Recreation Equipment

Each summer and winter, the Outdoor Retailer Trade Show in Salt Lake City serves as the outdoor industry’s ground zero of new gear and innovation. This year’s summer market broke all kinds of records, exploding in nearly every major category, including overall attendance, which topped 25,000.

The show was so big it spilled out of its long-time home in the Salt Palace into a New Exhibitor Pavilion in a makeshift building across the street. In addition to attendees, this year’s show brought all kinds of new equipment, clothing and ideas.

New West Feature

Problem: You’re a field biologist trying to assess the population of a secretive, imperiled aquatic species—let’s say a salamander—but you can’t find the little devil, so how can you count it?

Solution: Don’t try to eyeball the critters. Collect their DNA from cells they shed into the water. 

High Country News Feature

The decade-long tussle over energy development in New Mexico’s Otero Mesa has been reinvigorated recently, as hardrock mining claims now threaten the region for the first time.

The area, sometimes referred to as the “Southwest’s Serengeti,” is a 1.2 million-acre stretch of undisturbed Chihuahuan Desert grassland. The sprawling but sensitive expanses of black grama are home to more than 1,000 species of native wildlife, including a genetically-pure herd of pronghorn antelope, the endangered northern aplomado falcon, mountain lions, mule deer, bald and golden eagles and hundreds of species of plants, insects and migratory birds.

Moving Away

After finishing up my Master’s degree in education this summer, the job prospects were bleak.

I applied for several teaching jobs in Missoula, but it was discouraging when every person I talked to commented on how difficult it is to earn such a position without experience. I talked to a career counselor, who advised me to quit applying for these jobs in Missoula and focus on finishing my professional paper. I took her advice.

Guest Opinion

Right in the midst of their battle against ExxonMobil, residents along Idaho’s Highway 12 received an email from an unlikely but eminently appropriate source. An Israeli activist fighting gas exploration in the Elah Valley found their website, FightingGoliath.org, and wished them well in their struggle.

The Elah Valley was the site of the famous duel between a young shepherd boy and a giant warrior 3,000 years ago. Visitors can stay walk along the brook where David chose five smooth stones for his trusty slingshot.

New West Feature

The Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, backed by several other conservation groups, has strongly criticized Yellowstone National Park’s winter use plan to keep Sylvan Pass open between Cody and the park’s east entrance.

The pass features 20 avalanche runs that must be knocked down by artillery shells fired from a 105 mm howitzer, at a cost of $325,000 per season. Weather permitting, high explosives are hand-dropped on the avalanche runs from a helicopter.

From the Panhandle

School doesn’t start until September 6th, and fall isn’t supposed to officially arrive until September 23rd this year. But everything after the end of Sandpoint’s summer music festival seems like the denouement of the season in Sandpoint. We even had a spot of rain yesterday.

The iconic big tent is already down, rolled up and stored until next August. Smaller tents remain, along with huge collections of chairs, boxes, hoses, cables, coolers, dollies, tables, and garbage cans.

But no garbage. The festival’s impressive and activist all-volunteer Green Team has seen to that.

New West Feature

Citizens of Denver and Colorado Springs are excited about a public hearing set for Wednesday on the current test marketing in the cities of dissolvable tobacco products, which critics say are packaged to appeal to young people, a charge hotly denied by corporate officials.

It’s the second round of test marketing by the RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company of the brightly packaged, flavored line of lozenges and strips that deliver nicotine when they dissolve in the mouth. The first tests were done this spring in Indianapolis, Portland, Ore., and Columbus, Ohio. The marketing in Colorado is accompanied by a program in Charlotte, N.C.

New West Feature

In rural New Mexico, trailheads leading into cougar country often are posted with signs that explain what a hiker should do in case of an encounter.

Maybe Robert Giannini had read such advice, because he did the right thing—eventually.

WyoFile Feature

U.S. Federal Judge Nancy Freudenthal last week struck down the Interior Department’s 2010 instructional guidance meant to curtail the use of “categorical exclusions” in permitting oil and gas drilling.

The plaintiff, industry trade group Western Energy Alliance, successfully argued that the guidance was invalid, in part, because it wasn’t created under a formal process that includes public comment. Yet the “categorical exclusion” itself is a procedural tool that allows industry to bypass—at the permitting stage—a formal National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) analysis that includes public comment.