Sheep rancher [Mike Stevens] seeks peace with wolves

Sheep rancher seeks peace with wolves. Lava Lake Land and Livestock uses non-lethal measures to protect herds. By Jason Kaufmann. Idaho Mountain Express.

If there are a lot of wolves around your sheep bands, you are going lose quite a few sheep, right? And so every so often you have to have the government kill a bunch of wolves?

Lava Lake Land and Livestock which runs sheep on over 700,000 acres of central Idaho wolf country has proven this to be wrong. Their magic method is don’t respond to wolves in the traditional rancher fashion.

Fires threaten Wyoming highways

Fires threaten roads. By Cory Hatch. Jackson Hole Daily.

Otter orders mandatory evacuation of Yellow Pine, Idaho

Yellow Pine is a very deep backcountry town. I visited it for the first time in June 2006. A month later it was beseiged by forest fires on all sides. This year is may be worse, and invoking a rarely used authority, Idaho’s Governor Butch Otter has ordered people to leave.

Story. Governor orders Yellow Pine evacuation. By Heath Druzin. Idaho Statesman.

Yellow Pine on Google Earth. The photos on Google Earth are quite new and you can readily see the burns from last year.

Larry Craig: wildlife, safety, and arrowheads gotta go; cattle – stay.

Here is another great clip of Senator Larry Craig discussing how they need to stop bothering to look for Native American artifacts when they are fighting fires (something they don’t do anyway). I guess he forget that Kyle Prior, chairman of the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes was sitting at the end of the table for their news conference on the Murphy Fire as he gave out his misinformation.

Story and video on the WWP blog.

Mitchell Fire burns Deep Creek Mountains of SE Idaho

This fire has been dumping a bit of ash on Pocatello, but the major threat is to wildlife habitat (sage grouse) and a steep scenic mountain range if they use bulldozers. It’s another fire where there might be contention over grazing and rehabilitation methods subsequent to the fire (a BLM mountain range). Part of the range burned last summer. I visited in June this year, and it looked good except for mixed cheatgrass on the lower benches.

It has grown rapidly, and I’d better go take a look at it tomorrow. I would hate to see dozer lines on roadless Deep Creek Peak.

Inciweb report on the Mitchell Fire.

Meanwhile the Cleveland Fire has been burning rapidly through brush and old timbering in the southern end of the Portneuf Range 15 miles north of Preston, Idaho. It has grown to over 15,000 acres. Highway 34 was closed for a while. The fire has not jumped the Bear River so far.

These SE Idaho fires haven’t gotten a lot of attention in media, except locally.