The natural gas debate continues  
CRESTED BUTTE – Is natural gas the bridge fuel that will deliver us from the myriad problems of coal? Or does it have hellacious consequences, too?

That’s the debate going on across the land. In Gunnison County, the debate has to do with more on-the-ground consequences in the area north of Kebler Pass. This is on the far side of the Elk Range from Crested Butte. County officials have been drawing up regulations. One drilling company promises “perpetual litigation” if the regulations are adopted, while another company has had a more restrained reaction, reports the Crested Butte News.

In Steamboat Springs, The Today newspaper recently commended a drilling company for its willingness to meet with local officials and explain their plans. Routt County, like Gunnison County, has been trying to draw up regulations, although Colorado’s state government has insisted it has the over-reaching authority in regulating drilling.

In Telluride, natural gas was much in the air at Mountainfilm over Memorial Day weekend. Sandra Steingraber, a poet and biologist from Massachusetts, was the subject of one film, called “Living Downstream.” It’s about her investigation into the more than 100,000 toxic chemicals that have been introduced, with little understanding, into the environment.

Peter Shelton, a scribe for The Watch, reports that Steingraber’s face was tight with anger as she expressed her dismay about hydrofracturing, the process used to rattle loose sedimentary formations to extract the natural gas.

Writing about the same festival, Rob Schultheis described Armageddon-type forces at work. “Who dreamed up this ‘civilization’ in which energy is god, and everything else – beauty, dignity, wildness, space, freedom and life itself – is shoveled into Moloch’s furnace to keep the unholy fires burning?”

Death shines light on forest-dwellers
BRECKENRIDGE – People for decades have lived in tents and makeshift dwellings in the forests around Breckenridge, Frisco and other towns of Summit County. But this spring, one of the forest-dwellers was murdered, and police accuse another forest-dweller of the crime.

The death put the spotlight on this largely invisible population. Law enforcement officials tell the Summit Daily News that perhaps hundreds of people live in forested settings, some of them through winter months, emerging during the day to jobs or to libraries, to tap Internet connections.

Tensions rise as  risk of fire escalates
GLENWOOD SPRINGS – Colorado’s just one lighting strike, one careless cigarette butt, away from more uproar and catastrophic fires.
Last week, a new map was issued that shows the drought intensity. Vail, Aspen and Steamboat Springs are all overlaid with a bright-red blanket that shows “extreme drought,” the fourth highest of five levels.

That’s rare for June, when mountain meadows are typically emerald green. This year they tend toward Thanksgiving brown.

“I cannot ever remember ever hoping for rain – but a few days of steady sprinkles would help us all a lot,” wrote Mark Reaman in the Crested Butte News.

In Steamboat, the Yampa River was expected this week to be reduced to a trickle too low for kayaking, reported Steamboat Today.

Colorado already has one major forest fire, in the foothills west of Fort Collins. It’s the largest in the state’s recorded history and tops in number of homes destroyed. One person has died in the blaze.

Mindful of the danger, one homeowner in Red Cliff, near Vail, has been removing dead grasses from around his home, while others in the town are investing in sprinkling systems.

In Aspen, city officials announced free assessments of properties identified as being in high-risk areas. If homeowners need to cut or trim trees and bushes, the city will chip them for free. Hurdles in the city’s bureaucratic process for tree removal have been lowered or eliminated altogether if those trees are deemed a fire hazard, reports the Aspen Daily News.

Winds have been almost constant. “It was like the Dust Bowl yesterday,” said Jan Fedrizzi, of Eagle.

She and her husband, Gerald, have a cabin at 8,400 feet above the town of Glenwood Springs. Keenly aware of the fire risk, they used cement board siding in construction, instead of the typical logs. They have also diligently removed vegetation around their house and are now prepared to spend $2,900 to remove two large, diseased Douglas firs near the cabin.

One man’s trash, another’s treasure
OURAY – One person’s history is another guy’s trash. That seems to be the case in the San Juan Mountains, where the rotting remains of an old railroad depot between Ouray and Silverton were recently bulldozed.

The crushed wood crushed railroad historians. But Don Paulson told The Telluride Watch that he had refrained from the impulse to restore the depot to make it a Disneylan vely new event that has been getting national attention from the likes of the New York Times and National Public Radio.
 
Wolf keeps his distance for now
JASPER, Alberta – Eventually, somebody’s going to get hurt, say officials in Jasper National Park.

That assessment was uttered after a wolf chased a dog that had been running ahead of a woman jogging on a trail in the park. She heard a shriek, then saw the dog tearing back to her, a large, gray wolf in hot pursuit.

“He really wanted to eat my dog,” the woman told Jasper’s Fitzhugh newspaper.

The dog at her side, the woman emptied her can of bear spray, to no effect, then picked up a large stick. Thrusting the stick at the wolf, she backed down the trail several hundred meters to a road, where she was rescued by a passing motorist. The wolf stalked them the whole way.
A dog last November in the same area wasn’t so lucky. It, too, had been running free.

Steve Malcolm, a wildlife conflict specialist with the national park, told the Fitzhugh that the wolfpack there appears habituated to human beings. They do not yet see people as prey, but with habituation, that will change.

“Wolves will eventually move from this stage, where they’re just hunting their natural prey (dogs, coyotes and foxes), to looking at people as a food option,” he said.

Elsewhere in the Rockies, wolves were also in the news, with mixed results. In Idaho, a pup found several weeks ago was determined, through DNA testing, to be in fact a wolf and not a hybrid. The wolf may have been left as the mother was moving her pups from one den to another. But now removed from the pack for longer than two weeks, it would not be accepted again. Instead, wildlife officials are examining whether to put it into a zoo, reports the Idaho Mountain Express.

Ironically, perhaps, federal wildlife officials recently authorized the killing of three wolves from the same area that had been found guilty of plundering domestic sheep.

Meanwhile, two wolves were killed on the TransCanada Highway in Banff National Park. That leaves the Bow Valley pack at just four wolves, experts tell the Rocky Mountain Outlook. Wildlife officials suspect the wolves got onto the highway at cattle guards.

Also killed on the highway recently was a rare swift fox. Wildlife specialists aren’t sure from whence it came, as the swift fox, like the bison, prairie wolf and plains grizzly, had mostly disappeared early in the 20th century. The species had been extirpated from Alberta altogether in the 1970s.

 – Allen Best