21st Century Shootout at the OK Corral – Life and Death in Tombstone
Water is life in the desert. The federal government designated Tombstone as a national historic site but is now denying Tombstone the water it needs to survive as a town made of wood, in the middle of the desert, in the middle of a drought.
A few years ago, this same federal government that requested, and received, permission from Tombstone to use Tombstone’s water to fight forest fires has now shut down Tombstone’s access to its water leaving it with only minutes of water to protect the health, safety and welfare of its citizen from being destroyed by fire.
In 1881, pipes were run more than 30 miles from the Huachuca Mountains to serve water from 25 springs to the mining town of Tombstone. Tombstone retained these water rights and the access road to service its springs for 130 years. Even after a federal wilderness area was designated in 1984, Tombstone was not impeded in its right to use the road to access its springs. This all changed last year. Read More
Pollution: It’s Spreading Like Wildfire
ExxonMobil, ranked as one of the world’s largest corporate polluters, produces just over 10 million pounds of toxic air pollution per year.1 During three summer months, a recent North American fire released 66 billion pounds of just one of the toxic chemicals it spewed.2 That is 6,600 times more pollution than ExxonMobil releases in an entire year!
Wildfires throughout North America are on the rise and out of control, particularly in western states. These fires are emitting more dangerous pollutants into the air than all the “tailpipes and smokestacks in the United States….”3 Recent studies show that wildfires cause pollutants to triple normal levels deemed safe for humans and animals.4 These shocking results come from a trend of new scientific studies, and underscore the need for a major change in wildfire management.
Gambling with Fire on the Open Range
ELKO — Gambling is still alive and well on northeastern Nevada’s high desert.
Several public officials and Bureau of Land Management personnel participated in a tour of the Tomera family ranches along the Elko and Eureka county border last week. The gamble being addressed by the group was the build-up of fire fuel on the family’s Stonehouse Ranches in the Trout Creek area of the Pine Mountain Allotment south of Carlin.
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Wildlife History of Northern Nevada
From Scarcity, to Abundance and now Decline
In past years, I made presentations to public school classes and I always started with the question, “Were there more deer in 1830 or are there more deer today?” The answer was always unanimously that there were more deer in 1830. I challenge you to ask this question to your children, your spouses and your friends, and then educate them on the following facts. Read More
Smoked Bear educates as he visits the Bear Wallow Fire in Arizona
Smoked Bear visited the Bear Wallow fire in Springerville, Arizona. The fire burned through 40 miles of mountains and over 500,000 acres, the largest fire in Arizona history. It burned all the small animals and only the elk and some birds survived. Some elk had their feet burned so badly that they died after the fire.
The Forest Service had allowed the forest to become overcrowded with about 1600 trees per acre and would not allow any logging. An Apache Indian Reservation in the reservation logged their forest and it did not burn. The Forest Service’s anti-logging policy was predicated on protecting the Mexican spotted owl which resided in the forest, but ironically the owl and its habitat were burned up in the fire.
Interestingly, all the insects in the forest were gone. We were there all day driving around to different spots and there was not so much as a fly. Because there were no insects, the fish were dying for lack of food. It was a turning point for me to see the senseless waste and devastation. The Forest Service is now spending millions to spread straw, reseed to prevent erosion, and clear the burned timber along the roadways.
