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A Rocky Mountain National Park wilderness protection bill was reported out of a U.S. Senate committee Wednesday after lawmakers reached a compromise over liability protection for an irrigation ditch running through the park.
The bill, sponsored by Colorado's two senators - Democrat Ken Salazar and Republican Wayne Allard - would add a layer of legal protection for the park against future development and require strict management practices.
One burning cigarette has been attributed to a blaze that scorched nearly 800 acres and displaced many hikers along the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) last week. Authorities have not released the name of the suspect who has been cited.
The Apache Fire started Tuesday, April 29, at a stump near Apache Peak along the PCT. The blaze was contained Sunday evening.
The Allegheny National Forest along the northwestern border of Pennsylvania is home to about 8,000 oil and gas wells, each of which sits on a third of an acre of leveled land and is serviced by a 1,250-mile network of gravel roads through the trees.
The impact of those wells has not gone unnoticed by those who monitor and enjoy the forest and those whose livelihoods depend on people visiting it.
A Fort Collins company has agreed to pay $9 million for damages within Rocky Mountain National Park caused by a breach of the Grand River Ditch in May 2003.
The settlement is considered the largest natural resource damages payment in the history of the 1907 Park System Resource Protection Act.
Four dozen public lands, national forests, water and historical bills are slated for markup in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee this Wednesday, along with votes on nominees for two senior-level positions in the Energy and Interior departments.
About a third of the bills have already been cleared by the House, while the rest are Senate proposals that have been considered by different subcommittees over the last several months as part of a concentrated effort by the committee to address its legislative backlog.
With a House vote Tuesday evening, Congress sent the long-awaited and long-debated Wild Sky Wilderness plan to President Bush, who is expected to sign it.
But when hikers return this summer to the mountains above Skykomish and Index, they probably won't notice much change.
And that's exactly the point for Tom Uniack, who has spent the past five years lobbying to create Wild Sky.
A bundle of national park, forest and water bills is headed to the president's desk after the House cleared the legislation last night.
By a vote of 291-117, the House approved S. 2739, a package of 62 generally noncontroversial public lands bills.
Four Western states could see big chunks of new wilderness -- roughly three-quarters of a million acres - thanks to a flurry of wilderness legislation. Three bills are now wending their way through Congress, and a fourth, designating the Washington State Wild Sky Wilderness, awaits President Bush's expected signature.
Nearly six years after it was first introduced, a bill to create a Wild Sky Wilderness east of Seattle has cleared Congress, another step toward the first new wilderness area in Washington state in nearly a quarter-century.
The House gave final approval Tuesday to a bill that would designate 167 square miles in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest north of Sultan, Wash., as federal wilderness, the government's highest level of protection.
The new version of the Washington County Growth and Conservation Act of 2008, as rewritten by Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, and Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, is a compromise effort on a previous bill that raised a lot of questions and some strong opposition in Washington County.
There were problems with the original bill that many believed favored developers.
Instead of forcing it through, Bennett and Matheson went to the people who would be most affected by the bill and talked to them about their concerns, then reconfigured the bill.
