The Wolf Hunt Frontlines

Twenty five miles upriver from St. Maries in the town of Calder, John Walters eats a burger in the cafe. On his table by the window newspapers are opened to pages with wolf pictures. A recent ruling by the Idaho Fish and Game Commission that establishes the latest attempt at a hunting season for gray wolves in Idaho is the top story.

Walters, one of the directors of the Idaho Anti-Wolf Coalition, planned to be first in line to buy a hunting tag when they went on sale Monday for $11.25 per resident. He called his attorney a few days before an injunction was filed Aug. 20 by Earthjustice to stop the hunt. Thirteen groups were named in the suit.

He asked his attorney whether he could sue Fish and Game for fraud if the heavily advertised wolf hunting season didn’t transpire. “He said no, because an injunction hasn’t been filed yet to close the season,” says Walters, between bites of his burger.

Walters has been fighting for years for the right to kill wolves or sue the federal government for what he calls an illegal introduction of wolves into the state. A barrel of a man with long hair going gray, he’s a former construction worker who was injured on the job and now collects disability.

The Coeur d’Alene, Idaho native moved to the St. Joe Country in 1983 after years of advocating for the Fish and Game department that he is now at odds with. The agency, in Walters’ opinion, has turned tail on the hunting public—people who buy hunting licenses and who expect Fish and Game to manage the herds so hunters can bag bulls and bucks.

COMING SOON AND ON TRACK

On August 13, 1967, exactly 42 years ago, as I start to write this column, everything changed for the grizzly and everybody managing the national parks where the bears live. It’s a well-known tragedy--two young women killed and partly consumed by two separate grizzly bears in two separate locations on the same frightful night, all so expertly chronicled by Jack Olson in Night of the Grizzlies, which might be the best selling outdoor book ever.

I was in college at the time, spending my summers working on Glacier’s trail crew. The park usually pulled us off the trails in August to fight forest fires. That’s what I was doing on that night, sitting in a fire camp on Apgar Mountain a few miles away from Trout Lake and Granite Park, the sites of the fatal maulings. All of us on the fire crew were huddled around a campfire listening to bits and pieces of broken transmissions coming over our fire radios, trying to figure out what was going on, but knowing it was bad.

Power in the West

Big public utilities these days are turning to the wilderness to produce power—on streams that are so remote, hardly anyone complains, according to a fine Wall Street Journal story by Jim Carlton.

The article kicks off with news about how the Snohomish County Public Utility District (from the area north of Seattle) is building a small hydroelectric-power plant on “picture-perfect” Youngs Creek in the Cascades foothills—with little opposition.

According to the story: “So-called small hydro plants like Youngs Creek are sprouting up across the country, with around 500 potential sites identified by a federal study in Washington state alone.”

Tester Wilderness Bill

Acclaimed writer Rick Bass, author of The Wild Marsh and Why I Came West—a 2008 finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography—has published an interesting essay about the Forest Jobs and Recreation Act proposed by Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont.

The essay in Yale Environment360, a publication of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, gives Bass’s perspective as a longtime conservationist, Yaak Valley resident and member of the Yaak Valley Forest Council.

“It would be a good dramatic story if this bill was a sellout, but it’s not,” Bass writes.

THE GOOD OF THE MANY OUWEIGHS THE GOOD OF THE ONE

“The good of the one is outweighed by the good of the many.”

That’s one of my favorite quotations ever because it applies to so many issues. It comes from The Wrath of Khan, my favorite Star Trek movie (yep, still a Trekkie, even at my age), and so brilliantly offered by none other than Mr. Spock.

But what does it have to do with bears? A lot, it seems.

Ready, Aim, Fire Up Controversy

Idaho’s Fish and Game Commission yesterday approved the first wolf hunt in the state -- and in the Lower 48. According to a detailed story in the Spokesman-Review by Betsy Z. Russell, Idaho will start selling tags on Monday, August 24, "to give hunters from both inside and outside the state a shot at up to 220 of Idaho’s wolves -- a quarter of the wolf population."

The commissioners voted 4-3 for the wolf-hunt plan, the article says. The three dissenters wanted to allow hunters to shoot even more Idaho wolves, or up to 430 of them -- nearly 50 percent of the population.

[more]

The Forest Jobs and Recreation Act

The Forest Jobs and Recreation Act, landmark legislation introduced last month by Montana Sen. Jon Tester, enjoys strong support from Montanans in nearly all walks of life, according to a new statewide poll.

The poll, conducted in late July by Boulder, Colorado-based Harstad Strategic Research (HSR), found that 7 in 10
Montanans support the new bill, which focuses on job creation, forest management, clean water protections, and issues relating to wilderness and the economy.
[more]

Guest Column

I could have dealt with the pain, but the chocolate fudge Clif bar lodged somewhere mid-sternum made the ascent up Mist Ridge early in the morning the ultimate endurance test.

I should have taken the time this morning to cook my gruel-like instant oatmeal, but the mosquitoes around our campsite were relentless, attacking in wave after tenacious wave, like the Normandy invasion. Both the insect cloud and the presentation of my freeze-dried food dampened any appetite I could have summoned. So I set off to gain 1,000 feet in altitude in a two-mile climb, fortified with what felt like a handball from the gym stuck in my esophagus.

This was day three of a backpack trip in Yellowstone National Park’s (YNP) Pelican Valley, so my pack should have been lighter. Despite its custom fit and the titanium products I was packing, it felt as if I were carrying another person on my back -- giving a piggyback ride to a sadistic imp. [more]

‘EXTINCTION WHILE WE WATCH’

Grizzlies are one of the most iconic of the endangered species that have all but vanished from the American West. Efforts to bring them back, though, have been dogged by their reputation for eating humans, a trait that has made them even less popular than wolves as government biologists have fought to help the species regain some of its lost ground.

Even hikers, who tend to be among the most conservation-minded among forest users, have balked at the idea of sharing more hiking trails with more grizzlies.

The grizzly arguably has been affected more by the Bush administration’s war on the environment than any other forest dweller. It was Interior Secretary Gale Norton who scuttled plans to boost the bear population in the Bitterroots, effectively ending augmentation plans anywhere else. But the contention over grizzlies, and the collisions between science and politics goes back long before that.

Author David Knibb tells the tale in his book Grizzly Wars: The Public Fight Over the Great Bear. Plenty of other species have suffered at the hands of human expansion across the continent. Some have disappeared altogether. Few, though, spark the imagination, or for some, the hatred, that the grizzly does. [more]

Wolf Warring

An Idaho Fish and Game commissioner told a gathering of Western attorneys general that hunters are so angry about Idaho's wolf population, they will hunt the animals in the state's backcountry this fall -- whether the law allows it or not.

"It will either be a state-authorized one or it will be an illegal one," Commissioner Randy Budge said about the upcoming hunt, according to Idaho Mountain Express staff writer Jason Kauffman.
[more]