Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said rehabilitation of the Yankee Fork of the Salmon River serves as a model of his America’s Great Outdoors River Initiative.

The Yankee Fork at Sunbeam is one of 51 river projects Salazar is highlighting nationwide, to provide examples for how communities across America can restore and reconnect with the rivers in their backyards.

Idaho Republican Rep. Mike Simpson is not a supporter of the Antiquities Act of 1906 that gives the President power to set aside public lands as national monuments.

He opposed President Clinton’s expansion of the Crater of the Moon National Monument in 2000 but turned around and sponsored legislation that turned the added lands into the Craters of the Moon National Preserve, so hunting would be allowed. But he has not joined Rep. Raul Labrador in sponsoring a bill that would amend the existing Antiquities Act to exclude Idaho from additional national monuments.

Six months ago, Center for Biological Diversity Executive Director Kieran Suckling sat before the House Resources Committee on the hot seat.

Idaho Republican Rep. Raul Labrador and Chairman Doc Hastings grilled the leader of the group that has made its business to use the courts to protect imperiled animals and plants. The primary argument Hastings made was that since only 1 percent of the species listed have been recovered, the Endangered Species Act is “failing badly.”

Avista Corp, an investor owned electric and gas utility for northern Idaho, made a financial push to unseat two incumbents that failed. Both Avista and Idaho Power gave $1,000 to Pam Stout, the Tea Party opponent to Rep. George Eskridge, former Bonneville Power Administration district manager.

But Avista went a step further giving $15,000 to three political action committees that helped Stout and Danielle Ahrens who challenged Sen. Shawn Keough, R-Sandpoint, the Spokane Spokesman-Review reported.

Energy issues made a difference in county commissioner races, but not the Idaho Legislature.

Ada County Commissioner Sharon Ullman’s support for Dynamis Energy’s waste-to-power project helped David Case win in the Republican primary Tuesday. Meanwhile Washington County incumbents Michael Hopkins and Dave Springer were knocked off by Tom Anderson and Kirk Chandler in Washington County following passage of an ordinance regulating the new natural gas industry.

Canadian exploration company Midas Gold has consolidated ownership of the main gold deposits in the Stibnite-Yellow Pine area along the East Fork of South Fork of the Salmon River. It has mapped millions of ounces of gold in its Golden Meadows project and is seeking to learn even more.

So the Payette National Forest is beginning the environmental review process for more exploratory drilling in the area where millions of dollars were spent a decade ago to clean up past mining messes. It's also alongside one of the state's top chinook salmon spawning rivers.

The Idaho Fish and Game Commission approved leasing the oil and gas rights for the Payette River Wildlife Management Area.

The 386-acre reserve, located on both sides of the Payette River north of New Plymouth, lies right in the middle of the area where commercial levels of natural gas were discovered in 2010. The rights will be put up for bids in an Idaho Department of Lands auction this year.

A unlikely partnership between Formation Metals and the Idaho Conservation League put $150,000 into central Idaho to benefit conservation projects.

The mining company and the conservation group joined forces in 2009 to distribute money into the Salmon River watershed after the two also agreed on the degree of protection the company planned for its cobalt mine.

Packard’s milkvetch might not have the sex appeal of the Selkirk Mountain woodland caribou.

But the purple-flowered plant is found only in a 10-square-mile area between Big Willow Creek to the south and Little Willow Creek to the north. Biologists have found about 5,000 plants around light-colored sedimentary outcroppings, with distinctive but not yet well understood soil characteristics.

What they suspect is that the soil prevents competition for the milkvetch from invasive species.

After my story on how climate change is accelerating runoff in Idaho’s rivers Adam Winstral, a research hydrologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Northwest Watershed Research Center here in Boise contacted me. He wanted me to know that scientists there have developed new snowpack modeling tools they hope will help managers clear out some of the confusion climate change has caused.