Mountain West (CO ID MT NV UT WY)

"One morning in late June, after a crisp mountain air had settled into Kootenai River valley, Megan Leach heard her chickens clucking nervously. She ventured outside to see the cause for the commotion and noticed that one of her heavy coops, on wheels but sturdy, had been moved. As dusk began to fall later that day, Leach rounded up her chickens to place them in the protection of her barn, feeling that something was watching them. It turned out to be a grizzly bear."

"Nestled in the San Juan Mountains, Pagosa Springs is located right at the source. Water flows through an elaborate network of streams, rivers, lakes, treatment plants, and pipelines. It can be accessed through the simple turn of a tap. But living at the headwaters of a major Western river system does not equal water security for all."

"A conservation group acquired more than 1,500 acres just north of Yellowstone National Park to stop a gold mine that they say would have upset the habitat of bears and other wildlife."

"In an ongoing legal battle with the Biden administration over a Nevada lithium mine, environmentalists are poised to return to court with a new approach accusing U.S. wildlife officials of dragging their feet on a year-old petition seeking endangered species status for a tiny snail that lives nearby."

"Dust swirls on the dirt roads running through more than 400,000 acres of cactus studded grasslands south of La Junta, Colo. Suddenly, Jessica LaPage spots the reason she's here: A two-toned brown tarantula about the size of an adult's fist, crawling through the scrubby plants".

"A federal appeals court on Monday sided with the Biden administration against the state of Utah in a lawsuit over the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) “good neighbor” rule, which regulates the flow of air pollution across state lines."

"Since the Fellin family founded the Big Hole Lodge in the 1980s to take people fly fishing on the Big Hole River, they have seen significant changes to the cobble-and-boulder-studded freestone trout stream."

"A new partnership between NASA and researchers is measuring the impact of beavers reintroduced to landscapes in Idaho."

"The state of Utah is not doing enough to save its imperiled Great Salt Lake and stop an impending ecological collapse, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday by national and western environmental groups."

"Lawsuits, protests and fierce disputes over who controls water in the parched American West have held up a crucial pipeline."