Daily Wilderness News Clips

The first time they sat down together, they brought their agendas with them. Their goals were rigid. Gridlock was expected.

As one group member confessed, talking about collaboration is the easy part. When it comes time to actually give something up - to sacrifice something important - collaboration often goes out the door.

Yet the players at the table that day survived the spirited session. By talking things through, the horsemen, mountain bikers and conservationists realized they had more in common than not. Their goals, while slightly different, weren't that far apart.

A low carpet of greens and browns helps soften the landscape, the erosion that's carved steep wedges leading to gravel-filled creeks, where chalky waters flow like a melted vanilla malt.

Above the ever-present rush of the wind, nature resonates.

A bumblebee stumbles into the air from a butter-colored prickly pear blossom. A lone black-tailed prairie dog chatters away at interlopers. A prairie chicken bursts from its cover in a manic frenzy of squawk and feathers.

From a low branch on a lone cottonwood, a Western meadowlark sings.

Sen. Jon Tester reported progress on his Forest Jobs and Recreation bill, affirmed support for Secure Rural Schools, and again tried to quash the rumor about a federal land lockup in Montana. 

He made the remarks during his monthly teleconference with Montana newspaper reporters on Thursday morning. 

A bill that would protect some of Colorado's most picturesque mountains cleared committee this summer and will head for a full vote of the House soon.

The San Juan Mountains Wilderness Act introduced by Rep. John Salazar, D-Manassa, proposes to permanently protect 60,000 acres in Southwest Colorado, designating half of them as wilderness. The area includes the slopes of Mount Sneffels and Wilson Peak, two of the state's "fourteeners."

Photo by F. Andrew Taylor

Sunrise resident Terri Robertson stood on a hill at the end of miles of dirt road with the sort of broad grin that can't be faked. Below her a trail led to bright orange rocks that hid little canyons with petroglyphs and fields of tiny flowers that covered the harsh flinty surface with a brightly colored living carpet.

"This," she said, "is my favorite place in the world."

This summer, as part of an ongoing project to document and preserve wilderness, the Forest Service is sending staff, scientists, and volunteers into the field to collect data.

In the first of a two-part series, KCAW's Lily Mihalik 
accompanied one such crew into the West Chicagof-Yakobi Wilderness.

Sen. Tim Johnson, D-S.D., said he is willing to meet with ranchers to discuss their concerns about their grazing activities on federal grasslands that would be part of a 48,000 wilderness area near the Badlands National Park.

A dozen steps out of her SUV, Cheryl Warren stops to collect the view of Indian Creek valley below.

It stretches for miles to the south and west in a mix of deep-green grass and tawny humps and buttes decorated with cedar trees and flowering yucca and cactus.

"I love this," Warren says. "It just never fails to blow me away."

The Custer woman is one of many who love the view from a precipitous promontory known among frequent visitors as "Cardiac Hill," a few miles west of Scenic.

The farthest you can get from a road in the continental U.S. is 22 miles, in a deep corner of Yellowstone National Park. In the Southeast, the farthest is around five miles-in places like Tennessee's Upper River Bald Wilderness Study Area.

It's an idea that's been in the making for three-quarters of a century, but the creation of an international park along the U.S.-Mexico border is still nothing more than a notion.

The latest obstacle: security concerns stemming from the recent surge in violence in Mexico and the border region.

While proponents of the park say its creation would enhance security along the border, even they acknowledge that violence south of the border has made the concept of an international park a more difficult sell.