Obama’s Salmon Plan (Pending)
On May 20, the Obama administration is slated to release its revised salmon and steelhead plan for the Columbia and Snake Rivers. Based on signals from fed agencies over the past three months, this “new” plan may look disappointingly like George W’s old plan, about which U.S. District Court Judge James Redden, the Nez Perce Tribe, the State of Oregon, and the salmon community expressed serious concerns. See Wild Salmon & Steelhead News for updates after the jump.
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Tourism Troubles? Yellowstone
Bozeman—More than three million tourists visited Yellowstone National Park last year, an all-time record. But the impact to the economy around the park was mixed. “In West Yellowstone those of us who live here call ourselves survivors, because we survive from one season to another,” flyshop owner and guide Bob Jacklin said. Jacklin has been “surviving” in West Yellowstone now for 41 years.
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North Park—Getting Drilled
Over the protests of conservation groups, federal land managers moved to open 11,160 acres of North Park for gas and oil drilling. According to the Denver Post, the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management—despite vows to emphasize conservation—decided the nation’s need for domestic oil justified the decision. “Certainly, if we want to supply some of our domestic energy needs, drilling is going to occur in places like this,” BLM spokesman Steven Hall said.
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Swinging for the Fishes
Intrepid contributing editor/tequila connoisseur Will Rice blogs about a recent soggy weekend on the river. “I had walked for over a mile in the drizzling rain. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for. The sky was overcast and the low hanging clouds moved through the mountains on either side like specters. It was going to rain hard at some point. Hard. I continued walking. Stopping. Looking at water. Assessing the situation. Moving on again.” More pics after the jump.
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Tom Bie is the founder, editor, and publisher of The Drake. He started the magazine in 1998 as an annual newsprint publication based in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He then moved it to Steamboat, Colorado (1999), Boulder, Colorado (2001), and San Clemente, California (2004), as he took jobs as managing editor at Paddler, Senior Editor at Skiing, and Editor-in-Chief at Powder, respectively. Tom and The Drake are now both based in Denver, Colorado, where The Drake is finally all grows up(Swingers, 1996) to a quarterly magazine.