










The next year, Woodbridge and two colleagues traveled to the hawks' wintering ground in Argentina to try to find out why so many were disappearing. They were astonished. Back in California's Butte Valley, he'd spotted the hawks only occasionally, but in Argentina he discovered huge flocks -- sometimes thousands of hawks -- roosting in non-native eucalyptus groves called montes. And something was obviously very wrong: As he drove to a ranch to find the hawk he'd outfitted with the transmitter, he passed hundreds of dead birds on the ground. Woodbridge found that the farmers there had started using a deadly pesticide called monocrotophos. Hawks were drawn to spraying operations to gobble up squirming, dying grasshoppers and ingesting toxic amounts of the pesticide. Some died with grasshoppers in their talons, having absorbed the poison through their feet. In some cases, a fifth of the birds that roosted in a given monte were killed.

Woodbridge's pioneering research with satellite telemetry led to the formation of the International Swainson Hawk Working Group, which met with Argentine farmers and pesticide manufacturers, who eventually agreed to phase out toxic pesticides. "Satellite receivers were transformative," Woodbridge told me.

I had the same thought in 2005, when -- under the glow of four headlamps in Glacier National Park -- I watched as four biologists unwrapped the down coat covering an anesthetized wolverine and swabbed its belly in preparation for surgery. It was a typical combination of old and new technology: They had captured the wolverine in a hand-hewn log trap that snapped shut when the animal yanked on a piece of meat. When Jeff Copeland, the head of that U.S. Forest Service research project, approached the captive wolverine -- dryly named "M-1" -- it snarled and growled, and as he carefully opened the trap's lid to peek in, it lunged at him, taking a chunk out of the log near his hand. Copeland gingerly used a jab stick with a hypodermic at the end to sedate the wolverine and, after it fell asleep, picked it up and brought it to the table, where they operated. The biologists carefully sliced open the wolverine's belly and implanted a tiny satellite transmitter under the skin.

They wanted to find out where wolverines go in the forest, and how much snowmobiles and other winter recreation are invading the species' winter redoubts, and whether the Endangered Species Act should require protection of the habitat. Once the wolverine was released, they tracked it every two hours, using satellites, watching as it crossed 25 miles of a snow-covered mountain range in one day, and 25 miles the next. Wolverines are rare and secretive animals, so no one knew about their wide-ranging nature until some were successfully collared and tracked. Now the discussion of whether that species and its surprisingly large habitat need legal protection can incorporate the researchers' findings, including the fact that a male wolverine's home range spans 500 square miles. As Copeland said, "The hallmark of the wolverine is its insatiable need to keep moving."

In 2008, I visited a concrete underpass on Interstate 90 in the mountains west of Missoula, Mont., with Chris Servheen, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who's a long-time leader in the effort to protect and increase grizzly bear populations. As we walked the dirt and gravel between gray pillars and under a massive gray roof, with tractor trailers and cars whizzing overhead, Servheen pointed out the heat- and motion-activated cameras mounted in various places.

Hundreds of grizzly bears roam the mountains north of the highway, in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem, which includes Glacier National Park. But almost none have been spotted to the south, in good habitat whose core is the sprawling Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. In the 1990s, biologists proposed moving bears into the Selway-Bitterroot, but Congress, reacting to the anxieties of some locals, forbade it. Now biologists are hoping grizzlies will move there on their own, but I-90, with six lanes of high-speed traffic and several rows of concrete jersey barriers, remains an obstacle. The bears seem to refuse to use the underpass. A few years into this monitoring project, the cameras in the underpass have snapped pictures of deer and a host of other critters, including ATV riders, but no grizzlies.

Servheen's career, like mine, has spanned the evolution of the new technology. He remembers how the old-style radio collars required biologists to go airborne just to discover "where a bear was twice a week, during good weather, at 10 a.m.," he said, adding wryly, "If you know where I was at 10 o'clock in the morning twice a week, and you tried to draw conclusions about the places I like to go in my weekly activities, you would be pretty limited."

In contrast, the modern collars can find a bear 24 hours a day with an astonishing degree of accuracy, pinpointing an animal within 10 yards of its actual location. Sometimes biologists still go airborne to gather data, but as they fly over a bear, the collar is "interrogated" by an onboard computer, the data is beamed skyward and, in a few seconds, the entire trove is downloaded remotely into a portable laptop. Some modern collars contain a bolt-shearing mechanism set to go off at a predetermined time, reducing stress on both the bear and the biologists who retrieve its collar. "The bear stands there, there's a little pop and it falls off its neck," Servheen said.

The modern collars report in great detail where grizzly bears travel over periods as long as two years, exposing their behavior far more accurately than a TV "reality show" would. We've learned that the huge bears come surprisingly close to people's homes at night, moving so surreptitiously that the residents don't see them. That warns managers when to ask people to remove bird feeders and other bear attractants.

"The technology gives us a much better and more profound understanding of how bears respond to human activity on the landscape, and how we can better manage that human activity," said Servheen. "We can identify the places where bears cross the highway, so if a group like The Nature Conservancy wants to put in a conservation easement to protect a crossing, we know exactly where that is and can get the biggest bang for the buck." Even so, we still don't know for sure why grizzlies refuse to use that I-90 underpass.

Kate Kendall, a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, based in West Glacier, Mont., has created her own special recipe for grizzly bear soup: She dumps assorted carp, trout and other fish into a 55-gallon drum, and stirs in cattle blood gathered from slaughterhouses. Then she seals the fetid concoction and lets it age for a year, until it's good and ripe. "Then we open the drums and bottle it," she told me recently.

Last summer, Kendall and 75 others on her crew wrapped barbed wire around stands of pine trees at 395 locations in northwestern Montana's two-and-a-quarter-million-acre Cabinet-Yaak Ecosystem, to create what she calls "hair corrals." In the center of each corral, the team placed a generous dollop of Kendall's homemade lure on a pile of brush and stumps.

Remote cameras show that after the team left each corral, it seldom took long for the scent to work its magic. As the bears sneak under the wire to check out the heavenly smell, the barbs snag clumps of their hair. That project snagged 17,000 hair samples in that ecosystem. Once black bear hair is excluded from the samples, the DNA -- the basic genetic material -- in each grizzly hair will be assayed. In 2014, for the first time ever, the local people will have a realistic idea of how many grizzly bears live in the Cabinet-Yaak ecosystem, where they go and even their kinship: which bears are related to others and in what ways. That will give bear managers a much better sense of how many animals they are dealing with, compared to previous estimates based on radio collars and sightings. Moreover, the bears will never see a human being, never be drugged, and probably never know they have been studied. ----

A similar project led by Kendall in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem revealed a dramatic finding by the time it ended in 2008. Biologists had estimated that 300 grizzlies lived in that ecosystem, but the DNA results indicated more than twice that: 765, all told. "That's a totally different story," Kendall said. "Population numbers and trends are critical (for determining) if conservation methods are effective."

DNA analysis is revolutionizing wildlife research in many ways. It allows researchers to easily collect data on more than one animal, for instance. The old method -- live trapping -- allows researchers to sample blood and tissue from just a few bears. But collecting DNA in scat or hair allows them to gather information on two or three dozen, or even two or three hundred. They can calculate not only basic population numbers, but -- as Kendall has done -- relationships. Servheen's agency has assembled a complete family tree of all the grizzly bears between the Yukon and Yellowstone. In one example of how that's useful, when a grizzly was killed in the Selway-Bitterroot in 2007, DNA revealed that it had come from the Selkirk Mountains in northern Idaho -- an indication of a migration corridor that needs to be preserved.

"The genetic code is a mystery novel, a history book and a time log in a single hair," Michael Schwartz, a research ecologist at the U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station in Missoula, observed recently. "We are answering questions we couldn't even ask a few years ago." He described a potential breakthrough regarding pneumonia in bighorn sheep, which often catch it from domestic sheep; the domestic sheep are merely carriers, but the disease is often fatal to bighorns. Agricultural researchers know which genes govern disease resistance in domestic sheep, and now biologists can sequence the bighorns' genes and try to determine if some bighorns have a similar genetic resistance. "The gene for resistance may have drifted out of (a bighorn) population through random processes," Schwartz said, "so we know we need to bring in these genes" from other herds.

In Portugal, DNA researchers lined the back wall of a lynx den with cork, and placed a parasitic Amazonian kissing bug in a quarter-sized hole covered with a thin plastic membrane. When the lynx entered the den, the bug drilled through the plastic, bit the lynx and sucked its blood. After the cat left, they recaptured the bug and examined the blood and DNA it contained. Researchers in Vietnam who analyzed the blood from 25 leeches found genetic material from three mammal species that were rare and not well understood, including two that were only recently discovered -- a deer called the Truong Son muntjac and the Annamite striped rabbit.

In a visit to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in upstate New York -- the premier institution for the study of birds, with a staff of 50 scientists and educators -- I was amazed by the range of new approaches there, especially the use of sound. The lab has developed software that identifies the noises many kinds of animals make, and offers that software to researchers around the world. The lab also has built a vast audio library, and anyone with Internet access can hear thousands of distinctive birdsongs and the various calls of mammals, amphibians, reptiles, fish and even arthropods. The study of birds began long before binoculars were available; pioneering ornithologist John James Audubon, in the early 19th century, had to shoot birds to study them up close. Today's technologies include arrays of microphones and radar installations to gather data as flocks of snow geese and migrating hummingbirds pass overhead.

At the University of Montana Flight Research Lab, I've watched researchers like Bret Tobalske use lasers and other tools to discover exactly how birds fly, and even to explore how their habitat shapes their physiology. In one experiment in the warehouse-like flight lab, while a Rolling Stones recording rocked out in the background, Tobalske placed a small hummingbird he had captured in his yard into a plexiglass cube. As the tiny bird hovered and drank from a feeding tube, an emerald green laser beam illuminated a fine cloud of olive oil hanging in the air. A camera recorded the movement of the swirling mist, detailing how lift, drag and other forces work on the bird as it flies. By understanding a bird's flying strategies, scientists can learn more about its ecology. The hairy woodpecker, for instance, has evolved a technique to get from one bug-infested tree to another as fast as possible using a minimal amount of energy, with a distinctive combination of flapping and gliding flight. "Flight is extraordinarily expensive per second (when it comes to energy use) and birds have evolved ways to sidestep some of those costs," Tobalske said. "It tells us something about (how they deal with) predator risks and why they feed where they do."

Meanwhile, isotopes -- stable compounds created primarily by the planet's geologic processes and then naturally dissolved in water -- are being interpreted in new ways to monitor wildlife. When clouds move across the landscape and drop rain, they leave hydrogen, carbon and deuterium and other isotopes in soil and vegetation in unique and varied ratios. So the isotopic fingerprint of, say, the Lamar Valley in Yellowstone National Park is different than that of the Pelican Valley, which is also in the park. When a bear or mountain lion drinks water from different sources, a record of those isotopes is formed in its hair or claws, and biologists can later analyze it to determine where the animal has been drinking. Researchers analyzing isotopes can also identify what portion of a bear's diet is meat, vegetation or fish. The technique does not require trapping the animal, but it does require gathering isotopic ratios across vast areas -- known as "isoscapes" -- to accurately compare an animal's tissue with the places on the landscape it has visited.

That technology has other uses: After a camper was attacked and killed by a grizzly near Yellowstone in 2010, for instance, biologists killed the bear and tested a snip of its hair for a corn isotope. Since almost every processed food contains corn syrup, they could discover if the bear in question had been corrupted by human garbage. In this case, it hadn't.----

Fishery biologists in Yellowstone remove the calcium carbonate otolith, or "ear-stone," from dead fish to discover where the fish swam when they were alive. Tom McMahon, a professor of fishery biology at Montana State University, explained that technique: The otolith forms as a fish grows, and incorporates distinctive isotopes from each tributary it visits, so by analyzing it, "You can backtrack on (the fish's) movements through its entire life."

But I've heard a cautionary tone from several biologists over the years. Even Brian Woodbridge, the Swainson's hawk researcher who used early transmitters to discover migrations and threats posed by pesticides in Latin America, said the technology would not have played such a transformative role, if the researchers hadn't done the long-term fieldwork that included banding and watching the birds. Those traditional methods determined the basic population dynamics and the significance of the fact that the hawk's numbers were dropping. "Patterns emerge over time, that you can't get through technology in the short term," Woodbridge said.

Denver Holt, head of the Montana-based Owl Research Institute, had similar thoughts on a sunny day last March, when he drove me to a subdivision north of Polson, Mont., to show me more than a dozen bright white snowy owls -- aka "snowies" -- sitting on rooftops. In the same area, Holt pointed out a black golf-ball-sized owl "pellet" -- indigestible remains of an owl's meal -- lying on the ground. Holt, who has studied snowies in the field for 25 years, often following them to the Arctic where they spend most of their time, concluded that this pellet had been regurgitated by a snowy that had devoured voles. He took out his binoculars and looked through them upside-down, using them as a magnifying glass, to find tiny bones in the pellet. "Hmm, fibula ... tibia," he said, "and here's a humerus," as he pulled out a leg bone the size of a paper match. "Ought to be a skull in here somewhere," he predicted as he pawed through the black mass. And, sure enough, there was.

Long-term field studies like those Holt has conducted are increasingly rare. He believes they bring something unique and powerful to the table, even though they are difficult and hard to fund. "If you are on the ground, touring the field, making observations, you start to see patterns," he told me. "And if you aren't in the field, you would miss the unusual events that happen. If a snowy owl attacked a polar bear or a caribou that was getting too close to a nest or a chick, you wouldn't see that with just (transmitter) technology. You would have beeps on a map that might tell you something was going on, but you wouldn't know what it was." He worries that high-tech will supplant, rather than complement, long-term field studies. "You don't want to totally abandon field research," Holt said. "What you want to do is combine them, try to get the best out of both types."

Ed Bangs, probably the most well-known wildlife biologist in the Northern Rockies, shared his philosophical thoughts over breakfast in Helena, Mont., where we both live. For most of the history of federal wolf reintroduction in the Rockies, Bangs was the chief spokesman and manager; he retired in 2011. Over the years, after traveling with him to several wolf-related meetings and other events, I'd come to believe that he thought more deeply about the work than most of his colleagues. "You never need to go into the field" anymore, Bangs said, given today's technology. "You collar the animal and follow it in real time on the computer. You never see it; you never see where it lives. You can do a wildlife study and never visit the area. ... I became involved in wildlife research because of my passion for wildlife and wild places -- and technology doesn't catch that passion. We need more of an emotional connection with wildlife ... not just technological connections."

We talked about how the new technology encourages many researchers to think there is less need to spend dogged days, weeks and months in the field watching wildlife. Like Woodbridge and Holt, Bangs also believes long-term fieldwork can lead to a deeper, or least different, understanding of wildlife ways and habitat. Some in their camp also fear there has been a steady erosion in the sense of wildness, the feeling of mystery, much as the sense of freedom in the human world is being changed by surveillance technology. In some cases, Bangs warned, the new technologies not only don't further conservation, they may hinder it.

"Conservation involves managing people more than it does wildlife," said Bangs, drawing from his long experience in trying to persuade ranchers and hunters to accept wolves that kill livestock and elk, while also trying to persuade environmentalists that it's OK to shoot and trap some wolves. "Learning more about wolves is almost immaterial to wolf conservation. Some biologists don't even go out in the field anymore. How does it further conservation if you don't know about the people?"

Day by day, the advance of the new technologies raises more ethical questions. With the power to work with DNA growing by leaps and bounds, the revival of extinct species may not be far off. The veteran environmentalist Stewart Brand -- editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and founder of several green organizations, including the Long Now Foundation -- has helped launch a new project called Revive and Restore, dedicated to "de-extinction" of vanished species. The first species Revive and Restore may try to pluck out of the black hole of extinction is the passenger pigeon, the last of which died out in 1914. So far, only preliminary steps have been taken -- the genes of several museum specimens are being sequenced -- but Brand thinks it is doable in the not-too-distant future. In Revive and Restore's first meeting, at Harvard last February, Brand told me, "The practicalities are getting more practical all the time." In Spain a few years ago, in fact, researchers cloned an extinct ibex, a wild mountain goat, though it only lived a very short time.

Even the high-tech collars raise uncomfortable management questions. How far do you go to make a species palatable to people who are antagonistic to it? Collars can measure whether the animal is resting or active, by its heart rate and body temperature. But they can also be programmed to control an animal. Shock collars, similar to those put on ornery dogs, for instance, have been tested on wolves; when the wolves tried to roam beyond a fence of sensors controlled by a satellite, they were shocked. As the whole realm of wildlife conservation grows ever more controversial, biologists have also experimented with wolf collars that have tranquilizers in them, and can be activated remotely. Some ranchers, Bangs said, have joked that such a collar could also be packed with explosives that could be detonated remotely -- the kind of fate that might be in store for prisoners on a totalitarian planet in science fiction. In today's brave new world, or habitat, if things go that far eventually, it wouldn't surprise me.


Jim Robbins is a longtime New York Times writer based in Helena, Mont., and the author of five books, including this year’s The Man Who Planted Trees. His Times stories over the years included some of the experiences in this essay.


No publisher Wildlife 2012/12/17 06:00:00 GMT-6 Article
On the path to a greener church http://www.hcn.org/issues/185/5993 Spokane Bishop William Skylstad brings his rural and environmental background to the task of heading the steering committee on the Northwestern bishops' pastoral letter. Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue's feature story.

An organization with as much heft as the Catholic Church, and with 2,000 years of history, does not move quickly or simply. The Columbia River Basin pastoral letter, scheduled for release in November, has been five years in the making.

But even five years understates the letter's roots. Part of a movement toward a broadened social consciousness, it began in 1891, when Pope Leo issued an encyclical deploring sweatshops. The encyclical resulted in the establishment of offices within most dioceses to work as advocates for labor and low-income groups.

The next major step came with the pope's World Day of Peace message in January 1990, called "The Ecological Crisis: A Common Responsibility," which began a greening of Catholic theology. "We cannot interfere in one area of the ecosystem without paying due attention both to the consequences of such interference in other areas and to the well-being of future generations," Pope John Paul II said. "Delicate ecological balances are upset by the uncontrolled destruction of animal and plant life or by a reckless exploitation of natural resources."

The U.S. Conference of Bishops followed up with a report in 1991 called Renewing the Earth, which said that a "fundamental relation between humanity and nature is one of caring for creation."

In May 1995, a group of some 30 Catholic theologians and ethicists from the Environmental Justice Program of the U.S. Catholic Conference gathered at Mount Angel Abbey in the Willamette Valley of western Oregon to reflect on how the Catholic church regarded ecology.

Several Catholics from the West and Northwest who were at the Mount Angel meeting got together to talk informally about what they could do. "Everyone in the circle reiterated the word water," says Frank Fromherz, one of the attendees who works in the Office of Justice and Peace in the Portland Diocese. While they were encouraged by the pope's message and the bishop's statements, those were generalities. They wanted a statement that was anchored in a place. Nothing stood out like the Columbia.

People at the Mount Angel meeting also felt that the debate over the river needed to be reframed, from a strictly economic and scientific perspective into one that included moral and religious dimensions. Fromherz says, "Rather than as an engine of commerce, a lot of people think the river should be viewed as revelatory, revelatory of the presence of God."

The idea of a pastoral letter was raised. Lay Catholics at the Mount Angel meeting asked Bishop William Skylstad, who heads the Spokane Diocese, if he would head the steering committee.

Skylstad, by his own account, has become a "green" bishop, especially in the last few years. He brings ecological and rural backgrounds to the task. He was part of the bishops' domestic policy committee that wrote the Renewing the Earth statement, and a few years ago he attended a seminal conference, the National Partnership for Religion and the Environment, which brought the leaders of five major religions together to discuss the environment.

From 1995 to 1998, Skylstad was chairman of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference. The NCRLC is part of the heritage of Pope Leo's 1891 message that sparked a social reform movement within the church. Formed in 1923, it is active in everything from support service for rural ministries, to assuring fair wages for farm workers, to preserving family farms, to lobbying on issues that affect farmers, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization.

The pastoral letter is not only concerned with restoring the health of the river and protecting salmon, but also with the well-being of rural people. "Native peoples' rights have been ignored, even when guaranteed by treaties and laws," the letter reads. "Working people's wages are sometimes below poverty level. Habitat for many species is violated."

When it is released, the pastoral letter on the Columbia River won't have the same clout as an encyclical, which comes from the pope. Pastoral letters are bottom-up documents, generated by the bishops of a region or a country with input from priests and laypeople.

But they have a long and honorable past, says John Hart, the theology and environment professor at Carroll College in Helena, Mont., and the writer of the letter. "Paul wrote the first letters in the first century to give instruction as to beliefs and practices in the early Christian Church."

Pastoral letters can deal with any subject affecting Catholic life and worship. Important letters from the United States bishops include Healing Racism Through Faith and Truth, Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy, Quest for Justice, and The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response. In the 1980s, Hart helped write a pastoral letter from Midwestern bishops that decried the takeover of family farms by corporations; another denounced the powerlessness of the poor in Appalachia.

Copyright © HCN and Jim Robbins

No publisher Communities 2000/09/11 00:00:00 GMT-6 Article








And that's on the second page.




























































The following sidebar articles accompany this feature story:

- Excerpts from the pastoral letter draft

- On the path to a greener church


    • John Reid, 206/729-3737;
    • Frank Fromherz, 503/234-5334;
    • Bishop William Skylstad, 509/358-7300;
    • John Hart, 406/449-6912;

Copyright © 2000 HCN and Jim Robbins

No publisher Communities Archive 2000/09/11 00:00:00 GMT-6 Article
Wolves may not need Big Brother http://www.hcn.org/issues/28/791 Wolf biologist Diane Boyd believes reintroduction is a mistake. Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue's feature story, The wolves are back, big time.












Jim Robbins writes in Helena, Montana.

No publisher Wildlife 1995/02/06 01:00:00 GMT-6 Article
Busted town pursues industrial recreation http://www.hcn.org/issues/18/523 Anaconda wants to boost its economy by building a golf course on top of its tailings piles. ANACONDA, Mont. - Can famous golfer Jack Nicklaus reverse the sagging fortunes of this crumbling smeltertown by building a golf course on top of a hazardous waste site?










Many Anacondans are looking forward to their town's reincarnation as a tourist spot. Finnegan, who doesn't golf, thinks the fact the course sits atop a Superfund site won't keep golfers away. "The words 'toxic waste' bother me a lot, because of what it implies," he says. "It is not a Love Canal kind of thing."













Jim Robbins writes in Helena, Montana.

No publisher Energy & Industry 1994/09/05 00:00:00 GMT-6 Article
Camping out in the Merry Widow Mine http://www.hcn.org/issues/9/292 Merry Widow Mine a spa for arthritis sufferers. BOULDER, Mont. - Most people hear the word radon and think of an odorless, colorless gas that seeps into homes and can cause cancer. But some, like Denise Palmer, think of radon as a miracle drug.

Crippled with psoriatic arthritis, her hands had become so painful she could no longer pull her clothes on or make dinner.

"They had to carry me out of the house and put me in the camper to get me here," the 45-year-old Canadian woman says. "That's how bad I was."

"Here" is the Merry Widow Health Mine in southwestern Montana. Four days after she and her mother motored out of Edmonton, Alberta, and into Montana, Palmer slowly shuffles through the dampness of the old gold and silver mine in sneakers and a pink jogging suit. She looks happy. For the first time in five months, Palmer says, she can walk unaided, dress herself and enjoy her life.

The cure? Four hours a day for 10 days in the damp mine, inhaling radon gas, drinking and washing with radon-laced water and smearing radon-contaminated mud and moss scraped from the mine's dank walls onto her aching joints.

People come from around the world and pay good money to breathe naturally occurring high levels of the same gas the Environmental Protection Agency calls a leading threat to the nation's health. Believers claim this product of the disintegration of uranium is a miracle cure, and they make pilgrimages here for everything from diabetes to cataracts, bone spurs to hemorrhoids, warts to corns. Most come to treat the crippling disease of arthritis.

Experts say radon has no effect on arthritis. They say the only relief comes from exercising, applying heat and cold, reducing stress and taking anti-inflammatory drugs such as aspirin.

But all the cautionary tales in the world have not kept people away from folk remedies. Few are as unusual as the health mines of southwestern Montana.

In the late 1800s the rugged, pine-blanketed country between Boulder and Basin, Mont., some 30 miles south of Helena, the capital, was a booming gold and silver mining region. Many of the mines operated until the 1940s and 1950s. During the Atomic Age uranium mines opened and operated here as well.

The first of the health mines was the Free Enterprise, whose symbol is a man throwing away his crutches and jumping in the air to click his heels; its slogan: "The Unmedical Approach to Arthritis." The mine, which sits on a sagebrush-studded hill overlooking the picturesque town of Boulder, opened in 1951.

The supposed curative effects of the Free Enterprise were discovered when a woman who suffered from arthritis descended into the uranium mine every day to join her miner-husband for lunch. A couple of weeks after these underground lunches began she noticed her arthritis was nearly gone. Was it something in the baloney sandwiches? Further testing was carried out. An arthritic aunt visited and was brought into the mine for a series of therapeutic victuals. Her arthritis was said to clear up, too.

Soon so many ailing people were clamoring to be lowered into the mine that uranium mining stopped and a new kind of gold mine was born.

Now, a half dozen or so "health mines" dot the mountains, including the Lonetree, the Earth Angel and the Sunshine.

The Merry Widow is one of Montana's most popular health mines, located along Interstate 15 just outside of Basin. Several thousand people each year make a pilgrimage to this former gold mine, and thousands more to the other mines. One of the most celebrated regular Merry Widow visitors was General Omar Bradley, who led the U.S. invasion of Normandy in World War II.

The faithful who flock to the Merry Widow are mostly retired people who come from all over the United States and Canada. Many stay in trailers or recreational vehicles in a campground a short walk from the mine along the tree-lined Boulder River.

On a typical day mine-goers begin to wander up from the Merry Widow campground in the morning with towels draped over their necks and a styrofoam cup or a plastic squeeze bottle. They sign in with mine owner Helen O'Neill, who bought the place with her husband, Don, four years ago.

State health officials have limited how long people can be exposed - the maximum is 40 hours per year, about one-tenth the federal limit for uranium miners. So the full treatment is an hour, four times a day each day for 10 days. Each hour-long session costs $2.50.

Helen, who with her beehive hair and carefully plucked eyebrows looks like a country western singer, is down-home friendly to the folks who come here. She operates out of a homey little office, with a small kitchen and living room. A tiny teacup poodle snoozes in a recliner. Helen makes no wild claims about radon gas. Her customers do that for her. She pulls out a photo album full of letters and a video filled with testimony, all paeans to the relief that believers say emanates from the mine at Basin, Mont.

"Some people get relief right away," she says. "Most don't. It can happen in a few days, three months or five months."

As people enter the mine for the first time, Helen gets out the Geiger counter she keeps under the counter with her purse. She holds the detector - which looks like a small microphone - up to the visitor's nose. The black needle doesn't move. When the mine-sitters leave, she gets out her counter again. This time the instrument ticks frenetically, like a mad watch. "Because when they leave they're full of gas," Helen chirps, matter-of-factly.

Nearly tame chipmunks scamper outside the entrance to the Merry Widow, which is through a big wooden door with a sign that says "Positively no spitting." The adit is about eight feet wide and six feet high and goes 500 feet straight back into the mountain. The floor is poured concrete, and the passage is well lighted.

Just inside the mine is a small chamber with red vinyl benches, called the Poodle Parlor, where people can bring their ailing, blanket-wrapped dogs to take the cure.

At the back of the mine is the section for humans. Orange, glowing space heaters hang from the ceiling to ward off the underground chill, which hovers at about 55 degrees. In a small chamber to the left, two elderly couples are laughing and telling stories as they play cribbage on a table covered with a red-and-white checkered tablecloth. A half dozen other people, wrapped in sweaters and jackets, sit on green bus seats bolted to the floor, reading old magazines and suspense novels.

Claustrophobia strikes some who walk into the bowels of the Earth. The Free Enterprise mine has solved that little problem. Air is pumped up from the mine into an "inhalatorium' - a small, windowless, paneled room with lawn chairs, books, tables and decks of cards.

Gas isn't the only reason people travel to the Merry Widow. The water here has healing power, some say. The clear, cold liquid trickles from an underground spring through a red rubber garden hose and into a trough that runs along the cavern wall. An elderly woman, her head festooned with curlers, is toweling her gnarled feet after bathing them in a plastic pan. A couple and their grown son from Alberta come, peel off their clothes to reveal bathing suits, and get down into the cold water for a radioactive baptism.

Nearly everyone hauls away plastic jugs filled with the tonic to drink and wash with at home. There is no charge for water to go.

"It sounds fantastic when someone tells you about these mines," says silver-haired Muriel Hepple, 63, a grade-school teacher from Vancouver and a 10-year veteran of the Merry Widow, as she knits and purls her way toward a sweater in the cave.

"When I told my doctor about it he slammed the receiver down. But even for people who don't think it works, it works." Hepple says the effects of the gas last about a year. When she begins to feel the twinges of arthritis, she says, it's time to make another trip to the Merry Widow and gas up.

Those who make the sojourn to the health mines are well aware these visits are frowned on by science. But they don't care. "At first I thought it was a bunch of hooey," says Wally Harris, a stocky, red-faced, retired security guard from Tyler, Texas, who suffered from arthritis for several years. "But one morning I woke up and I wasn't hurting anymore. I threw away my pain pills.

"People say it's all in your head," he continues, "but there was a man camped behind us one time with a big old boxer bulldog. That dog couldn't walk and he even had to carry it outside to do its business. He carried it up to the mine for four mornings straight. By the fifth morning that dog was trotting around like a pup." One ancient poodle that took the cure here supposedly began frolicking so much it died of a heart attack.

Critics say the stress-free, relaxing "Camp Radon" atmosphere is really what soothes those in pain. Stress affects the severity of the disease, says Bill Jarvis, a professor of public health and preventive medicine at Loma Linda University School of Medicine, and anything that lessens stress can make people feel better.

"I don't know of any evidence that the gas in the mines works," says Jarvis. "It's the act of traveling to special places. A week off the job, away from home and rest and travel can make it work."

"Pain, stress and depression are a spiral down," adds Dr. Floyd Pennington, former medical director for the Atlanta, Ga.-based Arthritis Foundation. "More pain causes more stress, which causes more depression and so on. If you break the cycle by reducing stress, the depression and the pain can lift."

Health-miners pooh-pooh those ideas. They believe radon stimulates the pituitary gland, a small, cherry-sized gland attached to the base of the brain which emits chemicals that control metabolism. Radon gas, they hold, causes the pituitary gland to boost its production of natural ACTH and cortisone, two steroids that are used to treat arthritis, but which, in their synthetic form, can have serious side effects.

The EPA and the Surgeon General say radon gas is the second leading cause (after smoking) of lung cancer in the United States, but both Pennington and health officials in Montana say there is no health threat at the level of exposure mine-sitters experience. "Levels are so low people won't be hurt by going into the mines," says Pennington. Radon only becomes a serious health problem, experts say, when it seeps into a home and people are exposed to it round the clock for long periods of time.

Jim Robbins writes in Helena, Montana.

No publisher Communities Writers on the Range Essays 1994/06/27 00:00:00 GMT-6 Article
Montana town puts out unwelcome mat http://www.hcn.org/issues/2/49 Californians and celebrities among those moving to Montana BOZEMAN, Mont. - This quiet, mountain-ringed college town just north of Yellowstone National Park has now been discovered by everyone from movie stars to footloose entrepreneurs and just plain folks.

















The writer works in Helena, Montana.

No publisher Communities 1994/01/04 01:00:00 GMT-6 Article
Yvon Chouinard: A mutinous captain of industry http://www.hcn.org/issues/22.12/yvon-chouinard-a-mutinous-captain-of-industry "I never wanted to be a businessman," says the owner of Patagonia clothing and gear company, "because I thought businessmen were real greaseballs. In fact I still do." "I never wanted to be a businessman," says the owner of Patagonia clothing and gear company, "because I thought businessmen were real greaseballs. In fact I still do." Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/22.12/download-entire-issue

No publisher Politics Archive 1990/06/18 15:40:00 GMT-6 Article
FBI changes four with attack on power line http://www.hcn.org/issues/21.12/fbi-changes-four-with-attack-on-power-line On May 30, a flare broke the darkness of an Arizona desert evening, a signal for some 30 FBI agents and a helicopter to move in to arrest two men and a woman authorities claim were attempting to fell a tower that carries high-voltage lines to a water pump for the Central Arizona Project, a mammoth irrigation system in the desert. On May 30, a flare broke the darkness of an Arizona desert evening, a signal for some 30 FBI agents and a helicopter to move in to arrest two men and a woman authorities claim were attempting to fell a tower that carries high-voltage lines to a water pump for the Central Arizona Project, a mammoth irrigation system in the desert. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/21.12/download-entire-issue

No publisher Archive 1989/06/19 14:50:00 GMT-6 Article
Nevada fights its second nuclear war http://www.hcn.org/issues/21.9/nevada-fights-its-second-nuclear-war The U.S. Department of Energy is preparing to place the nation's first high-level nuclear waste repository on federal land adjacent to a former nuclear test site. The U.S. Department of Energy is preparing to place the nation's first high-level nuclear waste repository on federal land adjacent to a former nuclear test site. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/21.9/download-entire-issue

No publisher Archive 1989/03/08 16:45:00 GMT-6 Article
Invisible gold fuels Elko's boom http://www.hcn.org/issues/21.3/invisible-gold-fuels-elkos-boom The discovery of rich gold deposits in the brown Tuscarora Mountains northwest of Elko, Nev., has ignited a latter day gold rush. The discovery of rich gold deposits in the brown Tuscarora Mountains northwest of Elko, Nev., has ignited a latter day gold rush. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/21.3/download-entire-issue

No publisher Archive 1989/02/13 17:55:00 GMT-6 Article
Discouraging words in Montana http://www.hcn.org/issues/20.18/discouraging-words-in-montana Miles City, a community of 10,000 which has spent 100 years living and breathing ranching, is experiencing traumatic change as economic and other forces shove the family ranch off the Western stage. Miles City, a community of 10,000 which has spent 100 years living and breathing ranching, is experiencing traumatic change as economic and other forces shove the family ranch off the Western stage. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/20.18/download-entire-issue

No publisher Archive 1988/09/26 12:05:00 GMT-6 Article
Hurling sand into society's gears http://www.hcn.org/issues/20.8/hurling-sand-into-societys-gears Earth First! was born in the spring of 1980. Between tequila and beers and camping beneath the stars in the desert near a tiny Mexican border town, four men dedicated to the preservation of biological diversity hatched the notion of a group that was part Sierra Club, part Hell's Angels, part Yippie. Earth First! was born in the spring of 1980. Between tequila and beers and camping beneath the stars in the desert near a tiny Mexican border town, four men dedicated to the preservation of biological diversity hatched the notion of a group that was part Sierra Club, part Hell's Angels, part Yippie. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/20.8/download-entire-issue

No publisher Archive 1988/04/25 16:05:00 GMT-6 Article
Beauty, isolation and cheap land bring a sect to Montana http://www.hcn.org/issues/19.17/beauty-isolation-and-cheap-land-bring-a-sect-to-montana The Church Universal and Triumphant, a wealthy religious group from southern California, recently moved to a ranch called the Royal Teton on the northern boundary of Yellowstone National Park. The Church Universal and Triumphant, a wealthy religious group from southern California, recently moved to a ranch called the Royal Teton on the northern boundary of Yellowstone National Park. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/19.17/download-entire-issue

No publisher Archive 1987/09/14 13:45:00 GMT-6 Article
The continuing saga of the West's wild horse http://www.hcn.org/issues/19.5/the-continuing-saga-of-the-wests-wild-horse The number of horses on the range doubles roughly every seven years, creating conflict between ranchers, land managers and those who see the animals as a last remnant of the Wild West. The number of horses on the range doubles roughly every seven years, creating conflict between ranchers, land managers and those who see the animals as a last remnant of the Wild West. Download entire issue to view this article: http://www.hcn.org/issues/19.5/download-entire-issue

No publisher Archive 1987/03/16 17:05:00 GMT-6 Article