Phosphate Mining in SE Idaho Borderlands Targeted

U.S. Water News reports a legal battle shaping up between environmentalist groups and the J.R. Simplot Company over the company's phosphate mining operations in a southeastern Idaho wilderness area just 10 miles from the Wyoming border.

An Earthjustice attorney, one member group of the environmental coalition, said an expansion plan granted by the U.S. Forest Service "is going to turn substantial acreage of roadless land into an open pit phosphate mine." Only the head administrators of the Forest Service, BLM and Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne are named as defendants, but the suit is aimed at expanded mining by J.R. Simplot, which operated other phosphate mines along the border of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem where all 17 are designated under Superfund status as environmental threats.

The specific site in question is the Smoky Canyon area in the Webster Range at approximately N 42 degrees 44' lat. and W 110 degrees 58' long.

Check out "Sheep Bitch"

There is a new Tall Tails, Damn Lies posting on the fiction sister blog to Borderlands Traverse. I have been promising this story for quite awhile now so I'm understandably cheery about finally getting it written, rewritten and posted. Please take a look and see what you think. Just click on WALK THE LINES, TELL THE STORIES in the Main Links list below right. Warning: the language, as you might guess from the title, has not been sanitized.

Storytelling Along the Way

I just ran across a fascinating reference in Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower (2006, Viking, New York, p. 105). Philbrick says on one of their first trips inland from the Plymouth settlement in July of 1621, the Pilgrims ran across a group of local Indians who had been gathering lobsters in the harbor. The natives explained the circular, foot-deep holes that could be seen all along the trail they were following.

The holes commemorated "any remarkable act" and it was the duty of person's traveling the path to keep them in repair and further to tell others what had happened there with the hoped for result that "many things of great antiquity are fresh in memory."

Philbrick goes on to quote (italics) from Edward Winslow's account of Plymouth Settlement about what he felt were the reasons for this. He notes that he and hyis companion on the inland journey, Stephen Hopkins, "began to see that they were traversing a mythic land, where a sense of community extended far into the distant past. 'So that as a man travelleth...his journey will be less tedious, by reason of the many historical discourses [that] will be related unto him.'"
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