Federal courts have delivered a string of rebukes to the Trump administration over what they found were failures to protect the environment and address climate change as it promotes fossil fuel interests and the extraction of natural resources from public lands.

Judges have ruled administration officials ignored or downplayed potential environmental damage in lawsuits over oil and gas leases, coal mining and pipelines to transport fuels across the U.S., according to an Associated Press review of more than a dozen major environmental cases.

The latest ruling against the administration came last week when an appeals court refused to revive a permitting program for oil and gas pipelines that a lower court had cancelled.

Actions taken by the courts have ranged from orders for more environmental analysis to the unprecedented cancellation of oil and gas leases across hundreds of thousands of acres in Western states.

Many of the decisions the Trump administration has been making are arguably illegal and in some cases blatantly so.

Read full story…

Michael Golden has hunted elk on this mountain in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley his entire life. It’s a tradition he shared with his father. But his son is growing up in a starkly different environment.

Montana has warmed 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1950, considerably more than the United States as a whole. That added heat is contributing to raging forest fires and bark beetle outbreaks, a combination that has devastated the state’s forests.

What Golden and his son have witnessed is part of a broader trend. The forests have seen so much damage that Montana’s trees, which had provided the crucial function of pulling carbon dioxide from the air, are sending the greenhouse gas back into the atmosphere.

And forests that once provided a counterbalance to climate change are at the moment contributing to it, as carbon-rich trees suddenly burn, or die and slowly decompose.

Montana is one of six states in the West where trees have been emitting carbon in the past decade or so, according to an analysis by David Cleaves, former climate change adviser to the chief of the U.S. Forest Service.

The other states are Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. Four of these states’ forests have flipped in recent years to become carbon emitters — with Montana showing the biggest changes of all.

Read full story…

On 5,000 hectares of unplowed prairie in north-eastern Montana, hundreds of wild bison roam once again. But this herd is not in a national park or a protected sanctuary – they are on tribal lands. Belonging to the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes of Fort Peck Reservation, the 340 bison is the largest conservation herd in the ongoing bison restoration efforts by North America’s Indigenous people.

The bison – or as Native Americans call them, buffalo – are not just “sustenance.” The continent’s largest land mammal plays a major role in the spiritual and cultural lives of numerous Native American tribes, an “integrated relationship.”

Only a couple of hundred years ago, 20 million to 30 million bison lived in vast thundering herds across North America. They were leftover relics of the Pleistocene and one of the few large mammals to survive the Ice Age extinction.

But less than 400 years after Columbus’ direful voyage, white settlers pushed their way west into Native American territory in so-called manifest destiny. And the US government made the fateful decision to cripple the Native Americans through whatever means necessary. One of these was the bison: the government viewed slaughtering the great herds en-masse as a way to starve and devastate Native American tribes.

Within just decades, the bison went from numbering tens of millions to within a hair’s breadth of extinction.

Read full story…

This summer has felt like a global warming turning point. Now, another milestone: Saturday, August 11, 2018 was the hottest day in the history of Glacier National Park, and its first recorded time reaching 100 degrees F. On the same day, lightning started three fires in the Montana park, which has since been partly evacuated and closed. On Sunday, hot and dry winds helped the biggest fire expand rapidly.

Right now, every state west of the Mississippi is at least partly in drought, including Montana. Missoula, the closest major city to Glacier National Park, hasn’t had any measurable rain for 40 days, and none is in the short-term forecast either — a streak that will likely wind up being the driest stretch in local recorded history, beating a mark set just last year.

It’s clear that Montana is already becoming a vastly different place. In recent decades, warmer winters have helped mountain pine beetles thrive, turning mountains red with dead pines. In 1850, there were 150 glaciers in the area now known as Glacier National Park. Today there are 26. They’ve been there for 7,000 years — but in just a few decades, the glaciers of Glacier National Park will almost surely be gone. By then the park will need a new name. Glacier Memorial Park doesn’t have the same ring to it.

As bad as climate change already is in Montana and throughout the West, the prognosis for the future is much worse. Compared to 1950, Montana has had 11 more 90 degree-plus days each summer. Without rapid emissions reductions, by 2100, there could be an additional 58 more in Northern Montana. Eastern Montana could have as many as 70 more — about the same as present-day New Orleans.

Read full story…

The “Ninemile’s” historic collection of buildings is part typical Forest Service ranger district, part tourist destination, and part working ranch. A standard complement of Forest Service employees works at the station—a silviculturist, District Ranger, trail crews, and others who ensure the District resources are maintained and the public is safe. But the other cowboys seen milling about have a very different role, one that exists only in this corner of western Montana.

More than 200 government-owned mules and horses board here each winter. These mules, and the horses that help wrangle them, make up the Northern Region pack train—a collection of pack animals used to maintain the vast Wilderness areas that stretch across Montana and North Idaho. Each summer, these mules are loaded with food, lumber, water, crosscut saws, and myriad other tools and packed into the Bob Marshall, the Scapegoat, the Great Bear, the Selway Bitterroot, and the other sprawling Wilderness areas managed by Region One of the Forest Service.

In the 1910s and 1920s, the Forest Service relied on horses and mules for nearly all aspects of managing its vast territory. Roads were few and far between, and the Great Burn of 1910 was still fresh in the young agency’s mind. Rangers rode horses across their huge districts and mules packed in fire-fighting tools, supplies, and rations for the growing wildland fire-fighting efforts that had become a primary focus of the Forest Service.

In those early years, the agency relied on hiring the pack animals it needed from local farmers and ranchers, but by the late 1920s, tractors and trucks did most of the farm’s hauling, plowing, and haying, and quality animals were scarce. Recognizing a need for self-provision, the Region One office of the Forest Service leased a one-square mile, run-down ranch in the Ninemile Valley, and the Ninemile Remount Depot was born. Its primary goal: supplying the agency with a reliable supply of sturdy, mountain-ready mules and horses for fighting fires.

Read full story…

Winter hiking often involves snowshoes, but not if you wander along the southeastern edge of the Beartooth Mountains into Weatherman Draw.

Weatherman Draw creases one of the driest areas in Montana — a place where rain and snow are rare visitors. That makes it a great place to hike when more popular mountain trails are snowed in. By summertime, it’s too hot to hike there, so it’s the perfect off-season spot.

Also known as the Valley of the Chiefs and Valley of the Shields, the public land overseen by the Bureau of Land Management is protected as an Area of Critical Environmental Concern. That’s because it contains scattered pictographs and petroglyphs, some of which date back 10,000 years to American Indian tribes that lived in the region.

The name Valley of the Shields comes from pictographs of warriors behind large shields, depictions that are believed to date to before the arrival of the horse in North America. Why this particular area was the scene of so much art is a mystery, but there is a mystical, harsh beauty to the place.

Once threatened by oil and gas development, and then with a loss of access when property along Cottonwood Road was offered for sale, the public has continually rallied to protect this sacred, spiritual, sandstone enclave.

Learn more here…

The Meyers fire didn’t get a lot of press this summer, but it won’t go unnoticed among fans of the Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness.

As it blackened about 62,000 acres of the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest near Philipsburg, Montana, it made some particularly vigorous runs through the Pintler Ranger District. Even before the flames died, U.S. Forest Service backcountry workers started inventorying the damage to their trails and campsites.

Their to-do list showed 40 miles of trail covered with downfall, burned bridges and erosion trouble. The Wisdom/Wise River Ranger District has another 10 miles that is burn-damaged. And the Bitterroot side has 20 miles of work — all in a wilderness area that has only 250 miles of trail across all three ranger districts of west-central Montana.

The Wilderness Act of 1964 prohibits use of mechanized equipment in wilderness areas, so any repair work by law must be done with traditional, hand-powered methods. That meant crosscut saws, axes and mules.

A 20-person crew set out on the last week of September, just when the weather went from fire season to rain and snow.

“We put in a whole summer’s worth of work in four weeks,” the crew lead said. “They took out 450 burned snags felled with crosscuts or axes. There were 1,250 downed trees cut out of the trails. That puts us ahead for next year, but we still have at least as many that we didn’t get to.”

Read full story…

Crawl from your warm sleeping bag out the tent door, into the darkness and predawn wind whipping across the plateau. Look up at the cathedral of the sky. Watch the whirlpool of constellations spin overhead. Hold your breath.

It’s hard not to feel vertigo in the majesty of Montana’s wilderness. Whether you seek the rocky heights of a 10,000-foot peak or an endless chain of lakes, pastels in a mountain meadow or the allure of trout, trek into one of the state’s most magnificent ranges – the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness – to find solitude and grandeur.

Don’t be put off by the name of the best way to get in there: the Beaten Path, a 26-mile trail that climbs up and over the Gallatin National Forest watershed divide, wending its way past pond after lake, peak after cliff, meadow after plateau.

The trailhead sits at the southeastern edge of East Rosebud Lake. Accessible by car from the north via a 14-mile road from Roscoe, the lake’s shores are dotted with cottages and cabins, and make it an easy jumping-off point for the wilderness.

One of the beauties of the Montana alpine terrain is how easy it is to wander.

Read full story…

The West is burning, and there’s no relief in sight. More than 80 large wildfires are raging in an area covering more than 1.4 million acres, primarily in California, Montana, and Oregon, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Taken together, that’s a wildfire larger than the state of Delaware.

California has declared a state of emergency as wildfires burn outside Los Angeles and threaten giant sequoias in Yosemite National Park. In Oregon, the Eagle Creek fire is tearing through the scenic Columbia River Gorge. Seattle, Boise, and Denver are socked in under a haze of smoky air and ash that experts predict could linger until the first snowfall in the mountains.

But nowhere are the fires more devastating than in Montana, where more than 1 million acres of forest burned this summer, and more than 467,000 acres are currently burning in 26 large fires that line the mountainous western side of the state.

Breathing the air in Missoula today feels like chain-smoking Chesterfields. Schools aren’t letting the kids out at recess, and public health authorities are saying active adults and children should avoid outdoor exertion. It’s easy to get the impression that this is an extraordinary and unprecedented fire season. But you study forest fires over a timespan of thousands of years. How unusual or unique is this fire season?

Learn the answer here…

This week, as John Murray drove north from his home on the Badger-Two Medicine River to his job as the historic preservation officer for the Blackfeet Tribe, the mountains glowed red. His wife, who drove with him, commented on their beauty. Murray, 69, noted with deep satisfaction, that for the first time in more than 30 years, there are no more oil and gas leases up there.

For thousands of years, the area was home to the Blackfeet and Murray has spent decades fighting a collection of oil and gas leases sold for $1 an acre by the Reagan administration without consulting the tribe. This week Interior Secretary Sally Jewell cancelled the last two leases in the area known as Badger-Two Medicine, which now is part of the Lewis and Clark National Forest.

The landscape just outside of Glacier National Park where the prairies meet the mountains is sacred to the Blackfeet. “This area is like a church to our people,” Harry Barnes, chairman of the Blackfeet Nation Tribal Business Council, said in a statement. “We’ve lived for 30 years under the threat that it might be industrialized, and we’re extremely grateful that this cloud is finally lifted.”

Anthropological studies have found hundreds of artifacts in the area but it’s the landscape itself that is most treasured by the Blackfeet, Murray says. That landscape also is extremely important to conservation groups because it provides crucial habitat for grizzlies, mountain lions, big horn sheep, mountain goat and the other fauna that roam between Glacier, the Bob Marshall Wilderness and the Blackfeet Reservation. Hunting and fishing groups laud the area as unmatched for elk hunting and wild trout fishing. But conservationists who worked to preserve it say it was the Blackfeet that swayed the Interior Department to cancel the leases.

Read full story…