Butch Otter is now Idaho governor. Which Idaho will it be?

Here are current conditions. Which will grow during his Administration?

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Off road vehicle abuse near Pocatello, Idaho. Photo by Ralph Maughan

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Cache Meadow in Central Idaho. Used to be heavily grazed, the grazing was bought out.
Now it abounds with elk. Photo by Ralph Maughan. Note the Rainbow Family had one
of its annual gatherings here 2 years previous. It was claimed they destroyed the meadow.

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The beautiful peaks of the Lost River Range in the upper Pahsimeroi, and the awful cow zone.
Photo by Katie Fite


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  1. Mike Avatar

    Very nice shots, Ralph. That Lost River Range looks like great country.

    It is if you don’t made cattle devastation of ground, especially the streams. Look up at those towering peaks with huge folded cliffs.

    I have a page on it at: http://www.forwolves.org/ralph/wpages/borahpk.htm and don’t miss http://www.forwolves.org/ralph/wpages/borahpk-grazing.htm

  2. Alan Gregory Avatar

    Ralph, that Pocatello hill looks an awful like one of those that I hiked on as a junior high and high school brat (Irving Junior High and Pocatello High). In northeastern Pennsylania, the motorheads like to drive up and down anthracite coal stripping banks.

  3. kt Avatar
    kt

    Otter’s initial closed door “swearing in”, followed by the pomp and taxpayer-funded military plane flyovers of the “public” ceremony show exactly what is in store for Idaho.

    Cronyism abd back door deals for a cabal of family and business interests – including former father-in-law Simplot’s ag empire of public lands grazing (Simplot is the natins’s largest public lands “welfare rancher” in the country); and trying to suck in more welfare money from the federal government to support crony practices damaging to public lands – like the anti-science Idaho Office of Species Conservation (Extinction).

    It’ll be a Leave NO Yamaha Dealer, Corporate Cowboy, or Foul-Air Aquifer Polluting Dairy behind four years. Here’s Otter talking about new directions, or frugality, while taxpayers spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and get some more gobal warming gases aloft from military planes flying over his head for the public swearing-in pomp.

    The military flair was particularly ironic since I was told by a member of Butch’s own Natinal Guard unit back during Vietnam that as soon as he started dating Gay Simplot, he disappeared from Guard practice.

Author

Dr. Ralph Maughan is professor emeritus of political science at Idaho State University. He was a Western Watersheds Project Board Member off and on for many years, and was also its President for several years. For a long time he produced Ralph Maughan’s Wolf Report. He was a founder of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. He and Jackie Johnson Maughan wrote three editions of “Hiking Idaho.” He also wrote “Beyond the Tetons” and “Backpacking Wyoming’s Teton and Washakie Wilderness.” He created and is the administrator of The Wildlife News.

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