"No matter who wins the election Tuesday, the Bureau of Land Management is going to have to thread a needle to find routes Idaho Power Co. and Rocky Mountain Power can use for the Gateway West power line across southern Idaho."

"LARAMIE, Wyo. -- The idea behind the sculpture that appeared on the University of Wyoming campus about 16 months ago was simple but provocative: a swirl of dead wood and lumps of coal, intended to show the link between global warming and the pine beetle infestation that has ravaged forests across the Rockies."

"After years of working to obtain permission from the state, Alberta-based U.S. Oil Sands Inc. was given the final go-ahead Wednesday to develop the first commercial oil sands project in the US."

"WASHINGTON, DC -- Clearing the way for the largest wind farm in the United States, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar Tuesday approved the Chokecherry and Sierra Madre site in Wyoming as suitable for wind energy development."

"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."