Free Republic

WASHINGTON - Two East Coast lawmakers introduced a bill Friday with 73 co-sponsors that would designate as wilderness 23 million public acres in five Northern Rocky Mountain states, including Montana and Wyoming. Reps. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., and Christopher Shays, R-Conn., wrote the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act. It would give the government's strongest protections to areas of Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Washington and Oregon. They announced the measure along with songstress Carole King. Three co-sponsors are from Washington and three from Oregon. Both Montana and Wyoming's representatives condemned the bill and vowed to fight it. Similar measures have been introduced in...

I was up in the Indian Peaks Wilderness area (Brainard Lake) today for my afternoon training run about 5 miles west of Ward, Colorado which is about 12 miles WNW of Boulder. As I turned off of Peak to Peak highway (Colorado State HWY 72) onto the road leading upto Brainard Lake I immediately noticed cars coming down that were covered with a few inches of snow. A few miles west towards the trailhead were my training run was to start it was snowing, lightning and thundering. There was about 3 to 4 inches of heavy wet snow everywhere. Here...

Irked by state Sen. Sam Aanestad's continuing criticism of his wilderness bill, Rep. Mike Thompson Wednesday said the Grass Valley state legislator was ignorant. "He doesn't understand the North Coast or its economy," said Thompson, D-Napa Valley, in a telephone interview. Aanestad doesn't understand his bill, either, he added. Thompson, who represented Butte County in the state Senate before he was elected to Congress, has been promoting legislation to designate as wilderness more than 300,000 acres of land along California's northern coast. After Thompson introduced his latest version of this bill, House Resolution 233, in January, Aanestad attacked it as...