Public Lands

Striking at a longtime practice in the Four Corners area, federal authorities Wednesday unsealed indictments against 24 people in what they called the largest investigation ever into the looting of Native American artifacts on public lands. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced the charges at a Salt Lake City news conference and said in a telephone interview that many of the stolen items, valued at $335,000, came from sacred burial sites.

A college student was charged with two federal felonies Wednesday for what he contends were acts of civil disobedience -- making false bids to run up auction prices on oil and gas parcels on public land near Utah's national parks. At the Dec. 19 lease sale, Tim DeChristopher grabbed a bidder's paddle, drove up prices and won 22,000 acres of land for $1.79 million, an amount he later said he didn't have the means or intention to pay.

Just in time for the summer tourist throngs, mimes, musicians and balloon-animal shapers have been newly empowered to bring their entertainments and tip jars to public parks. In a ruling with potentially wide implications for street artists throughout the West, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday struck down curbs imposed by Seattle on those performing at the popular Seattle Center, home of the landmark Space Needle.

You'd be forgiven for mistaking members of the Los Angeles Urban Rangers for real park employees. After all, they wear official-looking uniforms and speak with authority (plus a touch of Scout-tastic chipperness) about what you can and cannot do on public lands. But as anyone who has spent time with them knows, the whole thing is something of an elaborate charade -- or is it closer to tongue-in-cheek performance art? It's often difficult to tell, and the ambiguity is definitely deliberate.

There's nothing wrong with a group of people historically at odds sitting down to find common ground. Or is there? For decades, our public lands have been a battleground: Timber, wildlife, recreation, wilderness -- which interests and uses should dominate? But now, "collaboration" is all the rage.

In a victory for gun-rights advocates, the federal government is preparing to relax a decades-old ban on bringing loaded firearms into national parks. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said Friday that his department would suggest new regulations by the end of April that could bring federal rules into line with state laws concerning guns in parks and public lands. His announcement came in a letter to Sen. Michael D. Crapo (R-Idaho), one of 50 senators who have written to him about the issue.

The federal government on Thursday took the first step toward a massive expansion of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area as President Bush signed legislation ordering the Interior Department to consider making additions to the protected area.

IT COULD very well be a mirage: A trick of the glaring morning sun or something misread in the pre-caffeinated early morning haze. But no. Upon closer inspection, that brown-and-white sign, hanging just beneath the red slash of the "No Left/U-Turn" symbol on a sparsely landscaped traffic island, proclaims exactly what you first thought: "The Islands of LA Nat'l Park."

Over the years, Ray C. Frost has found little reason to leave his tribe's reservation to hunt the deer and elk whose meat fills his freezer. Game is plentiful on the Southern Ute tribe's land in southwest Colorado and the hunting "fantastic," Frost said. But next year, the former tribal councilman and other Southern Ute hunters will venture off their land for a historic act: They will hunt on public lands, exercising long-dormant rights under a century-old treaty with the federal government.

A new group of retired land managers and forest rangers said Thursday that reckless off-road vehicle recreation was the No. 1 threat to public lands in the West. The 13-member Rangers for Responsible Recreation said it was voicing the concerns of many federal land management employees in the West, including in California, who report that an increasing number of riders and the growing power of the vehicles are endangering natural resources and public safety.