Visitors and employees leave the Royal Gorge Bridge park as smoke billows skyward Tuesday afternoon, June 11, 2013, from a fire near the gorge in western Fremont County west of Canon City, Colo. The fire burning on an estimated 300 acres south of the Royal Gorge Bridge and the Arkansas River led to the evacuation of the park, the Bureau of Land Management said.
An exhibit sign is displayed outside the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's wild horse holding facility on Wednesday, June 5, 2013 in Palomino Valley, Nev. A scathing independent scientific review of wild horse roundups in the West concludes the U.S. government should likely instead let nature cull the herds. A 14-member panel assembled by the National Science Academy's National Research Council, at the request of the Bureau of Land Management, concluded BLM's removal of nearly 100,000 horses from the Western range over the past decade is probably having the opposite effect of its intention to ease ecological damage and reduce overpopulated herds.
Some of the hundreds of mustangs the U.S. Bureau of Land Management recently has removed from federal rangeland peer at visitors Wednesday, June 5, 2013, at the BLM's Palomino Valley holding facility about 20 miles north of Reno. The National Academy of Science's National Research Council released a two-year study Wednesday recommending ways to curtail sky-rocketing costs associated with caring and feeding for the animals, as well as alternatives to the controversial roundups.
Bureau of Land Management Natural Resource Specialist John Hodge lights a naturally occurring oil seep in McKittrick, California, in this April 29, 2013 file photo. The vast Monterey shale formation is estimated by the U.S. Energy Information Administration to hold 15 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil, or four times that of the Bakken formation centered on North Dakota. Most of that oil is not economically retrievable except by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a production-boosting technique in which large amounts of water, sand and chemicals are injected into shale formations to force hydrocarbon fuels to the surface. As California sets the ground rules for drilling in the Monterey oil formation, some environmentalists worry that politicians, regulators and fellow activists are fighting the wrong battle. Picture taken April 29, 2013.
Bureau of Land Management Natural Resource Specialist John Hodge lights a naturally occurring oil seep in McKittrick, California, April 29, 2013. The vast Monterey shale formation is estimated by the U.S. Energy Information Administration to hold 15 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil, or four times that of the Bakken formation centered on North Dakota. Most of that oil is not economically retrievable except by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a production-boosting technique in which large amounts of water, sand and chemicals are injected into shale formations to force hydrocarbon fuels to the surface. Picture taken April 29, 2013.
In this April 19, 2013 photo released by the Nevada Department of Wildlife (NDOW) shows dead bluebirds on top of a white plastic hollow mine claim marker in central Nevada. Wildlife officials and conservationists in Nevada say they are making progress knocking down the white plastic pipes that miners traditionally have used to stake their claims but can also become death traps for hundreds of thousands of small birds that get stuck inside. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management estimates there are more than 3.4 million of the white polyvinyl chloride pipes sticking out of the ground across the western United States, more than 1 million in Nev. alone in a 2011 survey.
