Court upholds Obama-era ban on uranium mining near Grand Canyon

The Kanab North uranium mine near the Grand Canyon above Kanab Creek. (Mark Henle/The Republic)

Joshua Bowling
WKYC.com

PHOENIX — The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday upheld a 20-year ban on new uranium mining on public land near the Grand Canyon, while also striking down a challenge to an existing uranium mine south of Grand Canyon National Park.

In its opinion, the court ruled that the ban, imposed in 2012 under former president Obama, lines up with the Constitution and federal environmental laws. However, it ruled that a mine 6 miles south of the national park had a right to operate.

"We upheld the decision of the secretary of the Interior to withdraw, for 20 years, more than 1 million acres of public lands around Grand Canyon National Park from new mining claims," the opinion states. "That withdrawal did not extinguish 'valid existing rights.' "

The ban was put in place by the U.S. Department of the Interior under former secretary Ken Salazar. It came as mining operations were renewing their interest in uranium deposits near the canyon.

A spokeswoman for the Department of the Interior declined to comment Tuesday and said the Department of Justice handles questions on litigation.

A DOJ spokesman declined to comment and did not respond to further questions.

The suit — led by the Havasupai Tribe, Grand Canyon Trust, Center for Biological Diversity and Sierra Club — sought continued protections under the standing mining ban.

"The Havasupai people have been here since time immemorial. This place is who we are,” Havasupai Tribal Chairman Don Watahomigie said in a statement. "This place, these waters and our people deserve protection. The lives of our children and the purity of our waters are not to be gambled with and are not for sale."

In addition to the canyon's symbolic value, supporters of the suit argued it has significant economic value.

Grand Canyon National Park in 2016 contributed about $904 million to local economies and supported nearly 9,800 jobs, according to the National Park Service.

"The Department of the Interior’s decision to protect one of the world’s most enduring landscapes and the sustained health of indigenous communities that live within the watershed of the Grand Canyon was a strong and appropriate one,” said Kevin Dahl, Arizona senior program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association.

About 1 million acres adjacent to the Grand Canyon are protected under the ban, though the continued exception for existing mines came as a disappointment to the plaintiffs in the suit.

"We are disappointed that the court did not uphold the challenge to Canyon Mine, however, and we will continue to do all we can to ensure permanent protection of these lands," Sierra Club Grand Canyon chapter director Sandy Bahr said in a statement Tuesday.

The appeals court's decision comes on the heels of President Trump's decision to drastically shrink two national monuments in Utah — a decision a Navajo Nation attorney called a "slap in the face."

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, has drawn conservationists' ire for his review of national monuments, in particular those established under former presidents Obama and Bill Clinton.

He initially ordered a review of the Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument, north of the Canyon, an area that sits atop uranium deposits. Ultimately, he left the monument unchanged.

In a statement Tuesday, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., criticized Zinke for "ongoing actions to hand over public lands to extractive industries instead of ensuring taxpayers get a fair deal."

A history of litigation

The suit is far from the first for the uranium mining ban.

In 2012, the year it was put in place, The Arizona Republic reported that the National Mining Association and the Nuclear Energy Institute challenged the ban's constitutional merits.

Hal Quinn, president and CEO of the mining group, said at the time that the Interior Department "offered no evidence ... that a million-acre land grab is necessary to avoid environmental harm."

Taylor McKinnon, of the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement Tuesday that opening exposing the land to uranium mining could do harm to its aquifers.

“Any effort to lift this crucial ban will meet fierce opposition,” his statement read. “There’s every reason to believe uranium mining could permanently damage Grand Canyon’s precious aquifers and springs. That’s an unacceptable risk, and it’s immoral of Congress and Trump to even consider it.”

What's next?

Although the mining ban has worked its way through the legal system, some believe this could be the end of the line.

Roger Clark, Grand Canyon program director for the Grand Canyon Trust, said he doesn't believe the case will end up before the Supreme Court.

"In both cases, the appellate court upheld the district court and there was no discrepancy in their rulings and there’s very little, I’m told by our attorneys, angle for appeal in either case," he said. "I’m not an attorney, so I’ll put that caveat in there."

Congressman: Obama says no to Grand Canyon Monument

The proposed Greater Grand Canyon Heritage National Monument would encompass 1.7 million acres in northern Arizona.

By Loretta Yerian
Williams News

WILLIAMS, Ariz. — According to Arizona Representative Raúl Grijalva (D), the Obama administration has decided not to designate the 1.7 million acre Greater Grand Canyon Heritage National Monument before Obama leaves office this week.

In the Jan. 6 press release, Grijalva expressed his disappointment in the decision not to establish the monument, which would have encompassed all of the north Kaibab and Tusayan ranger districts of the Kaibab National Forest as well as lands on the Arizona Strip north of the Colorado River. All lands are currently managed by the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service, Arizona Game and Fish Department, Arizona State Trust Lands, along with approximately 28,000 acres under private ownership.

“I can only express my profound disappointment,” Grijalva said. “The Grand Canyon is one of the world’s most iconic and popular natural places, not just for its beauty but for its importance to tribal culture and history. Instead of building on former Secretary Salazar’s work, the interior and agriculture departments are apparently willing to leave the future of the Grand Canyon and the health of Arizona tribes up to Donald Trump. I am not.”

In 2016, Williams was among a number of cities and towns to pass resolutions opposing the establishment of the monument.

In April, Williams councilman Frank McNelly, representing Williams City Council and as a private rancher, joined small business owners, sportsmen, farmers, ranchers, elected officials and other stakeholders for a public session in Kingman that roundly criticized the proposed monument.

At the time, McNelly said he and other council members were frustrated that state leaders had not consulted with local northern Arizona community members about the monument. He said the land was appropriately managed now and the council saw no reason for the designation of a monument.

“There is very little private land in this state and I think it is very important the people of this state manage the land and not be dictated from some government agency,” McNelly said.

McNelly said he was glad of the outcome and said it was the right decision for the people who live and work the area that would have been in or near the designation.

“I think it is a really positive thing for the state and I would really praise Paul Gosar for his efforts and his vision on giving a voice to this and doing what he could to stop it,” he said. “It is better for the people who live here to decide and make the regulations and rules that govern the land where we live and work.”

Supporters of the designation, which included local and national environmental groups, the Navajo Nation and the Hopi and Havasupai tribes were disappointed in the decision and have vowed to continue to fight for preservation efforts.

“While the lands beyond the rim of the Grand Canyon are no less spectacular, culturally important, or economically vital than before, they do now face an even greater risk,” said Sandy Bahr, director of the Grand Canyon Chapter of the Sierra Club. “We remain dedicated to working with area tribes and communities to ensure these lands are protected for future generations.”

Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye expressed his gratitude in the recent designation of Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, but said he was disappointed in the decision for the Grand Canyon monument.

“We are disappointed that the Grand Canyon was not included in the designation by President Barack Obama under the Antiquities Act,” Begaye said. “We were hopeful to have both designations, but we are thankful for the Bears Ears designation. The Grand Canyon is an international monument that is visited by millions of people each year. The next administration should seriously consider designating the Grand Canyon under the Antiquities Act as a national monument to protect the canyon from mining and abuse in the name of economic development. This landscape should not be destroyed but saved for future generations to admire the beauty of the Southwest. We need to make sure that it is protected as a national monument.”

Supporters of the monument said designation of the monument would have protected wildland species and rare plants, protect cultural and archaeological sites, manage wildlife migration routes, reduce road density, provide retirement of grazing rights and helped prevent new uranium mines.

Polls showed that Arizonans varied in their support for the monument. Arizona representative Grijalva and former Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick supported the designation while U.S. Sen. John McCain (R), U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake (R) and Gov. Doug Ducey opposed the designation.

On Jan. 6, Grijalva reintroduced the Greater Grand Canyon Heritage National Monument Act and started mobilizing monument supporters for a strong push in the 115th Congress. The bill, which closely mirrors the previous version, would confer national monument status on two parcels of federal land, one north and one south of Grand Canyon National Park.

“The need to protect the Grand Canyon is bigger than who’s president or who sits in Congress,” Grijalva said. “The American people demand that this important place be preserved. People from all walks of life have been fighting this fight for a long time, and we’re going to keep working until we get it done.”

McNelly said he will be more confident in the decision not to designate the monument after President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration Jan. 20 and said he thought it was a good effort by Arizonans who opposed the designation, which he doesn’t see changing anytime soon.

“Right now Grijalva is in the minority, being a democrat. We have the majority and our champion, Paul Gosar who I’m sure will be on top of all those things,” he said. “I think Grijalva needs to get over it and go back to worrying about Tucson and not worrying about Williams and the North Rim.”

Feds give 20 more years to Glen Canyon Dam on Colorado River

FILE - This Nov. 19, 2012, file photo, shows the high-flow release of water into the Colorado River from bypass tubes at Glen Canyon Dam in Page, Ariz. The federal government is committing another 20 years to the aging and embattled Glen Canyon Dam it calls crucial to water and power supplies in the West, but that critics say is unstable and should be ripped down. U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell signed documents at a regional water conference Thursday, Dec. 15, 2016, in Las Vegas to have the federal Bureau of Reclamation continue to manage Glen Canyon Dam through 2036. (Rob Schumacher/The Arizona Republic via AP, File) (The Associated Press)

Associated Press
Fox News

LAS VEGAS – The federal government is committing to at least another 20 years of use of a huge Colorado River dam that officials call crucial to states in the West, but that critics say is unstable and should be removed.

"Politics belong out of this, because water is life," said U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell at a conference of key water managers in Las Vegas. She signed an agreement that allows the federal Bureau of Reclamation to manage Glen Canyon Dam and the Lake Powell reservoir in Arizona through 2036.

The agreement "provides certainty and predictability to those that use water and power from the dam," Jewell said, while also providing environmental protection for fish and wildlife in the Grand Canyon, through which the dam sends water to Lake Mead and Hoover Dam near Las Vegas.

Critics call Glen Canyon Dam obsolete and Lake Powell too porous and wasteful to keep operating in a basin.

Glen Canyon Dam, completed in 1964 near Page, Arizona, is the second-tallest concrete-arch dam in the United States, behind Hoover Dam near Las Vegas. But while Hoover Dam is anchored in solid volcano-baked basalt, Glen Canyon Dam spans a gorge lined with Navajo sandstone that critics compare with hardened sand dunes.

"Lake Powell is evaporating and seeping hundreds of thousands of acre-feet per year that are completely lost to the (Colorado River) system," said Gary Wockner, executive director of the Denver-based group Save the Colorado. He called Jewell's decision "an extraordinary waste."

"In order to keep the lake level high enough to keep electric turbines spinning, they're going to have to buy massive amounts of water from farmers in Colorado and Utah," Wockner said.

Glen Canyon has eight hydroelectric turbine generators that the Bureau of Reclamation says produce about 5 billion kilowatt-hours of hydroelectric power per year for distribution by the Western Area Power Administration to Nebraska and six of seven Colorado River basin states.

Jewell told reporters the agreement received five years of study about economic, technical, social and environmental factors, and was supported by states, the National Parks Conservation Association, Western Area Power Administration, the Navajo Nation and six other tribes, Grand Canyon river rafting groups and the public.

She said the so-called Long-term Experimental and Management Plan won't change water allocations for the basin states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — or Mexico.

But drought might. Jewell spoke several times of a 50-50 chance that a drought declaration will be made next August, forcing cuts in water deliveries beginning in January 2018 to Arizona and Nevada.

Under various treaties, regulations, statutes and agreements including the Colorado River Compact of 1922, the seven states are promised a share of about 15 million acre-feet of water the river was projected to take in annually from rainfall and snowmelt. Drought has cut that figure, and officials acknowledge the available supply today falls short of promised amounts.

Anne Castle, a former assistant Interior Department Interior secretary who spent years working on Colorado River issues, called the decision that Jewell signed important for the West. She said revenue from power produced at the dam pay for endangered species, environmental management and reclamation programs.

Feds to flood Grand Canyon to distribute sediment

Glen Canyon Dam water release in 2013. (Bureau of Reclamation)

Associated Press
Arizona Republic

PAGE — Campsites along the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon will be in shorter supply as federal officials flood the waterway.

The high-flow release from Glen Canyon Dam in northern Arizona is scheduled to start Monday and end Friday. It's the third under an innovative science-based experimental plan approved in May 2012.

Tons of sediment from river channels will be re-deposited along downstream reaches as sandbars and beaches along the river. Grand Canyon officials say most campsites will be smaller and some low-lying sites might not be usable.

Most of the sediment once deposited throughout the Grand Canyon now is trapped behind the dam near the Arizona-Utah border. The intent of the flooding is to mimic pre-dam conditions.

The Arizona Game and Fish Department says the release should enhance trout fishing.

Arizona town near Grand Canyon runs low on water

In this April 11, 2014 photo, low reservoir levels reveal tree stumps and a cracked lake bed in Williams, Ariz. Officials in Williams have declared a water crisis amid a drought that is quickly drying up nearby reservoirs and forcing the community to pump its only two wells to capacity.(AP Photo)

By Associated Press

WILLIAMS, Ariz. (AP) -- In the northern Arizona city of Williams, restaurant patrons don't automatically get a glass of water anymore. Residents caught watering lawns or washing cars with potable water can be fined. Businesses are hauling water from outside town to fill swimming pools, and building permits have been put on hold because there isn't enough water to accommodate development.

Officials in the community about 60 miles from the Grand Canyon's South Rim have clamped down on water use and declared a crisis amid a drought that is quickly drying up nearby reservoirs and forcing the city to pump its only two wells to capacity.

The situation offers a glimpse at how cities across the West are coping with a drought that has left them thirsting for water. More than a dozen rural towns in California recently emerged from emergency water restrictions that had a sheriff's office on the lookout for water bandits at a local lake. One New Mexico town relied on bottled water for days last year. In southern Nevada, water customers are paid to remove lawns and cannot install any new grass in their front yards.

Officials in Williams jumped straight to the most severe restrictions after receiving only about 6 inches of precipitation from October to April - about half of normal levels - and a bleak forecast that doesn't include much rain. City leaders acknowledge the move is extreme but say it's the only way to make the city has enough water to survive.

"We knew we had to take some action to preserve the water," Mayor John Moore said.

Reservoirs that supply residents' taps are so low that they reveal tree stumps, plants and cracked earth once submerged by water.

Businesses are feeling the effects, too. The Grand Canyon Railway, which shuttles tourists from Williams to the national park, is using water recycled from rainfall, drained from a hotel pool and wastewater purchased in nearby Flagstaff to irrigate its landscaping and run steam engines.

Residents are praying they get some relief soon.

"I still have hope God will send us the rain," said resident Jan Bardwell.

Communities across New Mexico also have seen their drinking water supplies dwindle in recent years due to severe drought and aging infrastructure. The town of Magdalena last summer was forced last summer to turn to bottled water after its well failed.

In the far western Texas city of El Paso, residents can't water outdoors on Mondays. And officials have been reusing treated wastewater and investing in a major desalination plant that turns salty, unusable groundwater into a drinking source for the border city.

As Williams waits for moisture, Moore said city officials are exploring whether new wells will help secure a more sustainable water source. He said water conservation should take residents through the next couple of months until the rainy season arrives and winter returns.

In his home, Moore is taking shorter showers, flushing the toilet less often and thinking twice about dumping out water he doesn't drink.

Other residents are using buckets to collect cold water that normally would go to waste while they wait for a hot shower, he said. Automatic shut-off devices are planned for showers at the city pool, and signs at water filling stations declare them off-limits to commercial water haulers.

Excessive water consumption could be costly under the restrictions. Residents using more than 15,000 gallons of water per month will see their bills rise by 150 percent to 200 percent. The penalty for using potable water outdoors for anything but public health or emergencies comes with a $100 surcharge that doubles for subsequent violations.

The Grand Canyon Railway poured tens of thousands of dollars into a landscape remodel last year that was watered with city taps. This year, the company had to gather that water from other sources, bringing in three rails cars to store it onsite.

It was a scenario that general manager Bob Baker didn't see coming. "It's drastic," he said.

Other northern Arizona towns have less-stringent water restrictions. In Payson, residents are on a schedule for outdoor watering or washing cars. They are prohibited from putting in new grass and must choose from drought-tolerant plants for landscaping.

The goal for each person is to use no more than 89 gallons of water per day, but residents have averaged better than that at 70 to 75 gallons daily over the past decade, Mayor Kenny Evans said.

Water rates that increased decades ago allow the town to offer rebates for low-flow toilets and other water-saving devices. Payson has positioned itself well enough to extend water services to nearby communities while preaching conservation.

"We don't have enough water to waste it," said Evans, president of the Northern Arizona Municipal Water Users Association.

In Williams, Moore recently looked out at the reservoirs surrounding town in anticipation of a monsoon season that could help replenish them.

"We know in due time, the lakes will fill back up, the snow will come," he said.

How old is the Grand Canyon? Scientific debate rages on

View of the Grand Canyon, Arizona. There's no consensus on how old the canyon is. (Gabriel Bouys / AFP / Getty Images)

Becky Oskin LiveScience
NBC News

The Colorado River took the easy route when it carved the Grand Canyon through Arizona's ruddy sandstones and pastel limestones, a new study claims.

Instead of slicing through thousands of feet of unblemished rock, the Colorado River recycled ancient canyons, at least one of which was 70 million years old, researchers reported Sunday (Jan. 26) in the journal Nature Geoscience.

"I think the Colorado River found low places and paleocanyons and ancient topographies that led to the Grand Canyon," said Karl Karlstrom, lead study author and a geologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

The new findings, which rely mainly on reinterpretations of other scientists' work, summarize decades of geologic sleuthing. But the study may do little to resolve the heated debate over the age of the Grand Canyon. For the past year, Karlstrom and others have stridently attacked work published Nov. 29, 2012, in the journal Science that suggested the westernmost Grand Canyon was 70 million years old.

But the debate over the Grand Canyon's age has raged for decades, in part because so much of the canyon's history is missing, carried away by the river. The little that's left means many things to many people. The argument also hinges on how one defines the Grand Canyon. Is there a Grand Canyon without the Colorado River running through it? [Video: Virtual Tour of Grand Canyon]

For Karlstrom, the answer is no. Even though his latest findings jibe with the 2012 Science paper, and he reuses that data, he asserts that the Grand Canyon is less than 6 million years old. He was also affronted by claims that dinosaurs walked on the Grand Canyon. "The Colorado River found a path and carved the entire canyon 5 [million] to 6 million years ago," Karlstrom told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet. "I agree our data is not in disagreement, but I had the [National] Park Service call me up and say, 'Is it true that the park is 70 million years old?'"

Assembling the canyon

To prove the point, Karlstrom and his co-authors assembled published geologic evidence, along with four new "cooling ages" in the westernmost canyon. The cooling ages come from apatite crystals, which contain helium-producing uranium. When the apatite is hotter than about 122 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius), helium escapes. As the rocks cool — for instance, when a canyon-carving river removes their cover — the helium stays trapped in the apatite crystals. Measuring the helium is a gauge for how long the rock has been cool, and exposed near the surface.

Karlstrom's group snipped the Grand Canyon into pieces, and then calculated how long ago each segment was carved. Only two of the segments are less than 6 million years old, the age posted on the National Park Service's signage, they found. Here's the breakdown, from east to west:

• Marble Canyon — Less than 6 million years old
• Eastern Grand Canyon — A 4,900-foot (1,500 meter) deep canyon carved 25 million years ago along the Kaibab Uplift.
• Hurricane Canyon — Carved to half its current depth 70 million years ago, flowing north along the Hurricane Fault.
• Westernmost Grand Canyon — Less than 6 million years old

The 2012 Science study also found a segment between the Hurricane Canyon and the westernmost Grand Canyon was cut to near-modern canyon depths about 70 million years ago.

Rebecca Flowers, lead author of the Science study, said she was interested to see the unusually young ages for the westernmost Grand Canyon, close to where both her group and Karlstrom's team had discovered 70-million-year-old cooling ages.

"Given the consistency of our combined helium data sets and the reproducibility of those results throughout this 35-mile [55 kilometers] section of the westernmost canyon, it will take a bit more time to understand fully why their interpretations are so different from ours and why they conclude that the erosion history varied so dramatically within this short reach of the canyon," Flowers, a geochemist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said in an email interview.

Why is it there?

The Colorado River first emerged from the Rocky Mountains some 11 million years ago, according to old river gravels. So another huge puzzle remains: Where did the river flow before the Grand Canyon formed, and why did it finally end up in the Grand Canyon?

"To me, the greatest remaining mystery is how this got connected into a canyon," said Joel Pederson, a geomorphologist at the University of Utah, who was not involved in the study.

For now, here's Karlstrom's big picture: About 6 million years ago, something prompted the Colorado River to shift gears and head southwest. That event could have been a lake flood, climate change or subtle shift prompted by erosion. Whatever happened, the Colorado River grabbed its chance, cutting through the ancient rocks lining the gorge (up to 1.8 billion years old at the bottom) and bursting through to the Gulf of California.

Pederson agrees that Karlstrom's reanalysis won't resolve the Grand Canyon age debate, especially because geochemists can continue to debate how the cooling ages are interpreted.

"You have two groups of people who can take the same samples from the same results and come to really different conclusions," Pederson told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet. "That's the key battle."

But while the arguments will continue to play out in scientific journals and conferences, the big picture is getting clearer.

Long before anyone ever measured helium in apatite, geologists had discovered the Grand Canyon's ancestors, the paleocanyons that came before today's stunning vermillion walls were breached. First discovered in the 1950s, the history of these older canyons is now being refined and revised by scientists like Flowers and Karlstrom, with modern geochemical techniques.

"We now know there are parts of the Grand Canyon that are using ancient paleocanyons to a greater extent than we previously thought," Pederson said.

And geologists continue more old-fashioned detective work, tramping across the desert plateau in search of undiscovered clues about the Colorado River's history.

"There are a lot of ideas out there, but I don't think we're all in agreement yet," Karlstrom said.

Coburn attacks National Park Service for wasteful spending while parks themselves fall into disrepair

By Doug McKelway
FoxNews.com

Taxpayers shell out $52,000 a year to maintain the home of Black History Month founder Carter Woodson. Yet the tiny, dilapidated row house in northwest Washington D.C., with a "No Trespassing" sign and iron bars blocking the front door and windows hasn’t seen a visitor in the seven years since the National Park Service bought it for $2.1 million and designated it a National Historic Site.

Senator Tom Coburn, R-Okla.,points to the house as one tiny symbol in a sea of dysfunction in the National Park Service. The Service, with its comparatively small budget, is, he says, a microcosm for wasteful spending in the federal government.

A report released Tuesday by Coburn's office finds the National Park Service devotes huge portions of its budget to the purchase of more and more federal properties and land, even while the country’s most treasured national parks are falling into disrepair and neglect.

His report documents a federal agency that is top heavy with bureaucracy and management, but badly mangles its spending priorities.

"This is an agency that spends $650 million a year administering a $2.6 billion budget," says Coburn -- a ratio he calls, "outlandish."

His report cites dozens of cases of waste. The Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site in the San Francisco Bay area, for example, averages less than 10 visitors a day. "With nine employees, the National Park Service often has more staff working the grounds, than daily visitors," the report says.

Yet, Coburn doesn't blame the Park Service, which fought against the O'Neill home historical designation. He blames Congress. "There is no ribbon-cutting ceremony for taking out the trash, fixing a broken railing or filling a pothole," he says.

"Congress continues to add things – ‘parks’ - that aren't significant in terms of national interest in a declining budget. What we have is our most treasured resources, the big parks, with maintenance backlogs in excess of $2 billion."

The report catalogues a litany of unfilled potholes, crumbling stairs and deteriorating infrastructure in many of the nation’s most visited national parks. "Look at the Grand Canyon," says Coburn. "They're not even replacing water lines that are 50 years old. They can't even flush the toilets, because they're not doing the critical maintenance that's needed."

He adds, "If you continue to add federal land and federal parks, what you are going to do is make this problem worse."

His report also documents many other cases of frivolous spending: a Park Ranger sent to Italy to judge an Italian Film Festival; an antique car show in Michigan; a wine tasting train in Ohio. The Service spent $731,000 to find stains on St Louis's Gateway Arch - but none of that money actually went to clean the stains.

As Congress gets to work on a budget conference, Coburn’s report and 50 others his staff has compiled over the last nine years on government waste provide no shortage of ammunition for members intent on cutting spending.

"Look at federal government IT," Coburn says. "We spent $84 billion a year on it and $42 billion is wasted. Where’s the management for that?" he asks.

The Drying of the West

Dams and other engineering helped provide water throughout the arid region for decades. It's no longer enough.

More frequent and intense droughts in the West may result in legal battles over the allocation of Colorado River water. Above, the river's Horseshoe Bend in Page, Ariz. (Matt York / Associated Press)

By William deBuys
Los Angeles Times

John Wesley Powell, whose legendary descent of the Colorado River in 1869 brought the one-armed explorer fame and celebrity, worried about America's westward migration. The defining characteristic of Western lands was their aridity, he wrote, and settlement of the West would have to respect the limits aridity imposed.

He was half right.

The subsequent story of the West can indeed be read as an unending duel between society's thirst and the dryness of the land, but in downtown Phoenix, Las Vegas or Los Angeles, you'd hardly know it.

By the late 20th century, Western Americans had created a miracle in the desert, successfully conjuring abundance from aridity. Thanks to reservoirs large and small, scores of dams including colossi like Hoover and Glen Canyon, more than 1,000 miles of aqueducts and countless pumps, siphons, tunnels and diversions, the West had been thoroughly re-rivered and re-engineered. It had acquired the plumbing system of a giant water-delivery machine, and in the process its liquid resources were stretched far beyond anything Powell might have imagined.

Today the Colorado River, the most fully harnessed of the West's great waterways, provides water to about 40 million people and irrigates nearly 5.5 million acres of farmland. It also touches 22 Indian reservations, seven National Wildlife Reservations and at least 15 units of the National Park System, including the Grand Canyon.

Until now, the ever-more-complex water delivery systems of the Colorado Basin have managed to meet the escalating needs of their users. This is true in part because the states of the Upper Basin (Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico) were slower to develop than their downstream cousins. Under the Colorado River Compact of 1922, the Upper and Lower Basins divided the river, with the Upper Basin assuring the Lower of an average of 7.5 million acre-feet of water per year delivered to Lees Ferry, Ariz., the dividing point between the two. The Upper Basin would use the rest. Until recently, however, it left a large share of its water in the river, which California, and secondarily Arizona and Nevada, happily put to use.

Those days are gone. The Lower Basin states now get only their annual entitlement and no more. Unfortunately for them, it's not enough, and never will be. Currently, the Lower Basin lives beyond its means — to the tune of about 1.3 million acre-feet per year, essentially consuming 117% of its allocation.

This deficit is "funded," for now, by drawing on the accumulated water surplus held in the nation's largest reservoir, Lake Mead, impounded behind Hoover Dam. Unfortunately, with the Lower Basin using more water than it receives, the surplus there can't last. In November 2010, the level of the lake fell to its lowest elevation ever: 1,082 feet above sea level, a foot lower than its previous nadir during the fierce drought of the 1950s.

Had the dry weather held — and increasing doses of such weather are forecast for the region — the reservoir would have soon fallen another 7 feet and triggered mandatory (but inadequate) cutbacks in water delivery to the Lower Basin states. Instead, heavy snowfall in the Northern Rockies that winter bailed out the system by producing a mighty runoff, lifting the reservoir a whopping 52 feet.

Since then, however, weather throughout the Colorado Basin has been relentlessly dry and the lake has resumed its precipitous fall. It now stands at 1,106 feet, which translates to roughly 47% of capacity. Lake Powell, Mead's alter ego, is in about the same condition.

Another dry year or two and the Colorado system will be back where it was in 2010, staring down a crisis.

One recent study forecasts that, under a changing climate, the yield of the Colorado will decline 10% by about 2030, and it will keep falling after that. Meanwhile, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation expects the river's 40 million water users to grow to between 49.3 million and 76.5 million by 2060.

None of the available remedies inspires much confidence. "Augmentation" — diverting water from another basin into the Colorado system — is politically, if not economically, infeasible. Desalination, which can be effective in specific, local situations, is too expensive and energy-consuming to slake much of the Southwest's thirst. And weather modification, a.k.a. rainmaking, isn't much more effective today than it was in its infancy during the last century.

Undoubtedly, there will be small successes squeezing water from unlikely sources. But the surest prospect for the West? That a bumper harvest of lawsuits is approaching. Water lawyers can expect decades of full employment in the region. Their clients will include irrigation farmers, thirsty cities and power companies that need water to cool their thermal generators and for hydroelectric production. Recreation interests and environmentalists trying to save endangered species will join them in the legal equivalent of a long-running, circular firing squad.

Powell was right about one thing: Aridity bats last.

William deBuys irrigates a small farm in northern New Mexico and is the author, most recently, of "A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest."

Feds begin high-flow releases from Glen Canyon

Experiments will occur yearly in hope of restoring Grand Canyon’s ecological vitality.

The high-flow release of water into the Colorado River from bypass tubes at Glen Canyon Dam in Page, Ariz., Monday Nov. 19, 2012 begins as Interior Secretary Ken Salazar opens the valves. Federal water managers started a 5-day high-flow experimental release to help restore the Grand Canyon's ecosystem. (AP Photo/The Arizona Republic,Rob Schumacher)

By Brian Maffly
The Salt Lake Tribune

Page, Ariz. -- Federal water mangers and scientists Monday began ratcheting up releases from Glen Canyon Dam as part of a five-day experiment to push sediments down the Colorado River in hopes of restoring sandbars that play a vital ecological role in the river channel.

This week’s high-flow releases, designed to mimic the pre-dam natural flooding, mark "an historic milestone" for river management, according to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

"It was an honor to open the door to a new era for Glen Canyon Dam operations and the ecology of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and Grand Canyon National Park — a new era in which we realize that the goals of water storage, delivery and hydropower production are compatible with improving and protecting the resources of the Colorado River," Salazar said after he personally triggered releases at noon through the dam’s outlet tubes that bypass the turbines.

The federal Bureau of Reclamation began experimenting with high flows in 1996; this week’s event is only the fourth experiment. The others occurred in 2004 and 2008.

But the frequency of future releases will increase — to the delight of conservationists — under protocols Salazar announced in May.

"We have been pitching Interior for years to do these as often as the sediment in the system warrants. They rejuvenate all the sediment-related resources," said Nikolai Lash, a program manager with the Grand Canyon Trust. Under the new protocols, high-flow releases are expected to occur as often as once or twice a year, depending on the accumulation of downstream sediments.

Scientists led by Utah State University geomorphologist Jack Schmidt will closely monitor the effects of these high flows for the next several years. Their findings will help guide a long-standing "adaptive management" strategy for the Southwest’s signature river, which has carved one of the world’s most scenic landscapes. Damming the river produced a windfall of electrical power, but it also wrecked the river’s ecology and pushed warm-water fish species toward extinction.

"By early 1990s, the scientific community recognized it would be impossible to restore native ecosystems without controlled floods because they reintroduce disturbance into the ecosystem," said Schmidt, who now works for the U.S. Geological Survey. A professor of watershed sciences, Schmidt remains on unpaid leave from his USU appointment while he leads the Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center in Flagstaff, Ariz.

By disturbance, Schmidt was referring to the massive floods that once roared through Glen and Grand canyons, with flows in excess of 50,000 cfs (cubic feet per second) occurring most years and in excess of 125,000 cfs every eight years on average. Before the 1966 completion of the 710-foot-high Glen Canyon Dam, which forms Lake Powell, the Colorado pushed millions of tons of eroded sediments downstream, creating a rich network of sandbars that supported fish and riparian communities along Grand Canyon’s floor, not to mention great camping spots for river runners.

The dam impounds 95 percent of the natural sediment flow, then releases water at a steady rate of 7,000 to 9,000 cfs, which prevents sediments building up at the mouths of tributaries from being pushed downstream, according Schmidt.

Grand Canyon Watershed National Monument Proposed by Conservation Groups

by Morgan Skinner
KCSG News

St. George, UT - A proposed Grand Canyon Watershed National Monument submitted to the US Bureau of Land Management by the Center for Biological Diversity based in Tucson, Arizona, Grand Canyon Wildlands Council and The Wilderness Society, both headquartered in Flagstaff, Arizona, has prompted strong local reaction by public officials. Washington County Commissioner Allan Gardner told KCSG News "the proposal is another effort to permanently shutdown all uranium mining on the Arizona Strip that will cost millions in lost tax revenue to the counties involved."

Rachel Tueller, Public Affairs Officer for the BLM Arizona Strip District told KCSG News, "BLM did not solicit nor does it advocate the proposed national monument designation." When asked about the status of this proposal, she said, "It had been referred for review as are all citizen proposals."

The proposed monument has six priorities; (1) Stop old-growth ponderosa pine logging, (2) Protect cultural and archaeological sites, (3) Manage native wildlife and wildlife migration, (4) Reduce road density, (5) Provide voluntary retirement of grazing permits, and (6) Prevent new uranium mines.

Grand Canyon Watershed National Monument Executive Summary

• Total public land - 1.7-million acres
• Total privately held - 7,000 acres
• Number of tribes for whom the land holds significance - 6; Kaibab Paiute, Hopi, Zuni, Hualapi, Havasupai and Navajo
• Number of archeological sites - more than 3,000
• Number of acres containing ancient trees and old-growth forest - approximately 300,000
• Number of wildlife species on the federal
• Endangered Species - 4
• Number of wildlife species on the Arizona
• Species of greatest conservation need list - 22
• Number of creeks, springs and seeps - more than 125

Headwaters Economics, an independent nonprofit research group based in Bozeman, Montana, prepared a series of reports on the economic performance of western communities near national monuments. Each in-depth report shows important data and trends on demographics, jobs, income, and the performance of specific economic sectors. The research shows that the monument designations help to safeguard and highlight amenities that draw new residents, tourists and businesses to surrounding communities.

Western counties with protected public lands, like national monuments, were found to be more successful at attracting fast-growing economic sectors and as a result grew more quickly, on average, than counties without protected public lands. In addition, protected natural amenities, such as the pristine scenery found at Grand Staircase-Escalante also helped sustain property values and attract new investment.

The Reports:

• Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument
• Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument
• Vermilion National Monument

The conservation groups are networking to encourage a national monument designation even though they have encountered opposition in Congress among the representatives from western states where much of the federal land is located. Washington lawmakers, have introduced legislation to limit the president's use of the Antiquities Act without state and local community input. Thus far the various bills introduced are still pending in committees.

On March 23, Utah Governor Gary R. Herbert signed House Bill 148 that demands the federal government make good on the promises made in the 1894 Enabling Act to extinguish title to federal lands in Utah. The Governor was joined by US Senators Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee, Congressman Rob Bishop, Utah Representatives Ken Ivory and Roger Barrus and other stakeholders in a show of unity for the effort to return public lands to state control even though the legislation may be ruled unconstitutional. The legislation creates a principle-driven framework for a structured public dialogue, a potential legal challenge and path forward to re-balance Utah's relationship with the federal government, the Governor said.

The Antiquities Act

Since its passage by Congress in 1906, the Antiquities Act has been used for the preservation of public lands managed by government. Sixteen presidents have declared 132 national monuments under the act; eight Republican presidents, eight Democratic presidents. National park units such as the Grand Canyon, Statue of Liberty, Joshua Tree, Olympic, Zion, and Chesapeake and Ohio Canal were all established originally by presidential monument designation.

Bill Clinton created the most monuments, nineteen, and expanded three others. Arizona has the largest number of national monuments with eighteen followed by New Mexico with twelve and California with ten.

There are five National Monuments in Utah:

• Natural Bridges designated by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908
• Timpanogos Cave designated by President Harding in 1922
• Hovenweep designated in 1923 by President Harding
• Cedar Breaks designated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933
• Grand Staircase-Escalante designated by President Clinton in 1996

Six federal agencies in four departments manage the 101 current National Monuments. A single agency, the National Park Service manages 96 monuments, while five are co-managed by two agencies. The Bureau of Land Managment manages sixteen National Monuments, two with the National Park Service and one with the US Forest Service. Only 75 of the NPS's 76 National Monuments are official units because the Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument overlaps with Lake Mead National Recreation Area.

Government: Loaded guns allowed in national parks, wildlife refuges as of Monday

MATTHEW DALY
Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Loaded guns will be allowed in Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon and other national parks under a new law that takes effect Monday.

The law lets licensed gun owners bring firearms into national parks and wildlife refuges as long as they are allowed by state law. It comes over the objections of gun-control advocates who fear it will lead to increased violence in national parks.

The national parks law takes effect in a climate that favors advocates of gun rights. The debate shifted dramatically in 2008, when the Supreme Court struck down a handgun ban in Washington, D.C., and declared that individuals have a constitutional right to possess firearms for self-defense and other purposes.

Gun owners have rushed in record numbers to get concealed weapons permits, saying they worry President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress may impose stricter gun laws. The National Rifle Association lobbied hard to allow guns in parks and has spent millions to challenge its opponents.

Now gun-control advocates are on the defensive, seeking to preserve some gun restrictions in the face of aggressive assertions of gun rights.

As of Monday, guns will be allowed in all but about 20 of the park service's 392 locations, including some of its most iconic parks: Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Great Smoky Mountains, Yosemite and Rocky Mountain National Park. Guns will not be allowed in visitor centers or rangers' offices, because firearms are banned in federal buildings, but they could be carried into private lodges or concession stands, depending on state laws.

Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said national parks are now among the safest places in America, but that could change under the new law. Current rules severely restrict guns in the national parks, generally requiring them to be locked or stored.

"It really is sad that we've become such a paranoid society that people want to take guns pretty much everywhere — including national parks," he said Friday.

"When you are at a campfire and people are getting loud and boisterous next to you, you used to have to worry about them quieting down. Now you have to worry about when they will start shooting," Helmke said.

Bill Wade, president of the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, called the new law a sad chapter in the history of the park system.

"People go to national parks to get away from things that they face in their everyday living, where they live and work. Now I think that social dynamic is really going to change," he said.

Bryan Faehner, associate director of the National Parks Conservation Association, said the law would place an unfair burden on park service employees, who will have to wade though a variety of state and local laws to determine whether visitors are breaking the law.

Officials said visitors who want to bring a gun to a national park need to understand and comply with state gun laws. More than 30 national parks span more than one state, so visitors need to know where they are in those parks and which state law applies, the park service said.

A spokesman for the National Rifle Association scoffed at the idea that parks would become more dangerous, saying people have been assaulted and even murdered in national parks.

"This common-sense measure will enhance the self-defense rights of law-abiding Americans and also ensure uniformity of firearm laws within a state," said Chris W. Cox, the NRA's chief lobbyist.

The National Park Service said there were 3,760 reported major crimes, including five homicides and 37 rapes, in 2008, the most recent year for which data was available. The agency does not note which crimes involve firearms. Crime is down across the system's parks, according to park service spokesman David Barna.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who led congressional efforts to change the law, said concerns about increased violence were overblown.

"I don't expect anything major to come from this other than to restore the Second Amendment rights taken away by bureaucrats," Coburn said

The park service has prepared for months for the new law. "We will administer this law as we do all others — fairly and consistently," National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis said in a statement.

National parks hosted about 275 million visitors in 2008, the agency said.

Interior halts uranium mining near Grand Canyon

Salazar bars new claims on 1 million acres for environmental impact study

Conservationists contend mining leaves the Grand Canyon vulnerable to environmental damage and that no new operations should be proposed when the old mining sites haven't been cleaned up. (John Moore / Getty Images)

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - The Interior Department announced Monday it is temporarily barring the filing of new mining claims, including for uranium, on nearly 1 million acres near the Grand Canyon.

The land is being set aside for two years so the department can study whether it should be permanently withdrawn from mining activity, according to a notice published in the Federal Register online. The notice covers 633,547 acres under the control of the Bureau of Land Management and 360,002 acres in Kaibab National Forest.

The announcement comes ahead of Tuesday's congressional hearing on a bill to set aside more than 1 million acres of federal lands north and south of the canyon. The bill's sponsor, Democratic Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona, and environmental groups had been looking to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar for temporary protections at the Grand Canyon while the legislation is pending.

The announcement drew an immediate objection from the mining industry. National Mining Association Vice President Luke Popovich said current laws and regulations are effective for protecting the environment from mining activity.

"This decision appears on its face to be wholly unjustified and even dumbfounding in view of the near 10 percent jobless rate," Popovich said.

Environmentalists applauded the decision.

"This decisive action to protect the Grand Canyon sends an important signal that President Obama is committed to prioritizing the public interest when it comes to managing America's natural resources," said Jane Danowitz, U.S. public lands program director at the Pew Environment Group.

The Interior Department under President George W. Bush was unresponsive to efforts to ban new uranium mining claims. The House Natural Resources Committee invoked a little-used rule to stop any new claims for up to three years, but Interior officials refused to recognize the action and continued to authorize additional mining claims.

A coalition of environmental groups sued, and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management later rescinded Congress' right to withdraw lands from mining and other activities in emergencies.

Since then, environmentalists and Grijalva have been hanging their hopes on Salazar for temporary protections.

Any companion bill to Grijalva's in the Senate is unlikely to come from Arizona's two U.S. senators. Republicans John McCain and Jon Kyl told Grijalva in a letter last month that adequate protections already exist.

Conservationists contend mining leaves the Grand Canyon vulnerable to environmental damage and that no new operations should be proposed when the old mining sites haven't been cleaned up.

There are as many as 10,000 existing mining claims on BLM and U.S. Forest Service lands near the Grand Canyon for all types of hard-rock exploration. Some 1,100 uranium mining claims are within five miles of the Grand Canyon National Park.

The protections offered by Salazar won't include uranium mining claims already filed near the Grand Canyon, the official said. It's not possible to prevent existing claims under the General Mining Act of 1872 unless Congress was to appropriate money for the department to buy up the claims, he said.

Former Grand Canyon National Park Superintendent Rob Arnberger said he would welcome any protection that Salazar offers, but permanent withdrawal is the goal.

"Are we prepared to allow the landscape to be torn up adjacent to the park, to threaten the hydrological and the natural resources of that park?" Arnberger said. "My answer to that is no. Don't open it up to exploration."

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.

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.

Grijalva: Bush policies bad for federal public lands

Tucson Region




By Tony Davis
Arizona Daily Star




Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ)



The Bush administration mounted a "concerted strategy" to reduce protections for federal public lands and to open them to all types of industry, a Tucson congressman says in a new report.

The report lists more than 40 actions by federal agencies such as the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management that Rep. Raúl Grijalva says harmed public lands.

They often allowed mining, timber and other private industry to exploit resources at the environment's expense, he claims.

Grijalva, a Democrat, is a congressional leader on public lands issues, as he chairs the National Parks, Forest and Public Lands subcommittee of the House Natural Resources Committee.

However, Bush administration officials and agency managers have generally defended their actions, calling them efforts to restore balance to public lands policy after eight years of Clinton administration policies that more commonly sided with environmentalists. Federal officials have also cited budget pressures in explaining some of the decisions.

Here are capsule accounts of some of the actions criticized in Grijalva's report, their effects on Arizona, and the federal agencies' responses:

Border fence
Grijalva's report criticized the Department of Homeland Security for repeatedly invoking a 2005 federal law allowing it to waive environmental laws — such as the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act — to build a 670-mile border fence.

The congressman is co-sponsoring a bill to rescind provisions of that law. Grijalva and environmental groups say the fence blocks wildlife movements and fragments habitat crucial for the survival of dozens of imperiled species, including jaguars, wolves and pronghorn antelope.

Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff said the fence, now about half-finished, is needed to block the illegal entry of terrorists, to impede drug smuggling, human smuggling and gang activity, and to counteract the environmental effects of illegal immigration.

Chertoff has used the law four times to waive dozens of environmental laws and regulations to build nearly 500 miles of fence, including segments along more than 200 miles of Arizona's border with Mexico.

Grand Canyon uranium mining
Grijalva has pushed through a measure to prevent uranium mining on 1 million acres adjoining Grand Canyon National Park for a year. But Interior Department officials have refused to withdraw the area from mining, and they are fighting to repeal underlying regulations.

Two potential uranium-mining exploration sites are being drilled on BLM land north of the national park. Environmental groups are suing to force the Interior Department to withdraw those lands, on the grounds that the radioactivity from the uranium could leak into the groundwater or the Colorado River running through the Grand Canyon.

There's a long history of uranium mining north of the Canyon, and it is "very responsible mining," counters Scott Florence, director of BLM's Arizona Strip office. It's all underground, with "a very small footprint" on the surface, Florence says. "They are not a big open-pit mine."

Loaded-gun parks
Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne has proposed a regulation allowing visitors to national parks and wildlife refuges to carry loaded, concealed weapons if they have proper permits. Today, visitors can pack only unloaded guns. The new rules would affect Arizona and other states that already allow concealed weapons in state parks.

Grijalva says the new rule would cause widespread confusion among gun owners because many national parks are located in two or more states with different gun rules.

Interior says it wants to respect states' ability to determine who may possess firearms within their boundaries. The National Rifle Association says park visitors should be allowed to carry guns for self-defense.

Seven retired National Park Service directors opposed the proposal, telling Kempthorne it would impair park rangers' ability to protect people and natural resources.

Off-road vehicles
Grijalva says environmentally harmful off-road vehicle use is out of control and growing rapidly on public lands. The vehicles have damaged cultural sites, disturbed wildlife habitat and destroyed private property, Grijalva says.

"Irresponsible off-roading has become such a menace that it is now the single greatest threat to American landscapes," a retired Forest Service official, Jack Gregory, testified at a congressional hearing in April.

A Tucson BLM official says the agency is trying to keep off-road vehicles under control, using trained volunteers on motorcycles and ATVs to go on patrol, pick up trash and talk to off-roaders about proper use.

"As more people are out on public lands, our challenges will always be there," said Brian Bellew, BLM's Tucson manager. "But we are coming up with much better means of dealing with those resource conflicts."

Air quality in national parks
The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed changing air quality regulations to make it less likely that emissions from new power plants near national parks would be in violation.

Grijalva says the regulation, still pending, would let companies seeking to build plants near national parks, including the Grand Canyon and Saguaro National Park, circumvent congressionally established pollution limits.

EPA spokeswoman Cathy Milbourn said the rule is part of an agency program to prevent air quality degradation in national parks and would not change the level of emissions allowed in clean-air areas.

Roadless rule
Throughout President Bush's tenure, federal officials have sought to overturn a last-minute rule instituted by then-President Bill Clinton that would ban logging, road building and development on 58 million acres of national forests and grasslands. That includes 420,000 Coronado National Forest acres in Southern Arizona.

In 2005, the Forest Service approved a new rule allowing state governments to petition federal officials to exempt these forest lands in their states from wilderness designation.

There have been conflicting lower-court rulings on whether the decision failed to consider environmental impacts. The decisions are under appeal.

BLM rejects House Resources Committee Grand Canyon hardrock mining ban

RULE CHANGE WOULD BAN EMERGENCY WITHDRAWALS

Federal officials are seeking to abolish a rule that allowed the House Natural Resources Committee to try to block uranium mining and exploration around the Grand Canyon.

by Dorothy Kosich
Mineweb

RENO, NV - The Bureau of Land Management has published a proposed rule which rejects the House Natural Resources Emergency House Resolution enacted in June that bans uranium mining and exploration near the Grand Canyon National Park.

The agency argues that the BLM "continues to believe the emergency procedure to be unnecessary. Like a withdrawal, segregation removes the lands from the operation of the public land laws, including the mining laws."

"Contrary to its implication, the procedures for issuing an emergency withdrawal order do not result in the protection of public lands more rapidly than the completion of a more conventional withdrawal process. Conventional withdrawals of public lands, as necessary and appropriate, will continue."

BLM Director Jim Caswell said, "The BLM recognizes that unique circumstances may arise requiring the withdrawal of land from particular activities in order to preserve resources and values that need immediate protection. We remain committed to working closely with states, local governments, and other stakeholders in the timely withdrawal of land under such critical circumstances."

The proposed BLM rule published Friday in the Federal Register would remove regulations that provide for emergency land withdrawals, such as the one utilized by the House Natural Resources Committee ordering the Secretary of the Interior to withdraw as much as 1,068,908 acres of federal land near the Grand Canyon National Park from any new uranium mining for up to the next three years.

In its published notice, the BLM said, "These regulations are redundant, since public lands can be protected without substantial delay via conventional withdrawal procedures, without resource to the regulations providing for emergency withdrawals. Moreover, constitutional issues may arise whenever a Congressional committee directs the Secretary of the Interior to withdraw lands immediately."

BLM officials estimate there are as many as 10,000 existing mining claims on BLM and the U.S. Forest Service lands near the Grand Canyon for all types of hardrock exploration.

The lawmakers used a seldom-utilized rule in the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act that allows the House and Senate Natural Resources Committee to withdraw lands from mining and other activities in emergencies. A 1983 Justice Department opinion found similar resolutions to be unconstitutional.

The public has until October 25th to comment on the proposed BLM rule change.

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.

ON THE WEB Time-lapse videos

Hikers missing in Grand Canyon flooding found

By CHRIS KAHN
Associated Press




A stranded rafter is lowered to shore after being short hauled across the Colorado River Sunday Aug. 17, 2008 in the Grand Canyon. An earthen dam broke near the Grand Canyon early Sunday after heavy rains that forced officials to pluck hundreds of residents and campers from the gorge by helicopter. (AP Photo/National Park Service)


PHOENIX — Rescue crews have located a handful of hikers who were missing after flooding struck a remote part of the Grand Canyon, authorities said today.

The 11 people from two families were tracked down in the canyon on Monday, Coconino County Sheriff's Department spokesman Gerry Blair said. They were the last to be accounted for after creeks overflowing with runoff from severe thunderstorms washed away trails during the weekend, stranding dozens of tourists.

"We have met them, and they're OK," Blair said.

Authorities were receiving more calls from people who believe their loved ones may still be in the canyon, Blair said. But everyone who followed the rules and signed in at the bottom of the trail into the remote area had been evacuated.

Rescue crews checked the hiking trails and surrounding gorges by helicopter and foot again today, and crews will do a more comprehensive ground search when the flood waters recede in a few days, Blair said.

Helicopters ferried about 255 people out of the canyon Sunday and Monday from the Havasupai Tribe's village of Supai, a remote community near the bottom of the canyon in an area west of Grand Canyon National Park headquarters. Many of the stranded tourists made their way to Supai before catching a helicopter ride to the rim.

Thunderstorms dumped 3 to 6 inches of rain on the entire region Friday and Saturday and about 2 inches more on Sunday. The storms sent a rush of water through parts of the canyon, uprooting trees and washing out trails and footbridges.

Mimi Mills, 42, of Nevada City, Calif., was stranded with 15 other river runners Saturday afternoon after a flash flood washed away their rafts. Mills said the group took shelter overnight under an overhang, but had to scramble up a cliff when another flash flood occurred in the middle of the night.

The Havasupai tribe is one of the smaller Indian communities in Arizona with some 679 members, according to Bureau of Indian Affairs estimates from 2003, the latest statistics available.

The tribe's Supai village sits in a region that's popular for hikers and river runners, with towering blue-green waterfalls. About 400 people live there year-round.

U.S. halts uranium mining near Grand Canyon

Reporting by Bernard Woodall
Reuters UK



South Rim from the Bright Angel trail in the Grand Canyon in this photo taken January 3, 2008.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Uranium mining near the rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona was halted for three years by a 20-2 vote on Wednesday in a U.S. House of Representatives committee.

A recent surge in mining claims within five miles of Grand Canyon National Park sparked the action. The number of claims close to the park increased to more than 1,100 by January 2008 from only 10 in January 2003, according to government figures.

Almost all those claims are to mine uranium. Uranium prices have increased in recent years as demand has spiked to feed an increasing number of nuclear power plants across the globe, as well as potential new U.S. plants.

"This emergency action will help prevent uranium mining from harming the Grand Canyon and polluting drinking water for millions," said Dusty Horwitt, public lands analyst at Environmental Working Group, which spearheaded the effort to block mining.

Horwitt said mining could pollute the Colorado River, source of drinking water for millions throughout the Southwest, including the Los Angeles, Phoenix and Las Vegas areas.

The world consumes about 180 million pounds (50 million to 55 million pounds in the United States) of raw uranium a year.