Tag: U.S. Forest Service

A growing chorus of Colorado and national sportsmen and conservation groups are calling on U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to suspend work on the controversial Colorado roadless rule or pull the plug on it altogether in favor of a strong national rule.

Sen. Mark Udall Monday revived a bill he first floated in the U.S. House last summer that some critics say could open up a recreational Pandora’s Box at the nation’s ski areas.

Conservation groups Tuesday asked the U.S. Forest Service to reconsider management guidelines for the Canada lynx, a tuft-eared, bobcat-like wildcat reintroduced in Colorado in the 1990s and the object of much controversy in the ensuing decade and a half.

As if the underfunded U.S. Forest Service didn’t have enough to worry about regulating mining, oil and gas production, logging, cattle grazing and ski-area development on national forest land, now it's in the photography business too.

The politics of powder could polarize the remote mountain town of Telluride if — as opponents suggest — the ski resort uses a proposed snow study to move forward with expansion plans in the slide-prone and deadly Upper Bear Creek drainage off the ski area’s back side.

A pack of peeved paddlers — as well as hunters, hikers, environmentalists and business leaders — will descend on the steps of the state Capitol in Denver tomorrow to deliver a “boatload” of comments opposing a Bush administration roadless rule for managing Colorado’s public lands.

Nearly two-thirds of all Coloradans would prefer to protect pristine national forest land rather than increase oil and gas production in those areas, according to a new poll conducted for the Pew Environment Group.

A new set of state rules for managing millions of acres of roadless public lands in Colorado — rules critics say are loaded with loopholes for oil and gas drilling, logging and ski-area expansion — are now out of the public arena and expected to be finalized sometime next year.

The battle over management of Colorado's 4.4 million acres has abruptly intensified, after years of federal intervention, state resistance and legal wrangling dating back to the final days of the Clinton administration. At stake, according to a coalition of environmental groups fighting to protect roadless areas, is whether wide swaths of relatively unscathed national forest will be made more accessible to motorized vehicles, allowing incursion by logging companies, oil and gas drilling, construction of water pipelines and power transmission lines, and expansion by the state's ski industry.