Elections Aftermath:

What would you feel if you had voted for tea party extremists?   Would you feel pure and virtuous the next day?  Or would you think, eww, why did I do that?

Ringo Starr:  “What would you feel if you sang out of tune?”

Well, Wyoming voters, you don’t have to creep around in shame, embarrassment or guilt:  You blew the pundits away !!!

Voters for Matt Mead and Rita Meyer, centrists but for a slip of the tongue or two, turned away the more extreme party candidates.  This election did not go tea party.

(Since Matt, with little administrative experience, edged out Rita; maybe he should ask her to manage his office like she did for Jim Geringer.  She might be needing work.)

In Gillette, a right-wing, out-of-state funded, gunsmith, SWAT-team maniac ran the most aggressive and expensive race ($62,000) for a local sheriff’s office in my memory.  He won a paltry eight percent of the vote.  I don’t know what the agenda was for his non-resident supporters, but I am glad that it went down the drain.  I don’t want a Freemen-type as my sheriff.

This election was Ron Micheli’s swan song; it’s time to retire honorably to the ranch and hang out with all of those grandchildren.  I tweaked him some for his campaign statements, but on a personal level, he has earned some respect as a sincere believer in his principles.

But OMG what do we do with Colin Simpson?  He sacrificed his legislative position in exchange for an electoral result which can’t feel very good.  He can’t take an interim job with the feds or get an ambassadorship….. wrong party.  Wait, hold the phone, isn’t there a vacancy in one of those places whose names end in “stan?”  Mike Sullivan was rewarded, deservedly so, with Ireland.  Colin gets to be in the wilderness for a while.  Maybe he and Newt Gingrich and Johnnie Burton could get up a game of gin rummy in political purgatory.

Colin is “on hold”; out of the legislature and not in the race anywhere.  But at least he did not behave like his famous father this week; oh boy is The Sage Grouse going to have fun with Alan Simpson and his enthusiastic embrace of new feminism. Ouch!  The Pacino flick “Scent of a Woman” comes to mind.  Badgers, other Wyoming natives, are also notoriously cranky, but they live in holes, eat dirt and have bad vision as excuses for their temperaments.

We should say some kind words about Pete Gosar; he’s a smart, striking, thoughtful guy who, despite having zero political experience other than listening to people talk on the state airplane, ran a sharp campaign.  If he does not say “phooey” on the whole process, he will be fun to watch in four years.

So we are down to Matt vs. Leslie, with Dr. Taylor Haynes lurking on the right, except that dang it, the August 27 morning paper reported that he is out; not enough signatures.  This would have been more fun to watch.  Dr. Haynes, an articulate libertarian, defines a more thoughtful right wing agenda than most of the hillbillies trying to occupy the field.  Leslie, no shrinking violet, will define the landscape to the left (but not Obama left), leaving Matt to figure out how far left and how far right he can pick the stepping stones.

A footnote:  The tea party searches for metaphors for racism in other states; none are publicly overtly racist, but they all hate Obama.  Tea party racism would have been dimmed with Dr. Haynes as a candidate.

With Dr. Haynes apparently out, Matt may be able to take the right for granted and move more centrist.  Both Leslie and Matt successfully avoided having to go extreme to win the primary, so both are well poised to reach out to the voters who did not go extreme in the primary, which is nearly all of them.

(This is the final story in a multi-part series on the Wind River Reservation)

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RIVERTON–As a child in California, Helsha Acuña was so sensitive about her Native American heritage—her father was Apache, her mother Aleut—that she sometimes tried to pass herself off as Italian. But the racism she encountered was rarely personal. For that, she testified in federal court, she had to come to Riverton.

Fresh from graduate work at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Acuña moved to Riverton in the mid-1990s, her daughter and two horses in tow, to teach Native American Studies at Central Wyoming College. She was thrilled when the owners of a nearby ranch, where she had arranged to board her horses, invited her to live in a trailer home on the property in exchange for caretaking duties. But Acuña’s relationship with the couple quickly soured. She was still unpacking her things when the husband stopped by with the news.

“My wife, uh, um, she’s a little concerned,” Acuña quoted the rancher as saying. “And, well, you know, we’ve had Indians out here before who have worked for us, and it’s never worked out real well, and, um, well, we just don’t know that we’ll be able to sleep at night with you on the property.”

Acuña called the man’s wife, who first berated her for rescheduling a gas delivery to the trailer without telling her, then for who she was.  “You know what, Helsha?” the woman said. “We’re not the niggers here.”

“What?” Acuña said.

“You heard me,” the woman replied, according to the college professor’s sworn testimony. “You know, you may not be from around here, you may be an Apache, but you’re no better than these fucking Arapahos or fucking Shoshones that are out here.”

The couple barred Acuña from returning to the property until she had paid the boarding bill for her horses, relenting only under pressure from her attorney. But when she showed up to collect her furniture and other household items, she found them heaped outside in the rain. “Everything was just soaked,” she testified. The rancher’s wife and several others, including a man with a shotgun, kept watch as she loaded her belongings onto a truck. “It was very demeaning.”

Racism usually takes subtler forms in this blue-collar town of about 9000 people, which was founded on land carved from the Wind River Indian Reservation in south-central Wyoming in 1906, when a portion of the reservation was opened up to white settlers. The reservation is the home of the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes. As elsewhere in Fremont County, whites and tribal members mingle in schools, the checkout lines at Wal-Mart, and the restaurant at the Arapaho-owned Wind River Casino, which is said to serve the best steak and lobster in town. Not since the 1950s have local businesses displayed “No Dogs or Indians” signs in their windows.

But hard feelings remain. Over the last seven months, two separate but related developments have cast a harsh light on white attitudes towards the reservation and the 10,000 tribal members who live there. First was the collapse of a cooperative agreement between the city of Riverton and the Northern Arapaho, who withdrew from the deal in February in the face of bitter opposition stirred in part by supporters of the conservative Tea Party movement. The other came in late April, when a federal judge cited “ongoing” discrimination against Native Americans—including that experienced by Acuña —in ordering the Fremont County Commission to scrap its at-large electoral system in favor of one based on single-member voting districts. The judge found that the county’s system had diluted Indian voting strength. Until 2006, no Native American had ever served on the commission, though the ethnic group makes up 20 percent of the county’s population.

The ugly feelings unearthed by these two episodes are rarely acknowledged among whites in Fremont County. Yet a close look at the public record reveals the deep reservoir of prejudice, suspicion and paranoia that–as elsewhere in the rural West–still shapes white perceptions of Indians.  Whites here may have legitimate concerns about the quasi-independent state on their borders, such as issues relating to law-enforcement jurisdiction or water rights. But that doesn’t explain the bigotry that often seems a holdover from another time: the high-school sports fans mocking Indian players as “prairie niggers,” for example, or the white civic leader, subsequently elected to the county commission, declaring in a private meeting, “I hate goddamn Indians,” to cite examples from the voting rights trial.

Even among those who eschew such naked hostility, Indians are often described, in effect, as freeloaders who are constantly maneuvering for political leverage and a bigger share of resources, often with help from the federal government and usually at the expense of the white majority.  This sense of  white victimization is striking. It turns the standard narrative of American history–a story of native people robbed of land, buffalo herds and culture–on its head.

One day I drove north from Riverton to meet Lois Herbst, a rancher and former president of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association who had spoken out against the agreement between the city and the Northern Arapaho.  Herbst, a flinty septuagenarian in slacks and a brown sweater, met me by the side of the road in her gray Ford Expedition, not far from the single-story beige house that she and her late husband purchased in 1962. Her father-in-law, an Austrian immigrant, was a homesteader who came to this area in a one-horse cart, now proudly displayed in Herbst’s front yard.

She took me on a driving tour of her property, a piece of it anyway, which is situated inside the reservation’s historic borders in the area opened up to homesteading in 1906. The newcomers purchased their plots of “excess” reservation land for nominal sums, a portion of which was supposed to go to the tribes, although it is far from clear how much of it actually did. The federal government then paid for the construction of a massive network of canals, ditches and dams—the Riverton Unit of the Midvale Irrigation District—to channel water from tribal lands to the white farmers. But Herbst insisted that the Indians had gotten a fair deal. “They were happy to have it,” she said of the proceeds from the land sales.

Besides, she added, “What was so great about the life they had before we came here? The women were doing all the work. I shouldn’t say that but it’s true.”

Herbst acknowledged that things have not worked out so well for the Indians, but she blamed that largely on their failure to assimilate—a consequence, she argued, of the socialist enterprise otherwise known as the reservation system. And as she sees it, hardworking people like her are paying the price, as the tribes and their attorneys scheme to take back “our water” and the land they had freely parted with. “If they can, they’ll tax us,” she said.

We got out of the car, and Herbst pointed to a distant wire fence, erected by tribal land managers, that she said intruded on her family’s property. “They fenced it without asking me,” she said. “To me that was arrogant. It is a new attitude being developed by some of them, an attitude of, ‘Take back.’”

A Record of Discrimination

Teepees are part of the view as you enter Lander, Wyoming, along Main Street, June 19, 2010. Photograph by Robert Durell

The reservation grew out of a treaty between the federal government and the Eastern Shoshone in 1868. Because the tribe was on good terms with the whites, it was allocated more than 4 million acres–much of it prime rangeland–in the drainage of the snowy Wind River range. But the situation was not to last. The Northern Arapaho, historic enemies of the Shoshone, were transferred to the reservation in 1878, and the government hacked away at its size with dubious land deals, such as the purchase of the Thermopolis area with its coveted hot springs, for $60,000 in 1896. Then, in 1905, Congress invited homesteaders to settle on 1.44 million acres of reservation land north of the Wind River, an area that now includes the city of Riverton. A million of the least desirable acres went unclaimed and were later returned to the tribes. The result was a confusing hodgepodge of ownership in which jurisdictional lines often were blurred.

The political system, of course, was tilted heavily in favor of the white settlers. Native Americans did not become citizens until 1924. And in Wyoming, literacy tests that were used until 1971, when they were finally eliminated by amendments to the Voting Rights Act, may have been a further impediment to political participation by non-whites.

In the 1960s and ’70s, Indians on the Wind River Reservation, as elsewhere, experienced a political awakening signaled by the rise of the American Indian Movement, whose sometimes-radical methods were aimed at restoring Native pride and sovereignty. The tribes also benefited from growing sympathy in Congress and the courts. In a landmark 1988 decision, the Wyoming Supreme Court infuriated white farmers and ranchers by ruling that the tribes had first claim on water flowing through the reservation, a decision later affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Emboldened by their progress, the Arapaho eventually won court approval—over intense state opposition—to bring casino gambling to the reservation. The Shoshone soon followed with their own casinos.

At the local level, though, political power still eluded the Indians. Under Fremont County’s at-large electoral system, whites who ran for the county commission had a built-in advantage, and tribal candidates invariably lost. So in 2005, a group of Northern Arapaho and Shoshone plaintiffs filed suit in U.S. District Court in Wyoming against the county under the Voting Rights Act. They argued that the electoral system discriminated against Native Americans, and sought to ensure a voice in local government by dividing the county into single-member voting districts, one of which would be mostly Native American.

Much of the trial transcript reads like a sadly familiar history lesson, with references to such infamous crimes as the Sand Creek massacre, in which scores of Arapaho and Cheyenne, mostly women and children, were slaughtered by a Colorado militia in 1864 (whites celebrated the killings with a parade in Denver). On the reservation, meanwhile, disease and malnutrition took such a toll that by the late 19^th century the Arapaho population had dwindled from about 6000 to fewer than 900, according to expert testimony. Children who survived their early years often were taken from their parents and forced into boarding schools of notorious cruelty and squalor. Their braids were chopped off, and if they dared to speak Native languages instead of English, they were beaten or had their mouths washed out with soap. At one such school on the Wind River reservation, living conditions were so dreadful that half the students died between 1892 and 1902, according to data, compiled by an Episcopal priest, which was presented at the voting rights trial.

Historical grievances aside, the trial produced ample evidence of how little some things have changed in Fremont County over the last century. One of the tribes’ witnesses was Todd Guenther, a former director of the Pioneer Museum in Lander who now teaches anthropology and history at Central Wyoming College. Guenther testified that when he came to the museum in 1995, Native Americans complained to him about the use of offensive terms, such as “squaws” and “bucks,” in some exhibits. So he applied for a $10,000 grant from the Wyoming Humanities Council to replace or redesign the exhibits.

Guenther got the grant, sharing the news in a meeting with the association that oversees the museum. But a member of the group, who also was on the county museums board, asked him to stay after the meeting. “He wanted to know more about what I was undertaking with that project,” Guenther testified. “And when I explained that to him, he terminated the meeting by slamming his notebook and saying, ‘I hate goddamn Indians, and I won’t have anything to do with this.’” The association member, Crosby Allen, subsequently was elected to the Fremont County Commission (Allen did not return phone messages seeking comment).

Others apparently shared the same view. “I have had people come up to me and say, well, I’ll support that museum if you don’t spend much time, you know, if you don’t emphasize those prairie niggers, which is a slur that’s heard around the area referring to Native Americans,” said Guenther.

Native Americans lacked a voice on the county commission until the election of Keja Whiteman, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, in 2006. The dearth of representation meant that tribes were at a distinct disadvantage when it came to competing with the rest of the county for services. Tribal leaders have commissioned studies showing that the reservation generates significantly more in revenues for the county than it receives in the form of services. County officials countered with their own analysis, which they say shows the reservation does receive its fair share of attention from county government.

But there is no dispute that the reservation makes a significant contribution to the county’s revenue base.  Much of the money comes from the severance tax that the state collects on oil and gas extracted from the reservation, then redistributes to counties on the basis of a revenue-sharing formula. Tribal members also pay state sales taxes–part of which comes back to the county–on purchases from businesses off the reservation.

“Some of our money is going into those [county] coffers, and I think we should be on the Commission saying, ‘Yes, this is where some of the money should go,’” testified James Large, a plaintiff in the case.

Large, who moved back to the reservation after earning two Purple Hearts in Vietnam, told the court that he and three others lived in a trailer home with no telephone or water service, relying on monthly truck deliveries to fill a cistern. Meanwhile, the reservation town of Fort Washakie had to rely on boiled or bottled drinking water for two and a half months in 2003 because local sources were contaminated, according to testimony from Gary Collins, a Northern Arapaho plaintiff. Collins, who studied geology at the University of Wyoming, said that between 2000 and 2005 there had been numerous such “boil orders” on the reservation.

“I didn’t think any community off of the reservation would have had such, it seemed, ongoing problems,” said Collins. “It just wouldn’t have been allowed to go on for so long.” (A county official said such problems typically are resolved below the county level, as when neighbors band together to form water and sewer districts. Taxes from these districts are then used to improve water quality.)

The county was aided in its defense by the Mountain States Legal Foundation, an arch-conservative Colorado-based group whose founding director was Wyoming lawyer James Watt, who served as Interior Secretary during the Reagan Administration. Their strategy, by and large, was to deny that there was any problem. To that end, the county’s attorneys relied heavily on expert testimony from Stephen Thernstrom, a Harvard University history professor known for his controversial arguments against special treatment for minorities. Thernstrom disputed the idea that Indians had suffered unduly at the hands of whites during the frontier era—“I think there’s plenty of blame to apportion to both sides”—or in the boarding schools they were later forced to attend. The experience of Indian children who were beaten for speaking Native languages, he suggested, was not so different than that of his father, a child of Swedish immigrants, who had no choice but to learn English when he entered public school in the United States. “That’s the American story, and I don’t think that was racist,” he said.

Patrick Hickerson, one of several commissioners to testify, disputed the charge that the county skimped on services for Native Americans, ticking off a list of programs—the detox center, a homeless shelter, services for children and elderly people—that many use. Under cross-examination, however, Hickerson acknowledged that several such programs were required by law, not initiated by the county, and that none of the program offices was actually located on the reservation—which, in fact, he knew little about:

“You’ve never attended any cultural events on the reservation, such as powwows, have you?

“Not that I can remember, no.

“And you’ve never had any interest in doing that, isn’t that right?

“Oh, I wouldn’t say I wouldn’t be interested in it, I just haven’t.”

“Well, didn’t you say in your deposition that you had no interest in doing it?”

“I may have.”

“Okay. You don’t really have any social contacts on the reservation, do you?”

“No, not really.”

“Now, as I understand it, the County Commission has never undertaken any specific projects on the reservation, such as improving housing, for example?”

“No.”

“Or improving drinking water?”

“Uh, no.”

“Or improving healthcare?”

“Not at—not a project, no.”

“Or to stimulate economic development on the reservation?”

“Not that I know of.”

A Sense of Community

John Vincent, mayor of Riverton, Wyoming, on a ranch outside of town, June 19, 2010. Photograph by Robert Durell

The voting rights trial was not the only threat to the status quo in Fremont County. Another was John Vincent, who in 2002 became the first Democrat to win the mayor’s office in Riverton since the 1950s. Born and raised in the community, Vincent, 61, is a shambling, easygoing bear of a man—a former college wrestler– who earns his living as a trial attorney. He runs his busy practice out of a converted 1920s bungalow, behind which is the carriage house where he keeps his private office. When I met him there one afternoon, he was dressed in gym clothes in preparation for an afternoon workout. Vincent told me he had always believed strongly in the need for better relations for the tribes, showing me a photo of a “cedaring ceremony”—a ritual blessing conferred by Native elders—held in his city hall chambers the day he was sworn in to his first term.

“It just seemed we needed to learn how to work together and get along better,” he recalled. “From the outset I wanted to develop some sense of community between Riverton people and reservation people, because our economies are so intertwined.”

A wide streak of pragmatism drove his efforts. As an assistant city attorney in the 1990s, Vincent had settled a lawsuit brought on behalf of a tribal member who had been picked up by a Riverton police officer for public drunkenness. Rather than taking him into custody, the officer deposited him across the city line in the parking lot of an Arapaho-owned bingo parlor on reservation land. The man staggered into traffic, was hit by a truck, and severely injured. The episode helped build support for the detoxification center in Riverton, which opened a few years later and now serves mostly Indians. And it underscored, in Vincent’s mind, the need for better coordination between the town and reservation, not just in law enforcement but in other areas as well.

Against that backdrop, then, Vincent and the leaders of the Arapaho and Shoshone Business Councils—the governing bodies for the tribes—signed a formal agreement on April 29, 2008. On its face, the pact was innocuous. It pledged in general terms that the city and the reservation would work together on various community matters, and asserted that “Riverton is within the exterior boundaries of the Wind River Reservation”—to Vincent and other supporters of the agreement, a simple acknowledgment of geographic fact. But the statement set off a firestorm in Fremont County, where the legal status of Riverton and other areas that were transferred to white ownership during the homesteading era has long been disputed.

“You are absolutely, positively and dangerously incorrect,” then County Attorney Ed Newell wrote in an email to Vincent. “I don’t know what compelled the City to adopt this agreement.” Accepting that Riverton is part of “Indian Country,” he wrote in another email, would “open the door for Tribal taxation and regulation of Riverton residents,” and prevent local police from arresting Indians for crimes committed in Riverton. He suggested that the city’s position could help free a “convicted baby-killer,” Andrew Yellowbear, an Arapaho man who in 2006 was convicted in a state court of murdering his infant daughter at his apartment in Riverton. Yellowbear, who had been sentenced to life, was seeking to have the conviction overturned on grounds that he should have been tried in a tribal or federal court because Riverton is part of the reservation.

Vincent, whose low-key manner masks a pugnacious streak, punched back.

“This type of fear-mongering and hateful language that Newell puts in his emails and then wants you to write is intended to do no more than to tear our people apart,” he told the Riverton Ranger. “I find it reprehensible for a publicly elected official who claims to represent the people of Fremont County.”

The battle had been joined, and it quickly got worse.

Hard Feelings

A teepee stands outside a home in Ethete, Wyoming, June 19, 2010. Photograph by Robert Durell

In September 2008, the Northern Arapaho filed a federal lawsuit against the state and county governments challenging their right to collect sales taxes and vehicle registration fees from tribal members in Riverton. Vigorously represented by the Lander law firm of Baldwin & Crocker, the tribe argued that because the town was within the reservation’s boundaries, tribal members should be exempt from such levies, as they already are on reservation land south of the river. Though the lawsuit did not name Riverton, city officials regarded it as a threat to their revenue base, which comes in part from state sales taxes. Many whites saw the tribe’s decision to file the case just four months after pledging cooperation with the city as evidence that the Indians on the reservation were not to be trusted—and that Vincent had been played for a fool.

“People would say stuff like, ‘Did you feel a tomahawk in your head, John?’” the mayor recalled ruefully. It didn’t help that during the same period, the Arapaho and Shoshone applied to the federal Environmental Protection Agency for money to conduct air quality studies on the reservation. The studies, if they are funded, could eventually help the tribes win a greater voice in the approval process for new industry near the reservation—an outcome that county officials say could threaten the local economy.

The city sided with the state and county in the tax case, and also joined them in opposing the tribes’ application to the EPA. The Shoshone, meanwhile, dropped out of the negotiations with the city. But despite their differences with the tribes, Vincent and other city officials believed strongly in the need for continued dialogue. In the fall of 2008, city officials began a new round of talks with the Arapaho, this time with help from former Wyoming Gov. Mike Sullivan, a Democrat and former ambassador to Ireland who had been brought in as a mediator.

In December of the same year, Vincent’s conciliatory approach was vindicated to some degree when U.S. Magistrate William C. Beaman found that city’s pursuit of better relations with the tribes did not amount to giving away the store, as the mayor’s critics had argued.

“The city has not conceded that it is Indian country,” Beaman wrote in an interim ruling in the tax case. “Rather, it has merely taken an approach of governmental cooperation with the Tribes given its proximity to the Tribe and the reservation.” (U.S. District Judge Clarence Brimmer subsequently dismissed the Northern Arapaho’s tax lawsuit, which is currently on appeal.)

The discussions brokered by Sullivan produced a new package of agreements known collectively as the MOU, or memorandum of understanding.  They were carefully written to take account of non-Indian concerns, or so the authors believed. Gone was any talk of Riverton’s place “within the exterior boundaries” of the reservation. In fact, the Arapaho explicitly disavowed any claims to land in Riverton. They also agreed to accept the city’s master plan for the city and its surroundings, and promised not to try to take over the municipal sewage plant, so long as it was operated effectively. In return, the city agreed to seat a tribal member on its planning commission, and to help the tribe work for federal tax breaks for local businesses that hire Native Americans. Both sides agreed to seek help from outside mediators before taking disputes to court.

“I think for too long we’ve let a river divide us and we haven’t worked together very well,” Vincent said at a city council meeting where the agreements were unveiled last Nov. 16.

But white reaction to the proposed pacts was hostile. As word of them spread in the community, opponents circulated petitions, flooded city hall with letters and emails, and took out a full-page newspaper ad warning that the MOU “has no value to Riverton and is detrimental to the citizens’ of Riverton position that Riverton is not part of the Reservation.”  Hostile county officials couched their arguments in legal terms, asserting that the documents implicitly supported the Indians’ position that Riverton and other parts of the reservation ceded by the 1905 act were still under tribal jurisdiction, at least for some legal and regulatory purposes.

“They’re not overt, they don’t say that, but when you read it in the context of what’s happening, it’s a red flag to me,” Doug Thompson, the chairman of the Fremont County Commission, told me in an interview this spring. “A lot of these cases hinge on the definition of what are the boundaries of the reservation.”

Thompson’s point is at least debatable, but it was clear that legal worries alone were not driving the opposition. As captured in video recordings, city and county residents who packed the November city council meeting and an even noisier session on February 9 denounced the accords in angry and emotional terms that often had little to do with their substance.

“They need to understand that they cannot keep on bearing this hatred toward the white man,” said a white-haired woman in a flowered dress, accusing the Indians of plotting to take white-owned property in Riverton. “They’re not forgiving and they’re planning all the time.”

A bearded man in a cowboy hat described the documents as “a trap” filled with “weasel words.” Another woman said the tribes’ taxation lawsuit “makes you question their values and ethics.” Someone else blamed the casinos on the reservation for driving up Riverton’s crime rate. Many of the sharpest comments were greeted with hearty applause.

Some of the nastiest comments came in the letters and emails to the city, which were obtained by the Northern Arapaho’s attorneys under the Freedom of Information Act and posted on the tribe’s website.  “If you give these Indians what they want now, they won’t quit. Then they will want to take more, possibly your business,” said an anonymous letter from A Concerned Citizen.

“Every day there are many Indian people listed in the paper for drunk, disorderly conduct, etc.,” warned another. “I think they should be deposited at the door of the Indian police–then, if they are caught again in Riverton, they would be trespassing and ordered to forfeit any incoming monies to the city gov’t.”

Intended as a vehicle of reconciliation, the pacts had instead become a lightning rod for white resentments and anxieties that were as old as the frontier, and as new as the Tea Party.

One of the emails the tribe obtained was from Karlee Zach, who identified herself as the Riverton organizer of the conservative movement. She warned that the proposed agreements would trample on the rights of ordinary citizens and perhaps add to their tax burden. “We have had enough extras shoved down our throats with the Stimulus funding,” she wrote. Many speakers at the council meetings used similar language to condemn the agreements as government meddling. “It kind of reminds me of Obama and the health care bill,” said one man.

The Arapaho kept a low profile during the debate. At the November meeting, Norman Willow, a member of the tribe’s business council, sought to assure the audience that Natives had no hidden agenda.

“We’re not going to rediscover America,” he said.  “What happened to my people, I swallowed it, so we can have agreement. I’m not going to hold it against anybody, what happened to my people. This is America.”

Mayor Vincent was more combative. At the second meeting, where extra police were on hand, he accused county officials of  “using emails and other things to whip up hate and discontent” and noted that in recent cases in which non-Indians had chosen to fight the tribes in court–as on water rights and casino gambling–they had not often prevailed.

“The idea here is that instead of suing each other that we learn how to communicate,” he said. “We don’t think as a council that it serves anybody’s purpose to simply go to the square-off place, hire your lawyers, and duke it out for the next five years.

But the fight was already lost. At the opening of next meeting of the city council on February 16, Vincent somberly read a letter from Arapaho Chairman Harvey Spoonhunter announcing that the tribe was withdrawing from the agreements, sparing the council from a vote.

“Recent stories, public statements and a petition show that among some, little has changed about historic attitudes and resentments toward Indian people,” said the letter, which was drafted with one of the tribe’s attorneys. “We did not expect that our communication and cooperation with you would have generated such an extreme and unfortunate response.”

When Dennis Heckart, the county commissioner who had organized the petition drive, approached the microphone to speak, the mayor cut him off. He looked weary and defeated.

“We’ve hurt each other enough,” he said.

No Resolution

A mural overlooks the main downtown area of Riverton, Wyoming, June 19, 2010. Photograph by Robert Durell

Several months later, the gulf between the two sides seemed as wide and unbridgeable as ever.

“Racism is alive and well here in Wyoming, and Riverton,” Spoonhunter, the Arapaho chairman, told me when I went to see him in his business council office. A youthful-looking man in his fifties, he was dressed in jeans and a black cowboy hat and wore his hair in a thin braid. He was still perplexed by the bitterness of the opposition he had encountered. “We just wanted to come together and cooperate.”

In Riverton, meanwhile, Vincent’s quixotic crusade had cost him dearly in terms of public support. A few days before I met him, there had been an ugly scene in a restaurant where he was dining with his wife and daughter, and many people subscribed to the theory that Vincent had pursued the agreements out of self-interest—to curry favor with the tribes in hopes of winning a share of their legal business. When I asked him about this charge, Vincent laughed.

“It’s a lot easier to be against the Indians than for them,” he said. “The notion that standing firm on issues like this does anything to help one’s business prospects in Riverton is far-fetched, to say the least.”

But change may yet come to Fremont County—and, as in the past, a court is the reason why. In a strongly worded opinion on April 29, U.S. District Judge Alan B. Johnson made mincemeat of the county’s arguments in the voting rights case, ordering it to draw up a new electoral system based on single-member districts, as the tribes had sought.

“The long history of discrimination against Indians in the United States, Wyoming, and Fremont County is undeniable,” he wrote. “The evidence presented to this court reveals that discrimination is ongoing, and that the effects of historical discrimination remain palpable.”

Even after Johnson’s unambiguous order, the commission was not ready to comply. Instead, it proposed a pair of alternatives to the Indian plaintiffs’ remedy. One of the county’s plans would have created a predominantly Native American district, while the four remaining members still would be elected at large. The Casper Star-Tribune editorialized that the county seemed not to have grasped that it had lost the case.

On August 12, Johnson rejected the county’s proposals, writing that they had been “crafted in such a manner that they preserve the racial separation of the county.” He ordered Fremont County to adopt the tribe’s plan for five districts.

Last week, the county commission voted to appeal.

John Lancaster, Writer: (website john-lancaster.com) Lancaster is a former Washington Post correspondent who covered national environmental issues. the Pentagon and served as the newspaper’s bureau chief in Cairo and New Delhi. A free-lance since 2007, Lancaster has written for National Geographic, The New Republic, Slate, Smithsonian, National Geographic Traveler and The Smart Set.

Robert Durell, Photographer: (website robertdurellphoto.com)Durell is an award-winning free lance photographer based in Northern California. As a former staff photographer for the Los Angeles Times, Durell covered floods, fires and political turmoil for more than ten years, producing more than 5,000 published photographs. His subjects included meth addicts, a Down Syndrome boy trying to make it in a traditional classroom and an Arcata, Ca, neighborhood overtaken by medical marijuana cultivation.

Mixed McGuire Metaphors

 What ever happened to Pat McGuire’s massively productive water well in the upper Laramie Plains?  He got a Farm Loan Board irrigation loan to plant barley fields at 7000+ feet with this well.  People said he tapped an underground river.  He tore up my favorite spot for watching sage grouse strut while I was in law school, plowed it, planted barley and installed center pivot sprinklers.  I took people up there at 4:00 am every spring from 1979 to 1981  to watch the birds, but the last year the whole place was plowed up.

 Pat, who later ran for Governor, drilled an amazing water well where aliens told him to drill for irrigation water and then plant barley, and put in sprinklers.  Ed Herschler’s buddies at DEPAD (Dept. of Economic Planning and Development, invented by Stan Hathaway) loaned him the low-interest money.  Talk about sub-prime lending.

 Many people would think the foregoing paragraphs are so fantastic that they reveal terrible lapses in The Sage Grouse’s perception and reason.  However, the facts save me: in the early 1980s Leo Sprinkle, on the psychology faculty at the University of Wyoming, and Pat McGuire, a quirky articulate rancher of unusual talents, pooled their energies to contact intelligent beings from another planet or solar system or galaxy.  The alien beings instructed Pat to plow up the prairie, drill the big well, plant barley, and sell it to the Israelis. 

 How could I make this up?  Pat plowed, planted and irrigated, courtesy of state subsidies, and went bankrupt.  7,000 feet is too cold and high to provide a successful growing season for barley in Wyoming.  The state foreclosed on his farm.  Too bad for the sage-grouse.  Too bad for the state treasury.

 I still have a Pat McGuire for Governor poster.

 I wonder what ever happened to that monster water well?

Leadership

The latest critique of the gubernatorial candidates brought some lively Wyofile commentary and some private rebukes to The Sage Grouse.

Mary Flitner aptly observes that it is easier to criticize than to run for office.  The critics tend to be, well, critical, whereas political candidates need to be optimistic, cheerful, voluble and thick-skinned, but they also have to be blurry and inoffensive to avoid pissing off voters.

Here are some leadership ideas:

I-80: don’t install a bunch of toll booths, just charge a surcharge based on weight whenever a non-Wyoming licensed truck crosses the border on either end of I-80, at the ports of entry.  Let’s do it at Sundance, Sheridan, Cody and south of Laramie too.

(Non-residents pay more for hunting licenses; why not pay more for I-80 licenses?)

Wolves: Leslie Petersen has it right:  make them trophy animals statewide.  Asking the Attorney General to defend a shoot-on-sight policy is hopeless.

Wild horses: find a Wyoming community which is missing out on the boom, like maybe Riverton, and build a nice clean government-inspected horse slaughterhouse.  Maybe build it on the reservation and offer jobs to unemployed residents.

State budgets: require each program manager to write a justification from scratch, not to exceed two pages, why his/her program should be funded.  Publish the same on the internet and in the media.  Let voters and legislators review and react.  This is sort of a shortcut for zero-based budgeting.

Fuel tax: in this era of anti-government, anti-Obama, anti-taxes, this issue is hard to include in any candidates’ brochures.  Wyoming has no income tax, a low sales tax full of exemptions, low property tax, low fuel tax.  Folks, if you want good highways, sewers, clean water and public safety, you gotta pay taxes.  Fuel taxes ding non-residents; can’t we get behind that?

Obamacare: Folks, this is a federal law.  Don’t vote for local officials or the Governor in hope that they will magically change this federal law.  Isn’t it leadership to recognize your limitations and focus on things you CAN change?

Juvenile justice: why aren’t the candidates focusing on this huge issue?  Steering problem children away from careers as druggies and criminals, why, this might be more important than hot-button topics like wolves and “fighting” the feds.  The guardian ad litem program mandated by the Supreme Court is foundering under huge costs; it has to be fixed.  Juveniles need separate incarceration facilities, but they need to be not incarcerated when correctional alternatives are available.  This is one of the most complicated, difficult governmental issues in Wyoming.

Wind River Indian Reservation: Natives need to get over outrage that Europeans stole their land and European descendants need to get over their contempt for people with unique priorities.  Disadvantaged people with ready access to alcohol and drugs do not effectively organize to achieve political goals; they fall upon each other in crime and predation.  This happens in hopeless urban ghettoes in Illinois and Michigan and in Indian reservations across the nation.  I don’t hear candidates for governor offering ideas on these topics.  These are difficult issues, not well suited to tea party sound bites.  Fremont County’s position on election redistricting is embarrassing to the entire state.

The issues surrounding the use of the Chief Joseph Scenic Highway in northwest Wyoming as a Montana industrial haul road are not nearly as black and white as these horses. (click to enlarge)

Wyoming Public Radio Interview with WyoFile Editor

Cody, Wyoming—Beginning next summer the state of Montana plans to haul thousands of tons of contaminated mine tailings from an abandoned Cooke City, Montana, gold mine over Wyoming’s Chief Joseph Scenic Highway, a fragile, 47-mile, two-lane mountain route to Yellowstone and  one of the state’s most popular tourist byways.

The project to remove 68,000-148,000 tons of toxic material overland from the McLaren mill tailings site on the outskirts of Cooke City, Montana, 318 miles to a smelter in Whitehall, Montana, near Butte also includes reprocessing the tailings to harvest residual gold. Montana officials claim that even at currently high gold prices of over $1,100 an ounce, the revenue from the recovered gold will barely cover the hauling costs.

But the hauling scheme has some high-level political allure in The Treasure State. The project was celebrated in a June 2 Montana agency press release as “good as gold” and an “example of [Montana] Gov. [Brian] Schweitzer’s restoration economy and a demonstration of Montana ingenuity at its best.”

Here in northwest Wyoming the McLaren mill clean-up proposal is not so glittery, evocative of previous borderland mine and mine cleanup skirmishes reflected in the once-popular bumper sticker:

“Montana Gets the Gold, Wyoming Gets the Shaft.”

Central to the issue here is geography. You cannot get to or from Cooke City Montana except by driving through Wyoming. It is one of the most geographically isolated towns in Montana.

Another component is transparency. The ambitious hauling plan was put together quietly by the Montana Department of Environmental Quality starting in early 2008 when the price of gold started a steep climb to historically high global prices.

But the cleanup of the old McLaren mine tailings received almost no attention in Wyoming until this summer when State Representative Pat Childers (R-Cody) raised concerns that the potential damage to the road and to the region’s tourist economy had not been sufficiently studied and that Wyoming officials were left out of the loop.

“Montana did not include Wyoming in the environmental analysis of what they were going to do with those tailings,” Childers said in an interview with WyoFile. “They may have included some of the Montana people, but Wyoming was left out of the picture and it shouldn’t have been.”

Wyoming Department of Transportation officials said they first heard about the heavy hauling  in late March of this year, weeks after the bids had been opened.

THE CREEK

Iron staining in Soda Butte Creek downstream of McLaren TailingsSeptember 8, 2008. Photo: Montana Department of Environmental Quality (click to enlarge)

Few people, if any, question the need for the Montana Department of Environmental Quality’s overall mission to clean up the McLaren mill pits  and restore Soda Butte Creek in Cooke City.

Soda Butte Creek is terribly  polluted by the McLaren’s 30 acres of mine excrement  straddling it, in some places 50 feet deep behind a shaky dam; a repository of  acid mine waste. Mixed with oxygen from the atmosphere and hydrogen in running water, the McLaren tailings have generated high concentrations of sulfuric acid, turning  the streambed a bright  orange, killing everything zootic in the aquatic food chain  for miles downstream.  This stream percolates only a few yards behind businesses  on the east side of Cooke City’s main street .

Awareness of Soda Butte Creek’s poisonous plight goes back 60 years.

In 1949,  a Yellowstone Park ranger determined that the McLaren tailings were heavily toxic and damaging to Soda Butte Creek  and Yellowstone itself.

Soda Butte Creek is one of the largest tributaries of the long Lamar River which in turn feeds the Yellowstone River. The ranger found that all biologic life in Soda Butte Creek , from microrganisms and invertebrates all the way up to trout , were dying or gone for miles below the McLaren.

At that time, the McLaren Mill was still operating, but mysteriously burned to the ground in 1953 and its owners walked away from it.

The tailings are four miles upstream from Yellowstone Park’s northeast entrance and five miles from Wyoming. When Soda Butte Creek eventually does cross the state line into Wyoming it is wholly within the jurisdictional confines of Yellowstone National Park.

THE CHIEF JOE

Click map to enlarge

After a 31-year effort, The Chief Joseph Highway , officially known as Wyoming State Highway 296, was finally upgraded from a county gravel road to a fully paved state highway in 1995.

But the earliest stretches of it are rapidly approaching their 50-year design life. The forces of nature brutalize the Chief Joe with relentless freeze and thaw cycles. It can snow any day of the year in Wyoming’s Chief Joseph highway country .

The highway climbs 3,000 vertical feet from its junction on the Cody side to 8,050 foot Dead Indian Pass, and drops 2,000 feet on the Cooke City side with an unbroken 7.2 mile double yellow stripe “No Passing Zone”  down 7 percent grades with hairpin turns.

There are already rough spots where the pavement is cracking or the subgrade undulating. State Highway 296 was not designed or constructed  to the more robust standards of a primary artery.

The Chief Joe is narrower and of less substance  than the highways with which it connects:  US 212,  Beartooth Scenic Highway, between Cooke City and Red Lodge Montana, but which is mostly in Wyoming , and Wyoming Hwy 120-North , the main  thoroughfare between Cody and Billings, Montana,  which is heavily travelled by trucks.

WYOMING CONCERNS

State Representative pat Childers of Cody before the board of the Park County Commission at their August 3 meeting, discussing the issues of Wyoming's Chief Joseph Scenic Highway being used by the State of Montana to route thousands of heavy trucks of mine tailings from the Cooke City MT to a smelter near Butte MT. Childers is taking the lead in orchestrating Wyoming's response to that haul operation.

Under Childers urging, the Park County Board of County Commissioners sent an August 10 letter to Montana Environmental Quality Director Richard Opper asking what Montana offered Wyoming as compensation for “potential road damage as well as mitigation of impacts to residents, disruption to tourism traffic, and safety considerations.”

Childers, a retired chemical engineer who is chairman of the Wyoming House Travel, Recreation, Wildlife and Cultural Resources Committee, said he also asked Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal and the Cody city government to pressure Montana for more information about the project.

Richard Opper, the current Director of the Montana Department of Environmental Quality. Photo: Montana Department of Environmental Quality

Interviewed by WyoFile on August 20, Opper said his staff is studying the Park County request. Opper said that based on earlier objections from Childers and Wyoming Department of Transportation engineers, he has already delayed the beginning of the haul by more than a month, from June to July 2011,  to avoid late spring wet and spongy road surfaces.

Montana is using year-to-year grants from its portion of federal Abandoned Mine Lands funds administered by the Office of Surface Mining, Western Region office in Denver, to pay for the 6-year McLaren cleanup.

The contracted  price for the base McLaren mill site cleanup ( all tailings left onsite)  is $ 20.5 million . But hauling the McLaren tailings back through Wyoming to Whitehall adds millions of dollars more to the project and is not included in the federal Abandoned Mine Lands funding. The haul to Whitehall must pay for itself to proceed at all, and is driven by the price of gold, as volatile and unpredictable that can be.

To lessen the tourist logjams caused by the slow-moving ten-axle, tandem belly-dump haul trucks as they negotiate the steep grades of the Chief Joseph,  Opper also said he had agreed not to haul on some key summer holidays.

Wyoming Department of Transportation traffic counters showed 185,000 motor vehicles traversed the Chief Joseph Highway in 2008, the bulk of that occurring in the brief months of summer tourist season, since fewer than 200 year round Wyoming residents  live along the route.

But Opper so far has refused to reconsider the project or open it up to further public discussion. “This is a federal highway and this is a legal haul,” Opper said. “We have the obligation, of course, to make sure we work closely with the Wyoming Department of Transportation.”

THE HAUL

The Chief Joseph Scenic Highway in northwest Wyoming was not designed to handle heavy loads on a regular basis as primary highways are. The Chief Joseph is a secondary , or " collector" highway , considered mainly a tourist corridor. Photo: Dewey Vanderhoff (click to enlarge)

Even those closely associated with the project cannot say for sure how many trucks will be making the 318 mile trip to Whitehall from Cooke City, but numbers range from at least 1,500 outbound trucks to as many as 4,000 and each of those trucks will return to Cooke City after dumping their loads at the Golden Sunlight Mine processing facility.

Roger Koontz is a lifelong Cody resident who operates Harris Trucking, a heavy construction and trucking firm and who is quite familiar with the Chief Joseph Highway. “That’s a job I would love to have,” Koontz told Wyofile, “ but those trucks will tear up that road.”

Koontz  also noted that a passenger car can drive from Cody to Cooke City in  less than two hours easily, but one of his heavy haul trucks would take about 4-1/2 hours to do it, giving some indication of the effect the McLaren haul trucks will have on traffic flows. Estimates are calling for trucks dispatching every half hour and up to 25 per day outbound over the Chief Joseph during next summer’s hauls, and an equal number returning.

If Wyoming Department of Transportation managers believe the Mclaren trucks are exacerbating wear and tear on the roadbed, they can legally force those trucks to lighten their loads. But this will likely increase the number and frequency of truckloads. Because it is a public roadway, subject to interstate commerce rules, this the only regulatory or statutory  tool Wyoming has to  buffer the impacts of the McLaren haul , unless and until very serious roadbed damage occurs.

The Chief Joseph Scenic Highway in northwest Wyoming is a steep winding mountain road . It is mainly a tourist corridor and was not designed as a haul road. Photo: Dewey Vanderhoff (click to enlarge)

The legal load limit on Wyoming state highways , including the Chief Joseph Highway , is 91,500 lbs. said Cody Beers, spokesman for Wyoming Department of Transportation.

Wyoming transportation engineers plan to do a technical assessment of the entire Chief Joseph road condition next Spring just before the hauling begins, mapping every linear foot of the 47 mile route with hi-tech sensors, said District Engineer Shelby Carlson from her Basin WY office on August  20.

The contract for the McLaren cleanup and hauling was awarded to multistate contracting and engineering firm Knife River, headquartered out of Bismarck North Dakota with major operations in Billings and Casper.

Knife River actually built portions of the Chief Joseph Scenic Highway during the 1980’s and also knows the highway well. Knife River began work on the McLaren project the second week of June  and has been  hauling truckloads of  equipment and   materials into Cooke City over the Chief Joseph Highway this summer .

THE SITE

Work on the McLaren mill tailings reclamation near Cooke City began in mid-June this summer , with hauling of mine waste over the Chief Joseph Scenic Highway scheduled for next year . When excavators began moving dirt there this summer, they uncovered relics of Cooke City's 140 year mining history, such as these old timbers. Photo: Dewey Vanderhoff (click to enlarge)

Heavy earthwork is proceeding briskly at the McLaren with a planned shutdown for the season about October 15. Knife River has prepared a mandatory comprehensive transportation plan that is presently circulating internally at Montana Department of Environmental Quality for review.

Interviewed at the cleanup site on a recent afternoon, project manager Tom Henderson, a professional hydrologist, said there are no viable alternatives to the long overland haul.

Highways back through Yellowstone Park or away east over the 10,940 foot alpine Beartooth Highway are not practical even if they were allowed. No commercial trucking, for example, is allowed in Yellowstone. The Beartooth Highway is even higher and more serpentine than the Chief Joseph.

Henderson said original plans to move all of the tailings to a repository only a few hundred yards from the current location above Soda Butte Creek are negated by seismic and groundwater concerns. Likewise, he said proposals to move the tailings to repositories in the Gallatin National Forest are also environmentally unsound.

Under the  revised final plan  sent out for bids in October 2009, most of the tailings will be excavated, cleaned and neutralized for Ph factor using lime, dried, and replaced in the original repository behind a new reinforced retaining wall  under an impervious cap then “revegetated ,” all resulting in Soda Butte Creek being made healthy again.

The remaining tailings , estimated at between 13 to 30 percent  of the total, will be trucked away over the Chief Joseph for reprocessing and final repose.

Years earlier  the state agency had asked the Gallatin National Forest for use or purchase  of a specific site— a little-used riprap and gravel pit nearby— for a possible repository for the McLaren tailings.

That request was turned down. But Gallatin National Forest officials offered a different repository , one being built for the ongoing and adjacent New World Mine cleanup that is presently only half full.

Montana Department of Environmental Quality was not interested in that option.

“That repository is still available to Montana” , says Mary Beth Marks , the geologist for the Gallatin Forest who oversees the 10-year New World Mine cleanup, now entering its final closeout phase.

LESSONS OF HISTORY

A photo taken on June 12 of 2008 on the Chief Joseph Scenic Highway shows it can snow most any day of the year along its mountain route. Wyoming Department of Transportation has asked Montana to delay the beginning of the Mclaren hauling till July to allow the road to fully dry out from spring runoff and snowmelt. Photo: Dewey Vanderhoff (click to enlarge)

In the 140 year history of mining in the Cooke City region , virtually every venture was unprofitable. It was not because of a lack of gold or silver bullion , it was because  the exceedingly high cost of  shipping  stuff in or out of the New World mining district spirited away all the capital , too. In other words, transportation costs have always exceeded the value of the precious metals extracted near Cooke City.

Nonetheless, Montana is clinging to the gold hauling plan. A sizable amount  of the mine waste targeted for hauling  is “mine dump “  ore that never went through the McLaren mill at all, so is inherently richer in gold percentage than the milled tailings.

The three contractor bids were opened in  February in Helena, and Knife River was awarded the 6-year job on  May 10 this year after review. “The contracts have been signed, this is our last good chance,” Henderson said.

Phone records reveal the first contact between Montana Department of Environmental Quality and the Wyoming Department of Transportation regarding use of the Chief Joseph Scenic Highway  came on March 28 , according to both Del McOmie, Chief Operating Engineer in Cheyenne and Shelby Carlson , District Engineer for northwest Wyoming.

For his part, Rep. Childers is not ruling out the Chief Joseph haul as a possible solution to the McLaren mine clean-up. Childers said he just wants Wyoming to have more of a say in what is happening on one of its most famous byways.

“If Richard Opper brushes off the Commissioners and the State,” Childers said, “I will request that the Commissioners consider filing suit against the state of Montana.”

Childers and other Wyoming officials question whether the Montana plan to remove and haul the tailings is the best approach and wonder if the potential for profit  from the recovered gold may be overly influencing the Montana hauling  decision at Wyoming’s expense.

“If they are making money on this,” said Childers, “some of those funds should be used to pay the Wyoming Department of Transportation for damage to the highway.”

As it evolves, the case highlights the limitations of interstate cooperation, even on environmentally sound issues, and promises to stoke already smoldering Montana-Wyoming enmity over issues like coal bed methane water pollution that flows from Wyoming’s Powder River Basin into Montana.

Officially, Montana officials are talking about cooperation between the two states.   But not far under the surface they are angered that a Wyoming intervention or lawsuit could scuttle their gilded project.

“This is a project that will benefit Yellowstone National Park,” said one official, who asked not to be identified by name. “Last time I looked most of Yellowstone is in Wyoming. Also, I didn’t see Wyoming consulting Montana when they polluted our waters with salt to produce coal bed methane.”

Kettlebells are one of the hot, “new” training tools on the market today. Walk the aisles of any Walmart and you can find colorful rubber-coated bells in a range of light weights. In gyms around the globe, these things — basically a steel ball with a big handle welded on the top– are becoming very popular. Their weights range up to 150 pounds each.

Originally used as counter-weights in Russian markets, the kettlebell first came into use as an exercise aid about 300 years ago. A hundred years ago, the strongmen of the day regularly used them in training and performance. They were common for a number of years, but saw a substantial drop in popularity in this country concurrent with the rise of machine training.

It wasn’t until very late in the 20^th century that they made a comeback, when a former Soviet trainer, Pavel Tsatsouline, “introduced” America to kettlebell training. Today his two books – Enter The Kettlebell (Dragon Door Publications, 2006) and The Russian Kettlebell Challenge (Dragon Door Publications, 2001) — are the two most-read books on the subject.

Although a sophisticated observer can easily see that kettlebells are simply a tool, and not a revolution, they are widely touted as the latter. Several trainers and fitness centers have hopped on board with kettlebell-only classes and programs. There are numerous kettlebell coaching certifications, and dozens of books and DVDs showing us how to get incredibly fit using these tools.

The bottom line is that the kettlebell can make you work differently than a traditional weight. The bell has a profound effect on one’s center of gravity when doing standard exercises such as the swing and the snatch. Where a dumbbell is balanced, with the weight easily controllable by the hand, the offset handle on the kettlebell effectively acts as an additional arm joint, and thus demands of the user more balance, better grip, and smoother movement than does dumbbell work.

The greatest benefit to most exercisers is the core involvement required in almost every kettlebell exercise. Add to this the full-body nature of many of these exercises, and you can see why research supports the use of these tools in both strength-building and fat-loss. Are kettlebells the way, the truth and the light? No. Should they be an intergral piece of your training plan? Yes.

Getting started is requires a bit of a learning curve, but I’ll argue that any exercise that’s easy to learn is less effective than a complex one. Start with the easier exercises such as swings and cleans, then as your strength improves advance to harder ones like the get-up and the snatch. Most people working in a home gym can get away with just one kettlebell, as most of the exercises are done one hand at a time.

My advice is to stay away from the really light ones, which tend to be substantially less effective, and start with a 15 to 25 pounder. Most women who train in our facility work up to using 35 pound or more for most of their exercises, and most men can handle 45 to 50.

Kettlebells are not new, not revolutionary, and will not correct your bad habits. They are, however, a great training tool, and can add good variety and skills to an athlete’s training program.

Bumps In The Road

 The August issue of National Geographic features the Kaziranga National Park in northeast India, most of which is Brahmaputra River floodplain.  This 400 mile long east-west mix of tall grass prairie, sand bars, marshes and woodlands is one of the last refuges for Bengal tigers,  Indian rhinoceros, Indian elephants, Asiatic water buffalo, basaringhs, sambars and hog deer.

 The Brahmaputra, an incredible U-turn river draining much of steep southern Tibet running east, rounding the Tibetan uplift and turning south, then disgorging its  rich floodwaters and sediments all over northeast India and Bangladesh,  owns its bottomlands.  No dams, no diversions control or mediate this angry river; it owns the floodplain.  Lots of people try to live there and they die by the hundreds or thousands every year.

 The wildlife, likewise affected by these floods, scoot their endangered butts right out of there in the rainy season.  Problem:  once they escape the floodplain in search of forested protection, they encounter highways and railroads running east-west along the edges of the floodplain.  Carnage ensues.

 There are parallels in Wyoming, although at least we do not encounter migratory rhinos who outweigh a Jeep and can flip most cars into the nearest ravine, nor elephants, nor tigers.  Rhinos and tigers and ellies, oh my.

 The highway death toll on these roads along the edges of the Kaziranga Park is stated to be appalling, for both bipeds and quadripeds.  The carnage is huge.

 Back to Wyoming:  on many of our highways, the carnage is also huge.  Deer and pronghorn, turkeys and sometimes other large mammals are slaughtered, and there are all of these unexplained unrestrained rollovers and all of the wildly skittering skid and yaw marks made by tires which we see daily.  How many of these accidents and deaths were caused by ungulates crossing the road?

 I recently spent 18 days driving around in Peru, mainly in mountainous areas.  The government installs asphalt speed bumps at the edges of all inhabited areas, and often in the middle of “urban” areas.  Locals build their own clay and gravel speed bumps wherever they want to slow the traffic.  Bumping over these semi-obstacles was inconvenient for us, even annoying.  It happened dozens or hundreds of times each day.  But, we did not run over a single goat, pig, chicken, child, dog or drunk the whole trip.

 The semis had to stop and crawl over these bumps in their lowest gear.  If I wanted to learn how to swear in Spanish, riding in a truck would have provided the ultimate language immersion experience.

 These speed bumps could be very useful along the Brahmaputra.  They could also be useful along the Pinedale Anticline and other areas of frequent vehicle-quadruped conflicts.  We could hear some swearing there too.

Get on Google Earth and check out the Glacier Basin, Chaos Mountain, Avalanche Creek, all part of the North Fork of the Shoshone River drainage west of Cody.  This area lies 13 air miles south of the North Fork highway and slightly north of perdition.  Or maybe in the middle of perdition.  If this is not the end of the earth, I am not sure I want to go there.

In a bit of land, a few hundred acres, lying relatively flat at 10,200 feet, ringed by Chaos Mountain, Battlement Mountain, Fishhawk Glacier and Glacier Basin in a 180 degree arc to the north and Howell Fork to the southwest, lies a boulder-strewn pass between the Yellowstone River drainage to the southwest and the North Fork Shoshone River drainage to the north: Glacier Pass.

This is rugged country, you might have surmised from the landmark names.  Contour intervals are densely packed.  Avalanche Creek’s cirque is so stunningly vertical that neither man nor horse can descend it (at least without ropes and a high degree of death wish in this Absaroka volcanic unconsolidated junk-rock); one must hike or ride in from the bottom, through grizzly-infested ultimate wildness.  Parts of this geology are upside down after a huge Yellowstone caldera explosion.  Mountain climbers don’t come here; the rock is too rotten.  Tourists are not often invited into these rugged highlands.  It’s pretty quiet here.

What, ask readers, affords our desk-jockey columnist license to write about one of the most inaccessible places in the lower 48?  Well, ahem, excuse me, I have been there.

And, by the way, what was I doing there?  Well, basically I was being a self-absorbed, bird watching, sightseeing, thermos-coffee-drinking photographer aboard my outfitter’s saddle horse as we climbed out of the timber into the pass while hunting for trophy Bighorn rams.  There are hunters who are totally alert and on edge 24/7, and there are hunters who rely on their guides for cues.  Big confession, I am one of the latter.  ADHD on horseback, that’s me.

We had climbed out of cold beds at 4, choked down a quick breakfast, ridden horseback in the darkness for two hours, climbed the forested trail to the surely-legendary Glacier Pass and broke out of the timber; I was hungry, bored, distracted, eating a granola bar and taking pictures of jays.  We were probably the first humans there in several years.

We got off the horses and were leading them along; I didn’t know, I was dumbly following my guide.  He stopped, pulled out his scope, took a peek and quietly told me to gingerly turn my horse around and slowly and nonchalantly walk back to the timber, pretending we had not seen anything.  The “anything” we had not “seen” was a group of seven trophy rams lying in the grass on the other side of the rock-strewn meadow.  As we shuffled slowly back to the timber, they exploded over a steep cliff and vanished north into the bowels of Glacier Basin.

This was the Ultimate Stupid Moment.  I was not hunting with a neophyte; my guide is one of the best.  Both of us just had a lapse of alertness during a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.  There were several record-class rams in that bunch.  They were smarter than we were.  At least I got to see them run away, forever.

After the rams dropped off a nasty escarpment into Glacier Basin, we flogged the horses to a little group of trees at timberline, tied them and launched into the most strenuous hiking day of my lifetime.  Wind sprints on steep scoria outcrops are highly recommended as conditioning.  I was actually in shape then, running a 5k in 21 minutes at 4,500 feet.  However, Glacier Pass is 10,200 feet.

We skittered recklessly down steep snow pack, scree and talus slopes, wildly defying death, into Glacier Basin, searching in vain for a track, or a hair, or a scent; nothing.  We went up, out of breath, we went down.  No sign.  So, without a clue, we dropped further a couple of thousand feet, hopefully seeking a glimpse of our ghost rams.

Chance favors the prepared.  We were not prepared.

As we dropped below timberline we lurched into lush patches of huckleberries, too juicy to resist. Suddenly hunting rams was forgotten.  For me it was an exciting and nerve-racking experience scarfing berries out of a thick berry patch of which the grizzlies had recently harvested one-half; we were scarfing the grizzlies’ remaining half.  To the left the berries had been carefully bitten off just below the berry-twig interface; to the right, the berries were intact.  We speculated about how proprietary grizzlies might be about huckleberries. The air was almost redolent with Chanel’s Grizzly No. 5.

Descending further below the steep, treeless no-man’s-land, we wandered into lush hanging valleys soaked by waterfalls, erupting with color: Lewis’ Monkeyflower, Fireweed, Paintbrush, raspberries, thimbleberries, wild strawberries, red and black currants, giant mushrooms, with huckleberries everywhere.  I kept expecting something prehistoric, like pterodactyls or dinosaurs or King Kong to emerge.  Shangri-La pales in comparison.  Carrying binoculars and a .270, I had brought only a tiny camera to capture a few images.

This was fun for a while, forgetting the rams (and the painful embarrassment associated therewith) while drinking spring water and gorging on berries, surrounded by waterfalls, absorbed with nature’s lush largesse.

Then came the harsh realization: we had to hike back up the several thousand feet to the pass and the horses.  Filling our water bottles, we started the long trudge.

We saw no people, no horses, no horse dung, no tracks all day.

But the grizzlies, they are everywhere.  They dig up rocks for moths, they skin conifers for cambium, they root up stumps, they roar, they run for elk gut piles left by hunters, they are everywhere.  We only saw three.

Postscript: when the grizzlies got home, they said “we only saw two”.

Reprinted from ClimateWire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — Mayor Harvey Hall can get very excited about efforts to “decarbonize” California’s energy system.

His city is the hub of Kern County. Its two major businesses, agriculture and oil, are in a severe slump. Unemployment is running about 17 percent. “I’ve lived here all my life,” explains Hall, 69. “This economy is probably the worst that I’ve ever seen.”

So when BP PLC and Rio Tinto, the big British-Australian mining company, decided on a Kern County site to build the nation’s first large facility to remove 90 percent of the carbon from coal-fired electricity, Hall became one of its evangelists. “Two billion dollars. That’s big!” he exclaims.

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Actually, it’s $2.3 billion, with $308 million awarded to the project by the U.S. Department of Energy. When it is completed, perhaps as early as 2015, it will dramatically transform some pastureland 40 miles west of Bakersfield into a power plant that can remove 90 percent of the carbon emissions from coal — something that has never been done before on a commercial scale.

Beyond that, the facility called the Hydrogen Energy California project — HECA for short — will begin to nibble away at California’s most vexing carbon emission problem: its sprawling transportation system. It is also being designed to burn the charred residue from petroleum refining, called petroleum coke. The result will be nearly carbon-free electricity. (Normally, “petcoke” is exported to Asia, where it is burned in conventional power plants that vent the resulting CO2 into the atmosphere.)

This pioneering effort is being closely watched from a number of levels. Hall, who owns businesses in Bakersfield, is looking for the ripple effect from 1,500 construction jobs to lift its economy and the area’s slumping tax base.

California is not normally regarded as being in “coal country” because it gets most of its electricity from plants that burn natural gas. But coal-producing Western states, such as Wyoming, are anxious to see whether California’s regulators will give power made from “decarbonized” coal or petcoke premium rates that make it competitive with electricity made from natural gas and wind power.

They are intensely interested because between 20 and 30 percent of California’s electricity comes from out of state, most of it produced by coal-fired power plants.

Bringing CO2 to played-out oil fields

Environmental groups are split. Some want the state with the nation’s first economywide carbon cap to lead the way to carbon capture and storage, or CCS. Others argue that developing such CCS projects will take money away from renewable energy projects.

Finally, there is Occidental Petroleum Corp., owner of the Elk Hills oil field, the largest in California, which is just 4.5 miles from the HECA site. It has a contract to buy 5,500 metric tons per day of the CO2 that will be captured by the plant. At Elk Hills, Occidental will inject it 6,000 feet down into the oil reservoir. Occidental estimates that the CO2 will help it produce an additional 15 percent of the oil that would otherwise remain trapped in the ground.

“Parts of it [the oil field] were sitting idle, waiting for new technology and this is it,” explained William Barrett, an engineer overseeing the project for Occidental.

So far, the HECA project has charmed state regulators. “It really is a win-win-win-win-win,” said Michael Peevey, president of California’s Public Utilities Commission. He noted that such carbon capture and storage projects will have to happen “on a large scale in California” if the state is going to meet its goal of cutting carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050.

HECA still has a ways to go. It must get permits from 18 different federal, state and local agencies before construction can begin next year. In November, Californians vote on a referendum that would suspend the state’s pioneering climate law until unemployment levels decline, which could halt state efforts on the project.

Then there is the precarious state of BP, one of HECA’s two sponsors. While BP has shown no sign of withdrawing, the billions of dollars the company is paying to clean up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill are making it a smaller company, less able to sponsor such large experiments in the future.

Public unease about injections

Polls show a public uneasy about injecting CO2 into the ground. Earthquake-sensitive Californians “don’t have a confidence level with anything that has to do with the subsurface in general,” explained Elizabeth Burton, technical director of the West Coast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership, a group of 80 companies and state agencies trying to pave the way for HECA and other demonstration projects.

While it is still mostly on paper, HECA may still have the best shot at winning public support because it has financial support and its technology is the most conservative bet among large-scale projects being planned. Instead of burning its fuel, it will bake it at high temperatures to turn it into a gas, a process that has been known since World War II. The gas will then be treated with steam to produce carbon dioxide and hydrogen. The hydrogen will be burned in HECA’s electric plant, providing “decarbonized” power to 150,000 homes.

Artist’s drawing of a power plant that will separate CO2 from coal emissions and pipe it to a nearby oil field. Courtesy of Hydrogen Energy California.
The separated CO2 will be sent via pipeline to Elk Hills, where Occidental’s payments for it will help reduce the project’s costs. Occidental has been using CO2 for what is called “enhanced oil recovery” projects in Texas since the 1970s. “Natural gas and oil fields have held the oil and gas for millions of years,” explained Barrett of Occidental. “They are basically good places to store things. We know all the characteristics of the reservoir.”

Speaking at a recent symposium on carbon capture and storage projects in Sacramento, Sally Benson, a climate and energy expert at Stanford University, said that while much of the debate in California has been around converting its energy system to forms of renewable energy, such as solar and wind power, that is not likely to happen by 2050.

While environmental groups have sold California voters on renewable energy and have successfully led campaigns against coal-burning power plants and new nuclear plants, basic engineering is still needed to make the all-renewable dream happen. Benson noted that advances in batteries and other energy storage systems are needed to make solar and wind power available and reliable on a 24-hour-a-day basis.

“With no change in the future, 80 percent of our energy will continue to come from fossil fuel,” she explained.

But she thinks that CCS — which is usually thought of as a technology that is applied only to coal-burning power plants — might bring California to its long-term emission-cutting goals. Benson explained that it would have to be applied to emissions of gas-fired power plants, cement plants, oil refineries and others among the state’s biggest emitters before it could dramatically shrink the state’s C02 footprint by 2050.

Moreover, while California has a limited number of oil and gas reservoirs, it has more than 1,000 years of potential carbon storage in deep underground saline aquifers in its Central Valley. Benson thinks public qualms about injecting CO2 deep underground can be overcome.

Environmental groups split

George Peridas, who has been pushing California’s interest in decarbonization efforts for the Natural Resources Defense Council, explained at the symposium that the state’s powerful environmental groups are split on the issue of CCS. Some worry that the technology will detract from further efforts to promote renewable energy; others are mainly focused on fighting the coal industry.

He agrees with Benson that if California is going to succeed in taking most of the carbon out of its energy system, CCS technology will be needed. “Pioneer projects like HECA are very important,” he said in an interview. “Although this isn’t one of our favorite climate solutions, it is one of those that is needed. It helps move the ball forward in getting CCS deployed.”

Peridas is concerned that while California is leading the nation by imposing a cap on carbon emissions, it has fallen behind other states and the federal governments in drafting regulations for carbon capture and storage. In theory, a plant such as HECA should get benefits under a cap-and-trade system, if it has lower emissions than a natural gas-fired power plant. “They might get excess credits to sell, but the framework for this has yet to be worked out.”

Mark Brownstein, deputy director of energy programs for the Environmental Defense Fund, agreed. He said the “simple fact is that it [coal] is going to be with us for quite a while. Phasing out of coal may take 50 to 100 years to do.”

An effort by the state Legislature to establish a legal framework for CCS fizzled two years ago over concerns that CO2 injected into the ground may escape with lethal consequences. Currently, the California Energy Commission has appointed a blue-ribbon panel to study the issue.

S. Julio Friedmann, leader of a team of scientists studying the CCS issue at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, says most of the discussion around the supposed lethality of CO2 centers around a volcanic eruption that caused a massive bubble of the gas to erupt from Lake Nyos, a crater lake in the African nation of Cameroon in August 1986. Although 1,700 people suffocated, Friedmann said the massive eruption is peculiar only to volcanoes.

Costs remain uncertain

“These are strongly non-analogous things,” he explained at the CCS symposium. Potential leaks from CCS storage sites would happen much more slowly and would be, by comparison, relatively tiny. “Science strongly supports that we can do CCS,” he added. “We know enough to site a plant, monitor it and close it effectively. Hazards are there, but they are well-defined, and the risks appear to be small and manageable.”

In future years, California laws on imports of coal-fired electric power from other states are expected to tighten. Current law says the carbon emissions associated with new imported power contracts must match those of gas-fired plants, which emit about 50 percent less carbon than coal plants.

That means that the HECA facility, which is being designed to use coal and to produce about a third of the carbon emitted from a natural gas plant, could be a way for California to expand energy jobs and lower its emissions and energy imports at the same time. According to Jeffrey Hopkins, a spokesman for Rio Tinto, that is part of the business plan.

“The objective for Rio Tinto is to demonstrate a technology that allows using solid fuels such as coal in a decarbonized world,” he explained. The mining company, he said, has called for a cap on carbon emissions since 1998. “It is a way to preserve coal as a viable commodity that we’re heavily invested in. That’s important. We’re consumers of electricity, so diversifying fuels can help reduce costs.”

Just what the electricity from HECA will cost is like many other elements of the “decarbonized world” taking shape in California. Like the CO2 pollution it is intended to lessen, it is still up in the air.

Jordan Feilders, a spokesman for the project, said it is having “early commercial discussions” with utilities that might want to buy the electricity. HECA is having another set of discussions with the California Public Utilities Commission to see what prices it might be allowed to charge.