — the Forest Service was creating "wilderness."

And "wilderness," in the legal sense, must be created by Congress, not the executive branch.

But the judges disagreed:

In a 120-page decision, the court said that full wilderness protection was far deeper than the mere banning of roads in certain places and that the Forest Service had broad jurisdiction in setting the balance of uses on the lands that it manages.

“The Forest Service did not usurp Congressional authority because the roadless rule did not establish de facto wilderness,” the court said in a decision written by Judge Jerome A. Holmes, who was nominated to the court by President George W. Bush.

This was the Tenth Circuit Court in Denver—the Ninth Circuit had reached a similar conclusion two years ago.

I am no legal scholar, but I think that as long as the different federal appellate courts agree, the Supreme Court is less likely to be interested in such a case. Qualified legal experts are welcome to enlighten me. But Wyoming could always try another appeal.

The Best Shower in Yellowstone

Gables at the Old Faithful Inn, completed in 1904, Yellowstone National Park

OK, you have been camping for a few nights. Maybe someone wants to wash her hair. But most of the campgrounds do not have showers. And the rivers (except the Firehole) are pretty cold.

Go to the Old Faithful Inn. You could go to the hotel in Mammoth too, but let's face it, the Old Faithful Inn is the most tradition-soaked, parkitecture-perfect building in Yellowstone.

Bring a bag with a towel, soap, shampoo, etc., unless you want to pay extra.

Walk up to the registration desk and tell the clerk that you wish to take a shower. The clerk will collect $3.45 and direct you up the creaking stairs to a restroom with shower stalls in the back.

The stalls are clean, tiled, and have windows that open to views like the one above. The shower is an old-style pierced disk high overhead. It feels wonderful.

Once clean and dry, stop at the Mezzanine Bar for a Snake River Lager, then carry it outside to one of the benches facing the Old Faithful Geyser and watch for it to erupt.