Save Our Wild Salmon, the coalition of environmentalists, fishermen and sporting industries that are pushing for breaching four dams on the Snake River, said in a press release earlier this week that documents that they got using the Freedom of Information Act that showed that the Bonneville Power Administration exaggerated the amount of power that would be needed to replace the four Lower Snake dams in Washington.

The way the salmon advocates see it, the Obama Administration decided July 29 how it was going proceed with the salmon and dam plan before U.S. District Judge James Redden.

But instead of sharing their plans with Oregon, the Nez Perce tribes and other groups that had challenged the previous federal plan in court, it asked Redden to give it until Sept. 15 to bring the plan back to the court. Justice Department attorney Coby Howell said they wanted to see whether they could find common ground with people who sued them.

Economist Ray Rasker has put together the costs of protecting houses from wildfire in Montana with predictions based on the warming climate. What he has found is the federal firefighting subsidies lead to poor planning in fire prone areas increase the cost of firefighting.

People move into forested areas and expect the federal government to protect their houses. And what politician is going to tell federal firefighters to let those fires burn.

Alternate Energy Holdings Inc. CEO and president Don Gillispie said several Idaho counties and the state have recently offered lands for its proposed nuclear plant following delays in local approval at the current site in Elmore County.

But Idaho Department of Lands Director George Bacon said about the state offer, “Not really.”

“He has gone out with some folks to see if the state has some properties that meet his needs,” Bacon said. “We’ve advised him what the process was for leasing land for any process.”

President Barack Obama plans to visit Yellowstone and Grand Canyon National Parks next week.

Obama will fly into Bozeman, Mont. and Yellowstone Saturday then fly on to Grand Junction, Colo., Grand Canyon and Phoenix, The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel reports.

Obama plans to stop in Grand Junction to talk about health care.

Idaho’s Department of Fish and Game has sent letters to all 50 states asking them whether they were interested in taking any of our wolves.

Guess what? Nobody wants them.

Not Vermont. Nor Maine. Nor New Hampshire or New York. California isn’t howling for them either. Not even Colorado appears interested.

Republican Sen. Gary Schroeder sponsored the bill last year ordering Fish and Game to send the letter to make a point. His point was that if we need to move wolves around for management purposes we have no place to put them.

So we have to kill them.

You may have seen the story about how former Idaho Gov. Cecil Andrus weighed in against the current Columbia-Snake salmon plan developed in the last years of the Bush Administration. He joined former Democratic governors John Kitzhaber of Oregon and Mike Lowry of Washington in a letter urging President Obama to reject the plan and instead embark on expanded talks.

Game managers from Idaho, Montana and Wyoming have proposed a memorandum of understanding about how they will institute grizzly bear hunting in the future.

With the current grizzly deaths by human already higher than they would like, none of them are talking about hunting them soon. But Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks has taken the memo out to the public for comment and hopes to hear how its state's residents will react to opening a grizzly hunting season for the first time since 1991.

If you think this summer is hot for you consider the salmon and steelhead making their epic odyssey up the Columbia River heading home to Idaho.

Water temperatures exceeded 73 degrees, far warmer than the 68-70 degrees fishery managers say these cold water fish prefer this time of the year. The Clean Water Act requires temperatures 68 degrees and lower.

When temperatures rise to 72 degrees, salmon suffer unless they can find cold water refuges like the mouths of cold water stream like the Deschutes in Oregon or the White Salmon in Washington that come right out of the high country.

I’ve been hard on Yellow Pine for its dependence on the costly South Fork of the Salmon Road. And they have gotten a bad rap for their attitudes about fires and firefighting.

But the residents of this community on the edge of the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness have showed how to make their town fire resistant in a way that other rural communities can copy. Once buried deep in the forest, Yellow Pine is thinned, open and has loads of defensible space for firefighters.