Federal Court: One Million Acres Near Grand Canyon Protected From Mining

The Grand Canyon (Shutterstock)

by Ari Phillips
Climate Progress

In early October, an Arizona federal judge upheld the Obama Administration’s 2012 withdrawal of over one million acres of federal lands surrounding Grand Canyon National Park from uranium mining. Originally imposed by then-Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, the mining industry challenged the ban arguing that the 700-page Environmental Impact Statement was inadequate, failed to address “scientific controversies”, and was unconstitutional.

With the court’s decision to uphold the Department of Interior’s (DIO) decision, the lands around the Grand Canyon will be closed to the exploration and development of uranium mining claims for 20 years, thus protecting the Colorado River watershed and several sacred Native American sites. According to the government’s study, removing the ban would mean that 26 new uranium mines and 700 uranium exploration projects could be developed.

According Roger Clark, air quality and clean energy director at the Grand Canyon Trust, the ruling affirms conclusions by five federal agencies, including scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey — that uranium mining poses unacceptable risks to Grand Canyon’s water, wildlife, and people.

“Uranium mines threaten hundreds of the Grand Canyon seeps and springs that provide precious water to thousands of desert-dwelling species,” wrote Clark. “Every new mine sacrifices cultural sites and fragments wildlife habitat, polluting the park with dirt roads, dust, heavy machinery, noise, off-road drilling rigs, power lines, and relentless truck traffic.”

Due to the sheer size and remoteness of the landscape, the EIS authors adopted a “cautious and careful approach” to assessing the potential impacts of uranium mining. They ultimately found that “the risk of groundwater contamination from uranium mining was low, but that the possible consequences of such contamination were severe.”

Arizona federal district court judge David G. Campbell found this approach warranted, writing that “the Court can find no legal principle that prevents the DIO from acting in the face of uncertainty,” and that the Secretary of the Interior had the authority to “err on the side of caution in protecting a national treasure — Grand Canyon national park.”

When President Theodore Roosevelt created the Grand Canyon Preserve in 1906 he didn’t allow mining on much of the land, but mines were opened on land surrounding the canyon. Often on Native American lands, including the Havasupai and Navajo, these mines have become dangerous radioactive sites. There are over 500 abandoned uranium mines on Navajo territory and the federal government is still working with the Navajo to determine the best way to address the issue. According to the EPA, potential health effects include lung cancer from inhalation of radioactive particles, as well as bone cancer and impaired kidney function from exposure to radionuclides in drinking water.

“In sum, this decision supports a precautionary approach to mineral withdrawals,” wrote Hillary M. Hoffmann, an environmental law professor at Vermont Law School. “It affirms the agency’s choice, ‘when faced with uncertainty due to a lack of definitive information, and a low risk of significant environmental harm,’ to temporarily withdraw land from mineral entry before conducting a National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review.”

Hoffman writes that while this may run counter to general policy underlying NEPA, in this instance the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) actions prevented the development of thousands of uranium claims until the agency could fully study the impacts of those claims and determine whether to make a full withdrawal.

“As the district court noted, if the BLM waited to act until after the NEPA review process was complete, the claims may have become vested and at that point, it would have been too late to protect the Colorado River watershed and the Havasupai sacred sites,” she writes.

When Salazar first banned this block of 633,547 acres of public lands and 360,002 acres of National Forest land from mining in 2012, a number of politicians objected, including U.S. Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT), John McCain (R-AZ), John Barrasso (R-WY), and Mike Lee (R-UT). Sen. Hatch said mining the land “poses no environmental threat” and that the announcement was another sign that the Obama Administration “is one of the most anti-American energy presidencies in history.”

Fast-forward two years later and there are currently 13 candidates up for election in November who want to sell or seize public lands for drilling, mining, or logging and seven senators not up for reelection, including four Arizonans: Sen. McCain, Sen. Jeff Flake, U.S. Rep. Trent Franks, and State Rep. Andy Tobin.

The uranium mining companies have 60 days to appeal Judge Campbell’s decision to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and are likely to do so, according to the Center For Biological Diversity.

BLM renews Grand Staircase grazing study

After 12-year hiatus, BLM set to restart an environmental analysis — and feud between environmentalists, ranchers

Map of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (BLM)

By Brian Maffly
The Salt Lake Tribune

A long-stalled environmental review of grazing in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is set to resume more than 12 years after a rangeland management plan was supposed to have been completed for this dry, though biologically and culturally varied, landscape.

The grazing issue has a tortured history on the 1.9 million-acre monument in southern Utah, pitting environmentalists against ranchers and their supporters in Garfield and Kane counties. Both sides have criticized the Bureau of Land Management for either failing to protect a fragile land owned by all Americans or pushing livestock off the range and undoing a revered Utah tradition.

Now the agency is trying to finish a job that it was given 17 years ago when President Bill Clinton established the monument, reigniting debate with both sides still firmly entrenched.

Clinton’s proclamation recognized livestock as a continuing presence on the Grand Staircase, Kaiparowits Plateau and Escalante canyons, but it also ensured grazing would be subject to "applicable laws and regulations."

The monument’s 1999 management plan is silent on the controversial subject of grazing, and officials have been kicking that can down the road ever since in the face of lawsuits and failed planning and collaboration efforts.

On Friday, the BLM is expected to post a notice of intent in the Federal Register, announcing the launch of an environmental review with the goal of producing a grazing-management plan, otherwise known as an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).

"A grazing plan needs to pay attention to more than just ‘grass utilization’ and how much forage there is," said David deRoulhac of the Grand Canyon Trust. "BLM processes need to include all kinds of stakeholders and not just permittees. Grazers affect all kinds of values, such as wildlife, ecosystem health and recreation."

Local officials and grazing interests, however, contend the trust and other conservation voices don’t deserve a seat.

"Their objective is to eliminate grazing from the monument," Garfield County Commission Chairman Clare Ramsay said. "All they would be doing would be to legitimize their position. We are the elected officials."

The monument currently harbors 82 grazing allotments supporting 102 permit-holders who used a total 11,000 animal unit months, or AUMs, last year. AUM is a measure of how many mother cows and their calves can graze an allotment for one month.

The $1.35 the feds charge per AUM falls far short of covering the grazing program’s administrative costs and environmental impacts, leading some conservation groups to ridicule public-lands grazing as "welfare ranching."

Conservationists believe this landscape is too arid to support grazing at current levels and the monument’s nonagricultural assets, such as biotic soils, native plants and ancient rock art, are being sacrificed for the sake of a 19th-century enterprise.

"Ranching is a negligible part of the economy of southern Utah, particularly in Garfield County. It’s barely measurable," said Jon Marvel, executive director of the Western Watersheds Project. "The politics of Utah is such that BLM has been afraid to complete a grazing plan even though they know that grazing is incompatible with that arid landscape."

The Grand Canyon Trust has mustered the money to buy and retire allotments along the Escalante Corridor and other sensitive places in the monument, provoking lawsuits from local officials.

"You don’t want to put cattle in a desert where they are only going to hang out in the riparian areas," said the trust’s Mary O’Brien.

However, the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act guarantees ranchers can run cattle on these lands, local officials say, and any reduction in grazing harms the counties.

"Those units were set up for grazing. It doesn't mention recreation or anything else," Ramsay said. He contends the trust’s concern with creeks is really an excuse to rid the land of cows.

Still, nearly 97 percent of the monument is actively grazed, according to O’Brien. The remaining 65,400 acres are associated with allotments that conservation interests have bought out through the years.

The BLM has been through this planning process already and issued a draft EIS in 2008. But the scope of the analysis had become so broad and unfocused that officials decided to scrap the document and start afresh.

Officials were reluctant to comment Thursday, but in past public statements, BLM state director Juan Palma has promised that the new review will engage all interested parties, including environmentalists, in a transparent process.

"There is no direction from anywhere [or] anyone about undoing grazing," he told the monument advisory committee last year.

Still, in its last session the Utah Legislature used BLM’s alleged efforts to reduce grazing as the basis for designating a "grazing zone" in and around the monument, declaring livestock the "highest management priority" there.

And under the Public Lands Transfer Act passed last year, the monument and another 28 million acres of federal land are to be transferred to the state by the end of 2014. The legality of either law is open to debate, but both send a message that Utah intends to assert as much control over the monument as it can.

Groups file lawsuit to stop mining near Grand Canyon

Suzanne Adams
Kingman Daily Miner


KINGMAN - New mining jobs in the Arizona Strip area may be put on hold. The Center for Biological Diversity, the Grand Canyon Trust and the Grand Canyon Chapter of the Sierra Club filed a lawsuit Nov. 16 challenging a Bureau of Land Management permit for the Arizona 1 Mine.

"I'm very disappointed," said Mohave County Supervisor Gary Watson when he heard of the lawsuit. "It's absolutely absurd to me to lock up one of the richest deposits of uranium in the continental United States."

"As far as we're concerned we have all the necessary permits," said Denison Mines Corp. President and CEO Ron Hochstein, which owns the uranium mine. The company is not named in the lawsuit.

The mine is located 45 miles south of Fredonia and north of the Grand Canyon National Park. It is one of three mines owned by Denison within the boundary of a 1 million-acre area south and north of the Grand Canyon that the federal government is considering withdrawing from all mining for the next 20 years.

The company is still working on air quality permits for the other mining claims it has in the area. At this time, the federal government is not allowing any new mining claims in the area.

In their lawsuit, the conservation groups are claiming that the BLM failed to update a 1988 environmental assessment before issuing a permit to Denison in September.

"The mine has been down for more than a decade," said Roger Clark of the Grand Canyon Trust. It would be prudent to re-evaluate the area, he said. New information has been collected about the area's groundwater and endangered species, and changes to BLM management policies have happened since the mine was closed in 1992, he said.

The conservation groups are also claiming that the BLM did not examine the validity of mine's claim and did not request a new plan of operation for the mine.

The conservation groups state in a news release that the mine's old operation plan expired when it was closed, and the company never established that there was a viable uranium deposit in the area, which is required in order to file a mining claim.

All claims pertaining to the mine have been kept in good standing since the mine was staked in the 1980s, Hochstein said.

The conservation groups have not requested a halt to any mining activity in the area, but they may in the future, Clark said.

Watson said he agrees that mining should not be allowed in the Grand Canyon National Park, but the Arizona 1 Mine is outside of park limits and Denison has met all of the permit qualifications.

According to company's Web site, the mine would employ 32 people and cost $2.3 million to get started. It would mine begin mining in the first quarter of 2010. The company plans to get about 857,000 pounds of uranium ore over the next three years and is expecting to sell it for between $53 and $65 per pound.

Edison to decommission Mohave power plant

The company closed the coal-fired facility in Laughlin NV in 2006 because it needed expensive upgrades.



Associated Press
Los Angeles Times

The owners of the closed Mohave Generating Station in Laughlin, Nev., said Wednesday that they would decommission the coal-fired power plant, which once supplied electricity to 1.5 million homes.

Southern California Edison Co. operated the 1,580-megawatt plant since it came online in 1971, and the company owned 56% of the facility on the Colorado River.

Edison shut down the plant in 2006 because it needed pollution-control upgrades to comply with a 1999 Clean Air Act settlement, a new water supply and pipeline upgrades costing $1.1 billion.

The plant's owners said they would decommission the plant and remove the generating facility from the site. Its operating permits will be terminated next year.

The utility is considering selling the property or constructing a renewable-energy project. Edison spokesman Gil Alexander said the utility had studied the property, its topography and the climate to determine whether it would be suitable for a renewable project, but no decisions had been made.

Roger Clark, air and energy director for the Grand Canyon Trust in Flagstaff, Ariz., one of the groups that sued over pollution controls, said he was pleased that the owners would dismantle the plant and were considering renewable energy.

"It's the final chapter on the story of Mohave as a coal plant," Clark said. "Until the owners decided to go ahead and decommission it and take it apart, there was always a chance someone could buy it and crank it up again."

Edison had planned to upgrade and restart the power plant but said in June 2006 that the plant needed too many repairs for the effort to go forward.

The Salt River Project, which owns 20% of the plant, later sought to take over operation from Edison but abandoned the effort in 2007 after its offer to buy Edison's ownership interest was rebuffed.

Other owners of the plant included Nevada Power Co. with 14% and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power with 10%.

Judge orders new plan for dam releases into Grand Canyon

Federal officials must reconsider the irregular water releases from Glen Canyon Dam, which may harm the humpback chub, an endangered fish.
Endangered Humpback Chub (AZ Game Fish)

By Nicholas Riccardi
Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Denver -- Federal officials must reconsider how they release water from Glen Canyon Dam into the Grand Canyon in order to protect an endangered fish, the humpback chub, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

Environmental groups have long argued that the irregular releases from the dam just above the canyon damage the fish's native environment, erode beaches and wash away ancient ruins in the canyon.

Nikolai Lash of the Grand Canyon Trust, which filed a lawsuit along with Earthjustice, said the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation should release water in regular flows, which would do less damage. "They're better at preserving the beaches, the archaeological sites and the fish," he said.

Officials at the bureau could not be reached for comment late Wednesday.

For much of its existence, Glen Canyon released water on timetables designed to benefit Southwestern power companies, whose demand for hydroelectric power peaks during the day.

Last year the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, reversing an old agency opinion, found that the fluctuating dam releases did not violate the Endangered Species Act. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge David G. Campbell ruled that that revision was improper and ordered the agency to reconsider how the dam flows may harm the endangered fish.

Campbell gave the government until November to file a new plan and ordered that, should it find the releases threaten the chub, it must propose a new schedule.

Two Utah counties lose again in monument grazing fight

Grand Staircase » Federal appeals court upholds purchase by conservation groups

By Patty Henetz
The Salt Lake Tribune

Two southern Utah counties have lost another round in their fight to reverse the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's decision to allow conservation groups to buy grazing allotments on the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

The Denver-based 10th U.S. District Court of Appeals on Monday upheld a federal administrative law judge's 2006 ruling that the BLM had acted properly when it issued grazing permits to the Grand Canyon Trust and Canyonlands Grazing Corp. after the groups cut deals with ranchers to acquire their allotments and cattle.

The appeals court also affirmed an administrative law judge's decision to deny grazing permits to other individuals and upheld a federal district court's ruling that the counties didn't have standing to join with those individuals in their case.

Calls to county commissioners for comment were not immediately returned Monday.

In 2006, Kane and Garfield counties lost a federal lawsuit that claimed economic harm from the BLM's sale of the permits to the Grand Canyon Trust. In that ruling, the federal judge also found the counties lacked standing to continue pressing their case against the agency.

The Grand Canyon Trust -- based in Flagstaff, Ariz., and Moab -- spent $1.5 million to buy about 350,000 acres worth of monument grazing permits from 1999 to 2001 in what were deemed environmentally sensitive areas. The group originally intended to retire the permits, but instead bought and grazed a few cattle, including strays left on one of the allotments it acquired.

Last year, a Utah judge ordered Kane and Garfield counties to stop using a state defense fund to cover their federal court costs. At that time, the counties had spent more than $174,000 on the cases.

Park official says science on canyon was ignored

Washington Post

Washington -- Interior Department officials ignored key scientific findings when they limited water flows in the Grand Canyon to optimize generation of electric power there, risking damage to the ecology of the spectacular landmark, according to documents obtained by the Washington Post.

A Jan. 15 memo written by Grand Canyon National Park Supt. Steve Martin suggests that the department produced a flawed environmental assessment to defend its actions against environmentalists.

The Grand Canyon Trust, an advocacy group, has sued Interior for reducing the flow of water from Glen Canyon Dam at night, when consumer demand for electricity is low, on the grounds that the policy hurts imperiled fish species and erodes the canyon's beaches.

"The government's brief as presented continues to misinterpret key scientific findings related to the humpback chub, status of downstream resources in Grand Canyon, and the need for the secretary to acknowledge [National Park Service] authorities and responsibilities to protect resources under [National Park Service] administration," Martin wrote in a memo that the Post obtained from the group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

Mike Snyder, the park service's intermountain regional director, said Tuesday that he concurred with the superintendent's analysis and had tried to petition Interior's top officials to reexamine the Colorado water experiment.

The issue highlights what Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will face as he evaluates Bush administration rules.

Environmentally minded cowboys run a green ranch in Arizona

At two ranches near the Grand Canyon, they try to raise cattle in a way that doesn’t sully the sensitive southwestern landscape.

New horizons: Ethan Aumack, who oversees conservation science at the Kane and Two Mile ranches, looks out over the Vermilion Cliffs that act as a natural fence on part of the land. (Jina Moore)

By Jina Moore
The Christian Science Monitor

John Heyneman has a problem. It’s late January, and some of his cows are missing. They’re stuck on the Kaibab Plateau, a 9,000-foot high Ponderosa pine forest just north of the Grand Canyon. Most of his 400 cattle made it safely from the forest, their summer home, to the valley below, where they winter. But the stragglers wandered off on land that lacks a cowboy’s most important tool – fences – and now they’re lost, stranded knee-deep in snow.

Mr. Heyneman is the ranch manager at the Kane and Two Miles Ranches, which cover 850,000 acres of mostly public land on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. That’s a lot of land across which to lose a cow. The aging fences have gaps in them, and passers-by often leave gates ajar. Up here, where the land rolls from rocky desert to lush forest to sandy cliffs, the most reliable resource in Heyneman’s work is the land. As an example, he gestures out the window of his white Dodge truck.

“Those rocks,” he says, pointing to the Vermilion Cliffs, one of the most famous landmarks in the Southwest, “are one of the few really effective fences we have.”

The ranches are a partnership between the Grand Canyon Trust and the Conservation Fund, which together spent $4.5 million for the land as an investment in conservation. But the parcels came with a controversial catch: cows. Yet here, the cattle have gone green. Or, if you prefer, the conservationists have gone cowboy. It’s an unlikely partnership between ranchers and environmentalists, two groups usually on opposite sides of the fence. Then again, those fences don’t usually come in 3,000-foot-high red rock.

•••

For decades, conservation groups have decried cattle grazing as an act of environmental destruction. Cows trample native plants and insects, leech scarce water, and aggravate soil erosion, environmentalists say. Heyneman has heard it all before, and he even agrees – to a certain extent.

“They are certainly people in the Southwest who really believe that cows are the great demise of the American West, and I’m not sure I’m willing to put that on their shoulders,” he says. “I don’t love cows. I don’t find them sacred. But I don’t find them diabolic either.”

Heyneman grew up in a Montana ranching family but never yearned to be a rancher himself. He went to college “back East in Minnesota,” where he studied science just long enough “to figure out that you could get whatever answer you wanted by changing what question you asked.” Itching with wanderlust after college, he worked for two years in Brazil, and later got a master’s degree in soil sciences.

He lives in Flagstaff, Ariz., and works in the Trust’s offices three days a week, then pulls out his Kevlar pants and pops in an audiobook for the two-hour commute to the ranches, where he spends the rest of his work week. His cowboys live up here.

Sometimes, they even stay at the ranch headquarters, a small stone building that once housed “Buffalo Bill” and a group of English aristocrats William Frederick Cody courted as investors for the hunting lodge he hoped to build here. Today, the stone house still lacks plumbing and power, and except for one week a month, Heyneman sleeps at his home in Flagstaff.

“I’m still a little more Alpine, I’m afraid,” he says. “I’ve got this affinity to running water that has not completely diminished.”

His counterpart in this operation is Ethan Aumack, a tall redhead in a fleece vest who oversees conservation science at the ranches. Mr. Aumack is a fifth-generation vegetarian who grew up in Flagstaff ditching school to go hiking in the Grand Canyon. In his office, he keeps a button that says “HELP PEOPLE.”

It’s from his grandmother, the third in a genealogical line of Norwegian immigrants who wouldn’t wear leather out of concern for cows. “There’s a lot of humor to be had about the vegetarian and the red meat rancher coming together on this project,” admits Aumack (who also confesses to eating beef from both ranches).

The project isn’t about nourishing cattle with ecofriendly feed or building wooden instead of barbed-wire fences. These cowboy-conservationists aren’t that kind of green. What they are doing, instead, is asking whether cattle ranching can be successful and environmental.

Actually, this may be the more revolutionary question. Environmental groups have been buying up land in the West to control the 80-year-old grazing permits it comes with. The idea is to retire the permits, and with them, the cows. That, eco-activists hope, will save the land.

The Trust didn’t have that option. If it retired its permits, Heyneman says, the government would just reallocate them. So if it wanted to preserve a quintessential American vista, it had to get in the cattle business. What began as an environmental initiative therefore became a ranching operation that defies the conventions of two sciences: ecology and economics.

Not many people who want to make money get into small-scale ranching in the Southwest. The businesses that have been turning a profit tend to be the big operations that own the land on which they graze their cows. Family-owned ranches often run their cattle on public lands and represent more of a hobby than a livelihood: One of Heyneman’s cowboys says his family and their neighbors all have day jobs and ranch on weekends, mostly as a way of spending time with each other and enjoying the landscape.

If the economics of small-scale ranching is dismal, the ecology is murky. Almost every aspect of ranching can inspire an ecological debate, and, sometimes, concessions. Heyneman was quick to prohibit his cowboys from a time-honored way of protecting cows – shooting coyotes or rattlesnakes. And, occasionally, his cows get a little cramped: The Trust sealed 10,000 acres off from the ranches to protect federal restoration activities, and it built fences of rough-hewn wood around a series of lakes that date back to a time the ocean covered the desert.

Other things are not as easy. If you let cattle drink from streams, for example, they might despoil riverbank habitat. Every source of water, then, is a potential source of tension. And not just between the cowboy and the conservationist. Earlier this year, one cowboy here said, ranch staff went to fix a spring and “near got in a fist fight” with neighbors who thought the water was theirs.

•••

Ultimately, the goal here is not to turn a profit from beef, but to preserve a unique American landscape. Through Aumack’s eyes, it is a wearied landscape, lurched out of its natural balance by a hundred years of human use. He’s trying to turn that around.

Aumack has led 550 volunteers in 47,000 hours of labor on the land since 2005. They’ve cleared tumbleweed from the fences, pulled water-sucking tamarisk from riverbeds, and counted the number of non-native plants across the ranches. The data they’ve gathered will help predict future brush fires, prioritize areas for protection, and offer guidance on better ways to graze cattle.

But there are things even science can’t prove, including the question at the heart of the operation: Are cows bad for the land? “The science doesn’t give us clear answers,” Aumack says. “It gives us some additional information to clarify the consequences of making different decisions, but it doesn’t necessarily decide what’s right or wrong.” Whether cows should graze on arid land in the American West is ultimately a matter of judgment – and politics.

Heyenman, on the other hand, knows one thing for sure: In the dead of winter, cows don’t belong in three feet of snow, and those stranded cattle on the Kaibab Plateau are in need of a rescue. Fortunately, the professional cowboy is also an amateur pilot. Heyneman will circle the pines in his plane until he finds the cows, and then lead them, one by one, back to the valley.

Grand Canyon flood results erode

Some of the sandbars and beaches built up in the March high-flow release are back to pre-flood levels.

By CYNDY COLE
Arizona Daily Sun

A half-year after a manmade flood built bigger sandbars and beaches in the Grand Canyon that are boon to native fish and plants, U.S. Geological Survey researchers say beaches are again eroding.

The data at this point is incomplete, researchers say, but some of the photos to date point to eroding sand bars as water releases from Glen Canyon Dam vary to meet peak power demands and interstate water-sharing agreements. A group of federal agents, tribes, environmentalists and power agencies that advises the Interior Department on how the Colorado River in Grand Canyon should be managed is meeting in Flagstaff Tuesday and today to discuss the latest research and propose next steps.

A budget up for discussion by the group today could determine whether there are any more experimental floods in the next five years. The next one called for in an earlier report by the Bureau of Reclamation is not until 2012.

About $3.3 million is projected to be spent on USGS research related to the flood this year and next.

The amount of sand in the Colorado River is of interest because it is believed to be linked to the creation of backwaters that could help promote the survival of some fish species, and because boaters use beaches for camping.

All of the sand that once flowed into the lower Colorado River upstream of Lake Powell is now trapped by the dam, leaving it to the remaining tributaries to supply sand to the main channel during periods of high water.

The advisory group did some battle publicly this spring, when Grand Canyon Superintendent Steve Martin proposed more regular floods to improve the canyon's ecosystem, to the disagreement of power producers and his bosses.

The floods are conducted as part of an experimental program to manage the Grand Canyon ecosystem to allow for power generation at the dam, while offsetting the dam where possible.

USGS researchers say it is possible to maintain some sandbars and beaches along the Colorado River with the dam in place.

But for that to happen, according to researchers' findings, power production would often suffer.

Environmental groups, including the Grand Canyon Trust, have litigated over dam operations, saying what's beneficial for peak power production puts some of the canyon's few remaining endangered fish species in jeopardy.

Trust employee Nikolai Lash, who works on this issue, said it's hopeful that the coming presidential election could change the Colorado River.

"The orientation has been completely backwards," he said. "This dam has been operated not for the benefit of Grand Canyon, but for the benefit of hydropower interests."

The third experimental flood since 1996, the March experiment was timed to move around three times more sand than was available in the tributaries to the Colorado River in 2004.

Cyndy Cole can be reached at 913-8607 or at ccole@azdailysun.com.

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Middle of Nowhere Is a Center of Conflict

A federal plan allows more recreation and mining in a rugged land of national monuments.



By Julie Cart, Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times



VERMILION CLIFFS NATIONAL MONUMENT, Ariz. — The 3 million acres of federal land in the Arizona Strip have their remote geography to thank for preserving their spectacular red sandstone escarpments, slot canyons, rock art and ruins of ancient pueblos.

One of the last places in the Lower 48 to be mapped, the strip, in the northwestern corner of the state, is today bypassed by major highways and mostly devoid of gas stations, hotels and other visitor services. As a result, more than 12,000 years of human history written on this rugged landscape has remained in place, undisturbed by tourism or development.

That is about to change.

Here at the backdoor of the Grand Canyon, two national monuments, Grand Canyon-Parashant and Vermilion Cliffs, are poised to absorb the effects of the explosive growth from Las Vegas to the west and St. George, Utah, to the north — two of the fastest expanding areas in the nation.

The federal agency that oversees much of the land in the Arizona Strip, the Bureau of Land Management, is preparing a long-range plan for the area that would allow uranium mining and oil and gas exploration across 96% of the lands outside the monuments.

The plan would also permit livestock grazing in the monuments and open 3,000 miles of roads to motorized recreation, including some in the monuments. A 7,100-acre "play area" for dirt bikes and all-terrain vehicles would be established. And although that area would be outside the monuments, it would be next to land set aside to protect a threatened cactus and a Native American petroglyph site.

Critics, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the local County Board of Supervisors, say the agency's plan fails to protect the two monuments with their thousands of historic and cultural sites, and exposes fragile BLM lands to nearly unrestricted livestock grazing and recreational activities.

Others say the proposal won't safeguard rare plants and animals, such as the desert tortoise and 20 species of raptors and other birds, including a colony of California condors reintroduced at Vermilion Cliffs.

"What you have in the Arizona Strip is a kind of sleepy place that has been highlighted with two monuments, but the BLM hasn't really risen to these different challenges," said Martha Hahn, a former BLM administrator with 21 years at the agency. Hahn now works with the conservation group Grand Canyon Trust.

But current BLM officials say the plan, which is four years in the works and won't be finalized for months, is a commendable effort to reconcile the agency's tradition of various uses on public land with its newer mandate to conserve national monuments.

"It's all about finding the right balance between protecting the resource and allowing the public to use the land for grazing and other activities," said Scott Florence, the BLM's district manager for the Arizona Strip.

The Arizona Strip was cut off from its surrounding area by the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River until a ferry was established in 1871, which remained the only river crossing until the first bridge was built 60 years later.

After ancient Pueblo people settled on the mesas and in the canyons, only the intrepid passed through here: Spanish friars in the 18th century, wayward mountain men, scattered trappers and, in the 19th century, Mormon families guiding wagons along the Honeymoon Trail to St. George.

In 2000, President Clinton created the Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument, at just over 1 million acres, and the Vermilion Cliffs National Monument, at nearly 300,000 acres. The BLM manages another 1 1/2 million acres in the area that don't carry the same level of protection.

The presidential proclamations called the monuments geological treasures. The one for Vermillion Cliffs reads: "Full of natural splendor and a sense of solitude, this area remains remote and unspoiled, qualities that are essential to the protection of the scientific and historic objects it contains."

Up to now, the Arizona Strip has been administered under a 1992 management plan. The proposed plan is the first to take into account the monument designations. Much of the land within the national monuments was intended to be set aside for scientific study, but BLM budgets often fail to make room for expensive scientific analysis. To survey the sites in Grand Canyon-Parashant, for example, would cost $30 million, according to Diana Hawks, who leads the BLM's planning effort.

According to an article in the latest edition of Issues in Science and Technology, published by the National Academies and the University of Texas at Dallas, only 6% of the BLM's 260 million acres in the West have been surveyed for cultural resources. About 263,000 cultural sites have been found, according to the article, but archeologists estimate there are likely to be 4.5 million sites on BLM holdings.

The pattern is repeated here. More than 97% of the land within the monuments has not been surveyed for archeological or paleontological sites, and according to a scientific study conducted last summer, 63% of the sites in Grand Canyon-Parashant are vulnerable to damage by off-road vehicle routes, as are nearly half the sites in the more remote Vermilion Cliffs monument.

"These archeological sites are a nonrenewable resource. Once they are gone, they are gone forever, " said Peter Bungart, a Flagstaff-based archeologist who conducted last year's monument surveys. "The silent history that's on that landscape is important, unless you argue that history is not important."

The BLM's new plan concludes that none of the proposed activities in the monuments would damage resources. But critics contend that the agency can't claim that roads won't damage archeological resources, considering the BLM doesn't even know where all of the sites are.

On a recent tour of Vermilion Cliffs, Rick Moore of the Grand Canyon Trust pointed out many archeological sites near roads, especially vulnerable to vandals. He showed one site atop the Paria Plateau where a road sliced though remnants of an early pueblo, the ruin's low stone walls flanking the dirt road.

The Coconino County Board of Supervisors is particularly concerned about the web of new roads open in the monuments and the other BLM lands.

"We have ample evidence that misuse of the land in these landscapes is sometimes irreparable, and sometimes it ain't gonna be right in your lifetime," Supervisor Carl Taylor said.

Taylor said the prospect of renewed uranium mining has created a rush to stake claims on the western side of the Arizona Strip and that the activity would create even more roads.

According to the EPA, the BLM's plan would open nearly nine times more public land to off-road vehicle use.

The EPA also argued against off-road travel in desert tortoise habitat and recommended that the BLM "eliminate open motorized and mechanized cross-county travel due to substantial impacts from this activity on soils, water resources, cultural resources and wildlife."

Proponents of motorized recreation, on the other hand, fear they will lose some of the freedom they enjoyed before the monuments were created.

"What we're worried about is that traditional routes are going to be closed, somewhat arbitrarily," said Dale Grange of Hurricane, Utah, president of the Tri State ATV Club and the motorized recreation representative at BLM meetings. Grange said motorcycle and ATV rallies in the Arizona Strip draw hundreds of participants. But because of BLM restrictions, organizers have to turn people away.

The BLM's Florence said the management plan for the area, though not perfect, is the result of years of careful, ongoing study.

"We fully expect to make some changes, clarifying what the plan does in term of protecting monument objects," he said. "It needs to be more clear, building in specific details exactly how the monument objects will be protected."

Deal May Be Near on Power Plant

Edison is negotiating for a continued supply of coal from a mine on Indian land.

By Marc Lifsher, Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times

Southern California Edison Co. is close to reaching a deal with two Indian tribes and the world's largest coal company that would bolster the utility's effort to keep open a Nevada power plant that provides cheap electricity to Southern California — but is a major source of air pollution.

Closed-door talks among Edison, the Hopi and Navajo tribes of northern Arizona and mining giant Peabody Energy Corp. are aimed at resolving water-use issues that threaten the future of Peabody's coal-mining operations on Indian land, tribal leaders said. The Black Mesa mine is the only source of coal for the giant Mohave power plant near Laughlin, Nev., and is a vital pillar of the Hopi economy.

"Essentially, the parties are very near to some agreements" on how best to share the region's scarce water supply and other issues related to the mine, Hopi Chairman Wayne Taylor said.

Ensuring a steady supply of coal and water is crucial to Edison's attempt to keep the 1,580-megawatt plant open despite a court-ordered Jan. 1 deadline requiring the utility to either install costly pollution-control equipment or shutter the 34-year-old generating facility.

Edison declined to discuss details of the negotiations. "We are working hard on all reasonable options that could make possible the continued operation of the plant," the company said in a statement.

Environmentalists, who can veto any deal to keep the plant open, were noncommittal Monday about Edison's efforts. They said the utility must fulfill its obligations to cut pollution but said they were "open to a viable proposal" that both cleans the air and boosts tribal economies.

To date, Edison has done little to significantly reduce emissions from the plant since settling a lawsuit brought by environmental groups under the U.S. Clean Air Act in 1999.

Until recently, Edison had told the California Public Utilities Commission that it expected to close the Mohave plant at the end of 2005. That also signaled the end of the Black Mesa mine because its only customer is the generating facility.

But on Sept. 26, Edison, a unit of Rosemead-based Edison International, reversed itself, telling the commission that it wanted to keep the plant open or shut it only temporarily.

One reason cited by the utility: Skyrocketing natural gas prices have sharply increased the cost of operating more modern, gas-fired power plants, making power produced by Mohave's coal-burning generators cheaper by comparison.

Edison, which owns 56% of the plant, also noted that regulators were concerned about the reliability of Southern California's supply of electricity. The Mohave plant provides about 7% of the electricity used by the utility's 13 million customers, many of them in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

The remaining plant ownership is split among several utilities, including the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

Edison has repeatedly told California regulators that it wouldn't spend the $1 billion needed for pollution controls and other equipment at the plant until it secured agreements from the Hopis, Navajos and Peabody that would guarantee a long-term supply of coal and water that is required.

Those commitments could be close at hand, Hopi leaders said. They are backing a proposal that would allow Peabody to continue mining at Black Mesa and would ensure a new source of water to carry the coal to the power plant via a 270-mile slurry pipeline.

Edison and the tribal leaders then hope to persuade the environmental groups to give them a waiver to operate the plant for at least three years until the pollution equipment and pipeline improvements can be completed, Hopi leaders said.

According to data gathered in 2002 and 2003 by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Mohave plant spewed an average of 19,000 tons of nitrogen oxides, 40,000 tons of sulfur dioxides and 2,000 tons of fine soot a year into the air above Laughlin, a Colorado River resort and gambling town. Emissions from the plant also have contributed to reduced visibility around the Grand Canyon to the east of the plant, environmentalists said.

Environmentalists accuse Edison of sending mixed signals to the Indians, California regulators and the plaintiffs who won the consent decree. "They're playing a game of chicken up to the end of this pending deadline," said Rob Smith of the Sierra Club in Phoenix.

Environmentalists remain frustrated at what they describe as Edison's six years of foot-dragging, said Roger Clark of the Grand Canyon Trust in Flagstaff, Ariz. Nevertheless, he said his group would be "happy to listen" to any proposal from the utility.

"Our hope is that we can find a solution that not only cleans up the pollution but also leaves the tribes in a much stronger economic position in the future," he said.

Rob Hammond, Peabody's Southwest group executive, declined to comment on the talks. Navajo leaders didn't return calls seeking comment.

Hopi leaders said they wanted to protect the environment but needed an extension of the pollution-control deadline to make sure that tribal economies weren't harmed by even the temporary loss of coal royalties and, in the Navajo's case, hundreds of high-paying jobs at the Peabody mine.

What's more, the development of a new source of water for the mine from an underground aquifer about 100 miles south of the Peabody open pit could be crucial to economic development of the 7,000-member Hopi tribe and the 250,000-member Navajo Nation.

The Hopi, a tribe of farmers and artisans that has lived on the same desert mesas for the last 1,000 years, has a 50% unemployment rate. A shutdown at the mine would suck as much as 40% out of the $20-million Hopi operating budget for 2006.

"This could be disastrous for the tribe," said Taylor, the chairman. "We can be considered today as an endangered species."

The environmentalists are sympathetic but remain distrustful of Edison.

"We are unwilling to excuse further violations of the law," they told the tribes in a May 25 letter signed by representatives of the Grand Canyon Trust, the Sierra Club and the National Parks Conservation Assn.

Consumer advocates said that closing down the Mohave plant shouldn't leave Edison short of power because the utility would open its new gas-fired, 1,054-megawatt Mountainview power plant in Redlands early next year.

And even if it's retrofitted, the plant at most can operate only 20 more years, said Bill Marcus, a consultant for the Utility Reform Network, a San Francisco-based ratepayers' advocate. Edison's permit to take water from the Colorado River to operate the generators expires in 2026, he said.

The best scenario would be for Edison to give up trying to keep Mohave open and, instead, invest in alternative energy projects and transmission lines that would help the Hopi and Navajo exploit their potentially abundant wind and solar power resources, said Clark of the Grand Canyon Trust.

"With California wanting to invest in cleaner forms of energy," he said, "why buy another 20 years of inefficient, old coal-fired generation?"

The Man Behind the Land

COLUMN ONE
David Gelbaum has shunned publicity while giving millions to preserve California wilderness and teach youths about nature.

By Kenneth R. Weiss
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

He has given more money to conservation causes in California than anyone else. His gifts have helped protect 1,179 square miles of mountain and desert landscapes, an area the size of Yosemite National Park.

His donations to wilderness education programs have made it possible for 437,000 inner-city schoolchildren to visit the mountains, the desert or the beach — often for the first time.

Over a decade of steadily growing contributions — including more than $100 million to the Sierra Club — this mathematician turned financial angel has taken great pains to remain anonymous.

In manner and appearance, David Gelbaum has maintained a low profile for someone who can afford to give away hundreds of millions of dollars.

At age 55, retired from the rarefied world of Wall Street hedge funds, he lives in Newport Beach with his wife and two of his five children in a large home where visitors on occasion have mistaken him for the gardener. Bespectacled, 5 feet 5 and slightly built, he speaks softly, barely above a hoarse whisper. He drives a Honda Civic hybrid, wears jeans and T-shirts to business meetings and helps the kids clean up at the wilderness camp-outs he sponsors.

Those who know him say he is never more uncomfortable than when asked to talk about his wealth or how much of it he has given away.

His donations, which according to public records and other sources total at least $250 million, have preserved hundreds of miles of wildlife corridors across mountains and deserts, tying together once-isolated national parks and wilderness areas. One conservation deal, land trust experts say, is the largest single purchase of private land ever handed over to the U.S. government for one purpose: to leave it alone.

He has given more than $20 million to schools in Orange County and handed over 108 rolling acres in the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains for use as an outdoor-education camp.

He has contributed $3.5 million to Orange County Sheriff Michael S. Carona's foundation to help the poorest children attend the camp's wilderness programs. Carona is both grateful and a bit mystified by the benefactor.

"He's one of these strange guys who doesn't want any publicity but wants to take care of kids and the community," Carona said. "When you look him in the eye and say, 'You've made a positive change in these kids' lives,' he does not want to take any credit for it. He's almost embarrassed when you say thank you to him."

(A federal grand jury recently subpoenaed financial records of Carona's foundation. Federal officials have not disclosed why they want the documents.)

Gelbaum, a native of Minnesota who moved to California as a teenager, was a math prodigy who parlayed his talents into a highly lucrative three-decade career using mathematical formulas to pick stocks and bonds for wealthy investors in hedge funds.

He won't say how much he made. He started giving his money away in ever-larger amounts in 1994.

"Most wealthy people spend their lives trying to make more and more money rather than give it away," Gelbaum said during a series of interviews that he agreed to only reluctantly. "They wait too long. They are depriving themselves of a lot of joy. I'm doing what I want to do. It's not like it's money that I or my family will ever need.

"It's a joy to see this land preserved and opening these kids' eyes to the natural world. It's not like burning the money. It goes into the land or into the kids' experiences. Both last forever."

Some charitable foundations have given more money to conservation causes, but much of it is aimed at saving tropical rain forests or other overseas ventures. The only individual whose contributions to California conservation rival Gelbaum's is Caroline Getty, granddaughter of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty. She recently donated $150 million to the Preserving Wild California project of the Resources Legacy Fund Foundation.

Gelbaum said his interest in land conservation was inspired by camping trips he took with his father and brothers to lakes in northern Minnesota, as well as Yellowstone National Park and Mt. Whitney. "Those were the happiest memories of my childhood."

It isn't enough, he said, "to protect wilderness just for people who can afford to go to it. I think bringing kids out to the wild is unquestionably the right thing to do. These kids have pretty tough lives. It opens their eyes to the world outside of their neighborhood. Some of the kids will grow up to protect the land they learn to love. You could look at it as an investment into the environment."

When making donations, Gelbaum usually insists that his identity not be revealed — out of concern, he says, for his family's security.

Besides, he said, "I don't think that if you have a lot money and you give away a lot of money, you should get a lot of recognition. You shouldn't be able to buy that."

Gelbaum has made his largest contributions to the 10-year-old Wildlands Conservancy, an Oak Glen, Calif.-based group that he co-founded with David Myers, who has remained the group's executive director.

Myers, an ardent environmentalist, wanted to sell 640 acres of desert land he owned near Yucca Valley and use most of the proceeds for other conservation projects. In 1994, he placed a newspaper ad seeking "a conservation-minded donor" who would buy, but not develop, the land. Gelbaum answered the ad. They have been working together ever since.

Gelbaum now acknowledges that he has been the biggest benefactor of the conservancy and its sister organization, the Wildlands Endowment Fund, which has taken in $157.8 million for land preservation, outdoor education and related programs.

But for the last decade, Myers avoided revealing the identity of his reclusive angel, despite growing curiosity about who was bankrolling this obscure conservation organization that was buying and swapping real estate with the gusto of a 19th century land baron.

Beginning in 1995, the group began making strategic land purchases, now totaling 70 square miles, in order to link the San Bernardino, San Jacinto and Big Horn Mountains with Joshua Tree National Park.

The next year, Wildlands purchased a 97,000-acre former cattle ranch in the foothills of the San Emigdio Mountains, northwest of Gorman, where a developer once hoped to build thousands of luxury homes.

Just outside metropolitan Los Angeles, the ranch, renamed Wind Wolves, has become the West Coast's largest privately owned nature preserve, its cascading hills and steep canyons an hour and half drive from the nation's second largest city.

By 2000, Wildlands had filled many of the largest holes in the wilderness tapestry created by the California Desert Protection Act of 1994. The legislation created the Mojave National Preserve, enlarged Joshua Tree and Death Valley national monuments and elevated both to national park status but left intact several privately owned parcels.

Wildlands bought out the largest of the landowners, the former real estate arm of the Santa Fe Pacific Corp. railroad, which had threatened to open the desert to development. Wildlands acquired 1,000 square miles and turned over the land to the federal government.

In 2001, Gelbaum branched out with two back-to-back anonymous gifts to the Sierra Club Foundation that dwarfed all previous individual contributions to the club. The $101.5 million in donations led to a 10-fold increase in the club's Youth in Wilderness programs and expansion of many other club activities.

But the windfall caused a stir internally. Gelbaum's identity, known only to a few Sierra Club officials, became an issue in a bitter struggle for control of the club's board of directors.

A slate of candidates, which wanted the club to call for tighter controls on immigration to stabilize the U.S. population and its impact on the environment, demanded to know the source of the donations. The candidates contended that the club's leadership opposed their election partly because of pressure brought by the secret donor.

"Is this foreign money? Is it money that comes with special obligations? I would want to know I'm not running a laundry or being a front group for an entity that doesn't have the best interests of the United States at heart," said former Colorado Gov. David Lamm.

Lamm and other like-minded candidates were soundly defeated in a vote of club members last April, and the source of the money was not revealed. But clues surfaced during the flap.

A Sierra Club official let slip a comment about a pair of unnamed brothers. That and other bits of information led The Times to Gelbaum, who, with his brother, Daniel, sat on the Wildlands Conservancy's board of directors, along with Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope.

David Gelbaum insisted that he played no role in the election. He dismissed allegations that he is calling the shots at the club in any other way.

"None of that is true," he said. "I'm not some Svengali. I'm not that engaged."

But he said Pope long had known where he stood on the contentious issue. "I did tell Carl Pope in 1994 or 1995 that if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me."

Gelbaum said he was a substantial donor at the time but not yet the club's largest benefactor. Immigration arose as an issue in 1994 because Proposition 187, which threatened to deny public education and health care to illegal immigrants, was on the state's ballot.

He said he was so upset by the idea of "pulling kids out of school" that he donated more than $180,000 to the campaign to oppose Proposition 187. After the measure passed, he said, he donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to civil rights lawyers who ultimately got the measure struck down in court.

Gelbaum, who reads the Spanish-language newspaper La Opinión and is married to a Mexican American, said his views on immigration were shaped long ago by his grandfather, Abraham, a watchmaker who had come to America to escape persecution of Jews in Ukraine before World War I.

"I asked, 'Abe, what do you think about all of these Mexicans coming here?' " Gelbaum said. "Abe didn't speak English that well. He said, 'I came here. How can I tell them not to come?'

"I cannot support an organization that is anti-immigration. It would dishonor the memory of my grandparents."

Born in Minneapolis, the second of four sons, Gelbaum moved to California when his father, Bernard Gelbaum, became founding chairman of the UC Irvine math department.

David Gelbaum showed early prowess in math, taking calculus at UC Irvine while still in high school. Months before he graduated from UCI in 1972, he was hired by math professor Edward O. Thorp to help with a business that needed a math researcher.

Thorp, who wrote the book "Beat the Dealer," about how to count cards and win at blackjack, was applying mathematical wizardry to the largest crap game in the world: Wall Street.

His formulas, which later appeared in his book "Beat the Market," led him to launch the nation's first market-neutral hedge fund — one intended to make money for investors whether the market goes up or down. From 1970 to 1989, the fund never had a losing quarter and increased investors' money more than 13-fold.

Gelbaum was one of his first math researchers hired to track and exploit the price discrepancies between a company's stocks and its options, warrants and convertible bonds.

"He was smart. He was idiosyncratic. He was always looking for more," Thorp said.

Thorp recalls a conversation with young Gelbaum about his salary.

"I said, 'I think we can multiply your salary by five times in five years.' He came back to me five years later with the same question. I said, 'I think I can multiply your salary by five times in five years. But I don't think I'll be able to do that again.'"

The firm, called Princeton-Newport Partners, was dissolved in 1989, when five of the firm's stock brokers based in Princeton, N.J., were convicted of scheming to create illegitimate tax losses. The convictions were overturned on appeal. Neither Thorp nor Gelbaum was implicated in the scandal.

Gelbaum emerged from the wreckage as a principal in a new investment firm, operating a new hedge fund using math formulas pioneered by Thorp.

Gelbaum declined to talk about the firm, Sierra Enterprises Group, from which he retired a few years ago. His business success, he said, "was all a matter of chance. It certainly wasn't because I worked 5,000 times as hard as the average person or was 5,000 times smarter than the average person."

He was more forthcoming about his venture into the cattle business. In the mid-1990s, he bought a pair of ranches "to run in an environmentally sensitive manner."

The Kane and Two-Mile ranches are in northern Arizona, a place Gelbaum learned about in a college ecology class. This is where Theodore Roosevelt once hunted mountain lions to reduce predators and increase the number of deer. The deer population soared and then starved in what became a textbook case of disrupting nature's balance chronicled by America's foremost ecologist, Aldo Leopold, in "A Sand County Almanac."

"It caught my imagination," Gelbaum said. So he bought the ranches and arrived with a message. "I told people when I came to Arizona I wanted to be good to the land and good to the people."

He won praise for removing cattle from wilderness areas and for raising wages of the cowboys and providing them housing and health care. He recently agreed to sell the ranches to the Grand Canyon Trust, a conservation group, for $4.5 million.

The ranches cover about 1,000 acres and control grazing rights on 900,000 acres of surrounding federal land.

Four years ago, President Clinton turned a large swath of these grazing lands into the Vermillion Cliffs National Monument, and Gelbaum won the admiration of then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt.

Babbitt's plan provoked the ire of local ranchers, who complained that it would run ranchers off good grazing land. At the height of the protests, Gelbaum's ranch manager stood up in a packed meeting hall and explained that his boss controlled all of the grazing rights in the area and considered the monument perfectly compatible with his ranching operations.

The speech hushed the protesters and allowed the monument to go forward.

"I half-thought about recommending to the president to name the national monument after David Gelbaum," Babbitt said. "Without David Gelbaum, it might well not have happened."

Times researcher Maloy Moore contributed to this report.