"Bivouacking with sheep high in the mountains around Sun Valley, Idaho, field technicians with the environmental group Defenders of Wildlife are gaining deeper insights into strategies they can use to keep wolves at bay without shooting them."

"El Dorado County environmental health officials are urging residents and visitors to take precautions after a chipmunk found in the Lake Tahoe Basin last week tested presumptive positive for the bacteria that causes the plague."

"CHEYENNE, Wyo. -- A land conservation group has reached a long-sought agreement to prevent a gas drilling project near a southern approach to Jackson Hole and Grand Teton National Park by buying out a vast area of mineral leases."

"FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — Klee Benally, a member of the Navajo tribe, has gone to the mountains just north of here to pray, and he has gone to get arrested. He has chained himself to excavators; he has faced down bulldozers. For 10 years, the soft-spoken activist has fought a ski resort’s expansion plans in the San Francisco Peaks that include clear-cutting 74 acres of forest and piping treated sewage effluent onto a mountain to make snow."

"President Obama plans to bypass Congress and sign an executive order [Friday]designating the ancient Chimney Rock ruins in southwest Colorado as a new national monument, the administration announced late yesterday."

"A coal-fired power plant in Billings, Montana, will be mothballed starting in April 2015 because it will cost too much to comply with new emissions reductions required by the government, plant owner and operator PPL Montana said on Wednesday."

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has called on NV Energy to close the coal-biurning Reid Gardner electric power plant near Las Vegas.

"The long legal battle over Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's controversial 2009 decision to cancel 77 leases near pristine federal lands in Utah may have finally reached its end."

"Gray wolves in Wyoming, the last still federally protected in the northern Rockies, will lose endangered species status at the end of next month, opening them to unregulated killing in most of the state, the U.S. government said on Friday."

"Mosquito Gold President and CEO Brian McClay took in stride a federal judge’s decision that the Forest Service needs to do more analysis of its exploration program."

"KALISPELL, Mont. -- A man dressed in a military-style 'ghillie' suit and apparently trying to provoke reports of a Bigfoot sighting in northwest Montana was struck by two cars and killed, authorities said."

"Environmentalists are warning that a plan to pipe billions of gallons of water a year from rural central Nevada nearly 300 miles to the Las Vegas metropolitan area will dry up wetlands and springs, damaging thousands of acres of wildlife habitat and potentially creating a 'dust bowl' scenario."

"CHEYENNE, Wyo. -- A federal judge has dismissed a legal challenge from environmental groups that sought to block federal coal leases in Wyoming's Powder River Basin on the grounds that burning the coal would contribute to global warming."

"To date in 2012, more than 173,000 acres have already burned in Colorado, destroying more than 600 homes and taken six lives, 7News reports. Now with 4th of July approaching, the heat combined with relative low humidity and unseasonable dryness has firefighters saying that fireworks are "not worth the risk" this year during the worst wildfire season in a decade."

"BROWNING – On a recent flight over Divide Mountain, a snow-marbled peak that straddles the border between the Blackfeet Indian Reservation and Glacier National Park, Lori New Breast crossed her fingers."