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New West Series

The days of oil and gas men crisscrossing the country, digging wells in hope of striking it rich, has become a far more high-tech, but still lucrative, business.

Although much of the money to be made is in oil and gas exploration, even when it comes to renewables, companies are betting fortunes hoping to lock up the key to energy development – the right plots of land.

One of those companies is Energy Investments, Inc. (EII), a Denver-based operation that currently controls more than 1 million acres in the Mountain West.

Founded in 1992 by former landman and Mobil Oil employee Stephen P. Chamberlain, the company leases acreage for oil and gas exploration across the United States with a distinct focus in the Rocky Mountain Region. The company also leases land for solar and wind energy development.

EII has competition. The Bringham Exploration Company is an independent exploration, development and production company working in the Williston Basin of eastern Montana and western North Dakota. 

Wildlife Management

A cable TV news crew taping a segment on bear safety Friday in Yellowstone National Park got a little something extra in the bargain: a close encounter with a bear.

“That was what we refer to as an incident within an incident,” park spokesman Dan Hottle said Monday, joking that he worried some might think the encounter was staged.

Hottle had taken the crew from CNN to Joffe Lake — a five-minute drive from park headquarters in Mammoth Hot Springs — where they were interviewing Yellowstone bear biologist Kerry Gunther.

New West Series

There has always been a boom and bust cycle to chasing riches in the Rocky Mountains. These days, the modern day 49ers are not seeking gold. Instead, oil is the new prize that has men and women staking claims in Big Sky Country.

In Montana, the best hope for an oil boom like the one that has erupted in North Dakota lies in the Bakken shale. The Bakken is an oil-bearing vein that covers northeastern Montana as well as parts of Canada and North Dakota. Since the technique of horizontal drilling didn’t exist until the 1990’s, the shale sat largely untapped since its discovery in 1953. 

Once the technology was developed and drilling became economical, the large-scale oil operations followed. Between 2006 and 2007, more than 150 new wells were drilled on the Bakken shale and there are still 176 active rigs in North Dakota, showing these wells have staying power.

Kayaking

Kayaking around Dillon Reservoir, people tend to notice things that they might not in a motorboat.

That was the idea behind Kyle McKenzie’s business, Kayak Lake Dillon, a sea-kayaking outfit that offers lessons and tours of the lake in Colorado. This will be the business’s second year of operation in Summit County.

They wanted to keep things on the down-low last year, but now they’re ready to spread the word. Anyone with a Summit County ID will be offered drastic discounts — and when we say drastic, we mean the most drastic kind.

“You get a very different perspective of the lake and the area from a kayak, not on a loud motorboat. Especially in the morning, it’s always really calm and quiet, a really relaxing trip,” said McKenzie, who is also the lead guide.

New West Series

The green energy revolution continues to spread across the country with more people choosing to install their own wind or solar power operations. But even with tax credit programs, the cost is often out of reach to many.

Installing these systems can cost tens of thousands of dollars and, in order for them to be effective, wind and solar power require just that—wind and sun. 

However, for retired couple Bill and Katharine McLaughry, converting their home was a no-brainer.

“As proponents of conservation for many years, we knew we had to consider energy conservation above all else,” Katharine said.

The couple moved from the second cloudiest area of the country in western Pennsylvania in August 2006 to their current home in Centennial, Colo.

Rural Issues

Walk in to a town council meeting in Pinedale, Wyoming, and you’re likely to find as many as three local reporters scribbling notes and asking questions.

That news in a town of 2,030 residents is covered by two newspapers and a website is partly explained by the abundance of mineral wealth in surrounding Sublette County, which produced $3.6 billion in natural gas last year. Add to that the urgent concern about breaching a local dam threatened by record snowmelt coming from the Wind River Range, and you’ve got a recipe for a small-town media frenzy.

This scene is also illustrative of how rural journalism is surviving, even thriving, in the rural West and across the United States, in an era of precipitous decline for major metropolitan newspapers.

In the United States, some 7,500 community newspapers – papers with under 30,000 in circulation – still hit the streets, front porches, and mailboxes at least once a week. A 2010 survey conducted by the University of Missouri, Columbia for the National Newspaper Association produced some enviable statistics: More than three-quarters of respondents said they read most or all of a local newspaper every week. And in news to warm the heart of any publisher, a full 94 percent said that they paid for their papers. 

Adventure Journal Post

On one level, this video of creatures captured by a single webcam in Banff National Park, Alberta, over the course of a year is incredibly cool. Bears, elk, mountain lions…mountain bikers, hikers, ravens…the spot is like Grand Central Station for wildlife. True, the images were edited together, and no doubt there were long periods of a whole lotta nothing going on. But the variety and volume is astounding.

Which leads one to a sense of awe and a glimpse into the notion that what goes on generally out of sight of man is pretty incredible and pretty important. We know there are critters out there, but they’re so often shy and we’ve pushed so many of them off into corners far from the sprawl of our houses and roads that it lets us forget the world is populated by far more beings than ourselves. We know this, but we don’t retain it.

Guest Column

Dear Governor Schweitzer:

The Exxon pipeline rupture shows that pipeline leaks can and do happen, and that it is a disaster when landowners, emergency responders and community officials are not adequately prepared for such an occurrence. We are landowners along the proposed Keystone XL pipeline route and downstream from the Missouri and Yellowstone river crossings who are concerned about the impact that another spill would have on our families’ health, water quality, and ability to make a living on the land in Montana.

The Keystone XL will be nine times the size of the Exxon pipeline which recently ruptured – with exponentially larger impacts should there be a spill. The Keystone I pipeline, which runs through North Dakota, has had 12 leaks in its first year of operation.  Because the Keystone XL pipeline needs a permit from the state of Montana, we call on YOU to protect Montanans along the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers by:

New West Series

The massive coal mines throughout the Powder River basin of Wyoming speak to the importance of this fossil fuel for the national and regional economy. Coal generates nearly half of the electricity in the United States and Wyoming produces more coal than any other state in the nation.

But coal is also responsible for large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions and the production of other pollutants like acid rain. The challenge seemed intractable—the U.S. relies on coal, but it is so environmentally damaging.

Then the answer seemed to arrive with two magic words—Clean Coal.

WyoFile Feature

The bear went over the mountain — as many kids learn from the popular song — to see what he could see. But the wolf went over the mountain and just kept on going, covering 40,000 square miles in two years.

Pluie, a well-traveled adult, female gray wolf tracked in 1991 by Canadian wildlife officials, was the inspiration for the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. Conceived in 1993 and formally established in 1997, the joint U.S.-Canada nonprofit group works with local landowners, agencies and organizations across the Northern Rockies to preserve and connect wildlife corridors that are crucial to the migration of key species like grizzly bears, elk and golden eagles.

“You can’t isolate nature from the rest of nature and expect her to survive,” said Harvey Locke, a conservationist and former attorney who founded Yellowstone to Yukon.

“The golden eagles that winter in Wyoming spend their summers in the Canadian Rockies,” Locke said last week during a presentation at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody. His talk also promoted “Yellowstone to Yukon: Freedom to Roam,” a photography exhibition by Florian Schulz, on display at the BBHC through Aug. 7.

Scientific understanding of the importance of wildlife corridors has been growing over the last 20 years, as new technologies and tracking techniques have allowed biologists to follow groups and individual animals over vast distances, Locke said, who was born in Canada and lives in Boulder, Colo. A more detailed picture of how animals move across the landscape has emerged, along with a stronger appreciation for the importance of key migration corridors.

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