Wyoming News

Western Book Roundup

Last week two regional organizations announced the finalists for their annual book awards. I’ve listed the finalists below with links to New West’s reviews of the books and author interviews. First, the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association announced the finalists for its Reading the West Book Awards (that’s the new name of the MPIBA’s longstanding book award series).

The shortlist in the Adult category:

• Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession by Craig Childs (Little, Brown and Co.)

• The Wake of Forgiveness by Bruce Machart (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

• Volt: Stories by Alan Heathcock (Graywolf Press)

• Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America by Eric Jay Dolin (W.W. Norton)

• The Ringer by Jenny Shank (The Permanent Press)

Also in the Roundup: The finalists for the High Plains Book Awards, The Whitefish Review seeks donations for its ninth issue, The High Desert Journal announces a poetry prize, and the tally on how many books Oprah helped David Wroblewski and Cormac McCarthy sell.

WyoFile Feature

America’s national parks have a tradition of coming to the rescue of visitors in trouble and recovering the bodies of those who die on park grounds. In 2009, the most recent year for which national records are available, Park Service workers conducted 3,568 search and rescues that cost a total of more than $4.8 million.

“We average about $5 million a year taken from our general funds,” said Jeffrey Olson, a Park Service spokesman in Washington, D.C.

Most search and rescues are relatively simple matters: a child wanders from a campsite in Yellowstone National Park; boaters have too much to drink in New York City’s Gateway National Recreation Area; an elderly visitor gets disoriented in Yosemite National Park.

But in some of the more remote and rugged parks, searches are very costly. In the past five years, for example, Alaska’s Denali National Park has had three prolonged searches that cost taxpayers $127,000, $132,000 and $118,000 respectively, according to Denali spokeswoman Maureen McLaughlin. Neither the people rescued nor the families of those whose bodies were recovered were charged for the Denali operations.

Nor were the families of Walker Kuhl and Gregory Seftick at Grand Teton.

In light of the national budget crisis, Denali and other parks are exploring the idea of charging additional “special use” fees for particularly hazardous adventures. Denali recently proposed charging a $500-per-climber fee to scale Mount McKinley.

New West Feature

The Hoback River, located near Jackson Hole in western Wyoming, received national attention last week after American Rivers, a Washington, D.C.-based conservation group, ranked it seventh on its annual list of “America’s Most Endangered Rivers.”

However, the term “endangered” may be a bit misleading. American Rivers’ list highlights waterways that are at an important crossroads in 2011, rather than selecting the most polluted, poorly managed or overused rivers. According to the report, natural gas development threatens the Hoback, making it the most threatened river in the Rocky Mountain region. 

Plains Exploration and Production, (PXP), a Houston-based energy company, plans to drill 136 natural gas wells and construct 17 drill pads near the river. There are also concerns about the effects 29 roads new or updated roads could have on the area.

“If you were to close your eyes and throw a dart at a map of Wyoming, there couldn’t be a worse spot for that dart to land, and oil and gas development to begin,” said Scott Bosse, American Rivers’ director for the northern Rockies. “The Hoback has some of the cleanest water in the region.”

New West Fiction

SHERIFF PRUETT toed the edge of the obsidian, geometric opening in the earth. Approximately four feet by two, and shallow. The big man ached all over. He’d cried, shut himself up, and cried again. His heart felt so worn down it did not beat so much as murmur; a utilitarian thing without feeling or sound. The loss consumed him, and his will would not rise—muted by a damp, negative space swallowing his physical being. Pruett was shattered; broken in ways he might never fix. He did not know loneliness, or at least he had no memory of it. Now this singularity encased him—an invisible, merciless force threatening to erase all he was or ever would be.

Like the victim of a holocaust.

Sorrow made the old man feel weak. Exposed to the emotional elements. But, like everything else, he made room for it. A man got good at tamping emotions down—one here, one there—or at least Pruett had. The problem arose when there was no more room for packing.

And this last tragedy was far too oversized for his soul to bear. Even were his stowaway places clean and emptied, he’d still never have figured a way to subjugate this much devastation—at least not for long.

What reconciliation could stand up to a fate as twisted as this?

Pruett occupied a world now where all the songbirds had flown and only carrion remained. Elemental tasks tested him: waking, standing, breathing. He was a sheriff! How did he go forward from here? Just how did the balance sheets get equaled on all sides?

WyoFile Feature

State, federal and company officials admit they don’t fully understand how to restore air quality and avoid further exceedences of federal Clean Air Act standards in the once-pristine airshed of Wyoming’s Upper Green River Basin.

Yet the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has already begun analyzing proposals for major natural gas field expansions that will add up to 4,338 new wells in the area around Pinedale.

Despite significant reductions in the volume of emissions from the Pinedale Anticline and Jonah natural gas fields in recent years, the area remains prone to ozone spikes — a human health risk. Ozone spiked beyond federal thresholds 13 times this past winter, and triggered 10 state-issued alerts, warning people to remain indoors.

Ozone is best known as the main ingredient in urban smog, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Naturally-occurring ozone in the stratosphere helps protect the earth from the sun’s ultraviolet rays. But at ground level, and in high concentrations, ozone is harmful to human health, plants and wildlife.

WyoFile Feature

Many people speak figuratively of preparing for spring by saying they are “shoveling out” from winter. But maintenance worker Gary Maki and others in Yellowstone National Park were literally doing just that last week, as the park opened for the summer season.

Though Yellowstone’s west entrance opened last month, the road linking Canyon, Fishing Bridge and the east entrance opened May 6, offering visitors access to most of the park’s interior for the first time since fall. Many diehard visitors spent the day returning to their favorite Yellowstone haunts, marking a kind of summer “opening day” for nature lovers across the region.

But for Maki, who has worked in the park since the 1980s, the day was mainly about digging out from a winter that saw more snow than any during the past decade.

“I saw this when I first came here, but this is kind of a lot compared to what we usually get,” Maki said of piles of plowed and drifted snow that towered above his head at Lake Butte Overlook. The hillside viewing area near the park’s east entrance offers commanding views of Yellowstone Lake, and Maki was clearing a path to a vault toilet near the parking area.

WyoFile Feature

Within weeks, Powder River Basin coal customers will have to kick in an extra few million dollars per year to help control coal dust from loaded trains leaving Wyoming.

According to Platts reporter Peter Gartrell, BNSF Railway will impose a new tariff for coal dust suppression. The pending tariff comes after a March ruling by the U.S. Surface Transportation Board that nullified one previously proposed by BNSF. That ruling was the latest in a years-long battle between the railroad and utilities over just who is responsible to pay for dust suppression along thousands of miles of rail used to connect the Powder River Basin to coal-fired power plants across the U.S.

Last year, Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corp., which challenged the tariff, estimated the annual cost at $100 million. But no matter how the estimated $100 million in annual coal suppression is eventually divided between utilities and the railroad, it still adds to the overall cost of Powder River Basin coal.

Before you roll your eyes thinking this is another ploy by environmentalists to poke Big Coal in the eye, consider this; Suppressing coal dust from loaded trains is a matter of national security.

NEW WEST FEATURE

To boosters, it’s almost a magical elixir for the world’s energy woes. To opponents, it’s more akin to snake oil. Even more than most other fossil fuels, oil shale meets with a sharply divided reaction, and after two weeks of public hearings across Utah, Wyoming and Colorado, federal officials have received an earful from both sides.

But beyond the bluster, those in the middle feel left in a vacuum of straight talk.

“I would like to see some sort of document that includes the facts, from a source that doesn’t have an agenda,” Jim Yellico told Bureau of Land Management officials at a meeting in Rifle. Colo., on Tuesday.

Getting straight facts, though, is a challenge.

Western Book Roundup

Helen Thorpe‘s Colorado Book Award-winning Just Like Us is out in paperback now, and it includes an update about the lives of her subjects, four young Mexican women who grew up in Denver, two with U.S. citizenship and two without. On May 12, Thorpe will speak at the Arvada Public Library, and on May 15 she will participate in the Dean’s Forum at St. John’s Cathedral in Denver. In October, Just Like Us will be the featured book for One Book One Town in Carbondale, Colo.

• Brady Udall‘s excellent novel The Lonely Polygamist is out in paperback now too. Udall will appear at the Jackson Hole Writers Conference, along with Cristina García, Gary Ferguson, and Stephanie Elizondo Griest from June 23-26. The conference is open for registration now. (Check back on New West in late June for David Abrams‘ report on the conference.)

Also in the Roundup: Robin Black is this year’s Lighthouse Fly-By Writer, the new Mountain West Poetry Series, lit champ Jennifer Egan to headline the Literary Sojourn in Steamboat Springs, and Women Writing the West conference tickets are on sale now.

WyoFile Feature

I was visiting with a local geologist in Casper recently who was reminiscing about the heyday of Wyoming’s uranium industry in the 1970s. He was a young guy then, fresh out of college and working on a two-man crew that made the nearly 100-mile drive from Casper to the Gas Hills each summer morning to begin staking claims at sunrise.

Back then, companies rarely asked for permission to hunt for uranium on federal land, he said. A company staked a claim and started drilling. Crews working for competing companies shared the same dirt roads in the Gas Hills and worked like hell to beat each other at staking claims.

The actual process of staking a claim involved two men and a pickup truck. With the wheels pointed straight, the steering wheel was secured with a rope tied under the seat, then the pickup was turned loose to idle in low gear without a single occupant. The men paced off a specified distance from the truck on either side, then walked — or ran — parallel to the idling truck, hammering stakes into the ground.