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Show B-12 The Park Record Saturday, August 26, 2000 It protects the thing you need most .s in business: your spine. TbtBj.kSMir'" V ExKhln Chuir V - .0 TAr SignMxre Stria Management Chair The perfect bed for people who don't have back pain. (And mora importantly, iwver want it.) Ik. 7 P....t Mattrtn m u:nUa AJm tubit BJ RELAX THE BACK www.relaxtheback.com The Smartest Way To Sit Or Sleep. 4S62 So. Highland Dr.. Holladay, UTS4117 278-4567 sofanists struggle against wead cydss PHRAIM, Utah (AP) Steve Monscn has nightmares about weeds. Squarrose knapweed, medusa head and cheatgrass -- most of all cheatgrass. They creep into his conscious con-scious and his conversation- just as they're invading the range land he grew up on. Foreign weeds are driving out the sagebrush and native grasses, says Monsen, one of the government's govern-ment's foremost experts on weeds. And they're highly flammable, fueling fuel-ing some of the blazes that have made this fire season one of the West's worst in decades. "We have altered these systems to the point where we have devastating devas-tating fires." Monsen. As he drove through land in central cen-tral Utah his grandfather once owned, he pointed out alien plants that hae taken over a third of the 75 million acres of the Great Basin in Utah, Idaho, Nevada. Oregon and California. "if we had transformed the Eastern hardwood forests and prairies into a weed-ridden set of circumstances like we have in the West, the general population would not have allowed it to happen," said Monsen of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rocky Mountain Research Laboratory and Shrub Sciences Laboratory. Cheatgrass, a native of central Asia, arrived in the West in 1910, most likely with imported grains. By then, cattle and sheep had beea grazing the region for several decades, clearing out the dense sagebrush and native grasses. It didn't did-n't take long for cheatgrass to fill the void. Cheatgrass seeds germinate in early fall or even in the winter in warm areas, giving it a head start against other plants in early spring. That's especially important in the Great Basin, where soil moisture is scarce. By May. when native perennials peren-nials like winter fat and sagebrush are still trying to get established, cheatgrass has already grown, dropped seeds and died. Left behind is a carpet of tinder, w ailing to be set ablaze by lightning, a careless campfire or even a car. Where rangeland fires used to occur every 10 years or so, enough time for the slow sagebrush to grow back in, they now strike just two or three years apart. One cheatgrass-filled cheatgrass-filled valley in central Utah has burned four times in two years. And it a vicious cycle: the fires clear out native brush, making more room for cheatgrass - w hose seeds resist the flames. So far this year, with weeks of fire season still to go, more than 3,000 fires have burned 1.56 million acres in the Great Basin. All last summer, wildfires blackened nearly 2 million acres in the region. The solution, Monsen says, is to restore native grasses. This year, the Bureau of Land Management announced its Great Basin Restoration Initiative, a plan to replant 500,000 acres, including some native species. Experts figure it will take S10 million a year for at least 10 years to keep the effort going. The project was granted $17 million mil-lion this spring in an emergency appropriations bill, but the money was later dropped. Now, the BLM w ants $2.5 million to start the project proj-ect next year. The BLM already spends nearly $71 an acre each year to put out fires, $64 an acre to rehabilitate after fires, and $70 an acre to stop weeds. "You can get all kinds of dollars to put out a fire, but where we ought to be spending our money is in preventative measures," Monsen said. But range management has always been a touchy subject, and some Western politicians and ranchers fear restoration could mean placing thousands of acres off limits to grazing. Another problem, experts say, is that most people have little understanding under-standing of the issue. "Everybody drives across Nevada and Utah on Interstate 80 and that's their general look at the sagebrush ecosystem," said Peter Brussard, a biology professor at the University of Nevada-Reno and co-dirsctor of the Nevada Biodiversity Initiative. Aldrich aims high, qualifies for Olympic team NOTICE OF NONDISCRIMINATORY POLICY AS TO STUDENTS Park City Arts &: Music Conservatory admits students of any race, color, national and ethnic origin to all rights, privileges, programs and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the conservatory. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national or ethnic origin in administration administra-tion of its educational policies, admissions policies, scholarship and loan programs, and other conservatory administered programs. Our formal admissions policy is open to all students of all ages, without regard to background, education, or previous arts or music training. This is published in our newsletter and communicated to all who call or come by. (435) 649-5883 AUSTIN (AP) Erin Aldrich surprised sur-prised everyone but herself when she qualified for the U.S Olympic team in the high jump. Shaking off a year of frustrating injuries and missed heights, the University of Texas senior wasn't among the favorites to qualify for Australia at the U.S. Olympic trials last month. But the 22 -year-old Aldrich beat the odds - anil most of the field -w hen she cleared six feet, four inches. inch-es. The mark w as below her personal person-al best of 6-4 34 but still good enough to get her to the Sydney games with a second place finish w ith teammates Karol Damon and Amv Acuff. "Weird things can happen in an Olympic year." said Aldrich. the only collegian on the women's track anil field team. "There's always a wild card that w ill make it." That Aldrich would be considered consid-ered an underdog w as perhaps a surprise sur-prise in itself. A four-time NCAA champion, her leap of f4 3.4 at the Texas Relays in April is still the best outdoor mark by an American woman this year. But her lackluster showings in previous international appearances and an ankle injury had most thinking think-ing she'd be watching tape-delayed Olympic highlights on television. "I guess 1 was expected to choke," Aldrich said. Her road to the Olympics started long before the U.S. track and field trials in July. Aldrich got her first taste of international competition at the 1997 World Championships in Greece. Still a college freshman, she cleared the bar at only 5-11 and failed to make it past the first round. She also had a disappointing showing at the World University Games in Spain in 1999 when she made the finals but couldn even reach 6-2. Then came the pain. And the frustration of bad jumps. Aldrich was grounded by sore knees, the result of tendinitis compounded com-pounded by her second career as a standout Longhoms volleyball player. play-er. ' In 1999, 1 hit one of those slumps I had never hit before. I felt kind of helpless at that time." she said. "Finally, at the beginning of 2000 outdoor season, I said I've got to find a way out of this or I w asnl going to make the Olympics." She seemed to have found it. Finally over the soreness in her knee, Aldrich was cruising in the outdoor season when she won the Texas Relays. Instead of calling quits, however, how-ever, Aldrich was gunning for 6-5 when she rolled her ankle on a takeoff. take-off. "It was just like the devil was saying say-ing 'Bam! Gotcha again." I felt so awful. I finally had gotten it together and was struck down again." Aldrich said. Her coach. University of Texas assistant John Rembao. takes some of the blame. "I should have called it a day," said Rembao. "She was losing focus and when you're that hyped up, thatls when bad things happen. The hardest hard-est thing to do as a coach is tell an athlete to stop when they want to keep going." The injury wasnl disastrous, however. how-ever. Aldrich recovered in tune to win the Big 12 and NCAA championships. champi-onships. Physically she was fine, but Rembao thinks the injury has occupied occu-pied a dark place in her mind and occasionally creeps to the forefront. Since qualifying for the Olympics, Aldrich struggled in three European meets, failing to go higher than 6-0 3.4. "For her. that's not good," said Rembao, w ho as the father of a newborn new-born daughter, didnt travel with Aldrich to Europe but will be with her in Sydney. "I think (the injury) created some hesitation in her mind." Aldrich is currently ranked 24th in the world by the International Amateur Athletic Foundation and her personal best is well short of the top mark in the world this year of 6-7 6-7 3.4 by Romania's Monica Iager-Dinescu. Iager-Dinescu. Even so, Aklrich believes she can compete for s medaL "Nobody expects her to do it, shels so young." Rembao said. "I told her to enjoy the experience. She has the potential to make three more Olympic teams." Aldrich prefers to win now. "I think if I werenl thinking about gold, I'd be selling myself short," Aldrich said. "Physically, we're all gifted," she said. "It basically whols going to scratch and claw their way to the three medals." Wildlife groups seek help to protect the trumpeter SALT LAKE CITY (AP) Two wildlife groups have asked the U.S. Fish and W ildlife Sen ice to declare Yellowstone National Park's trumpeter trum-peter swans endangered and protect critical habitats stretching at least into Utah. A 95-page petition says inadequate inade-quate habitat protection has kept the swans from migrating into areas such as northern Utah, Nevada and even California. That has "bottlenecked" the swans in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. The petition comes a little more than two months after the agency angered wildlife organiza tions by introducing a proposal to allow a permanent trumpeter swan hunting season after an experimental, experimen-tal, five-year season in Montana, Utah and Nev ada. "These birds need the opportunity opportuni-ty to increase their numbers and reestablish re-establish their migration if there's any hope of re-establishing their numbers," said Andrea Lococo, the Rocky Mountain coordinator of The Fund for Animals. The Yellowstone birds no longer migrate on their own, she said. Others that were moved to areas such as the Bear River National i ? : t. , , flu - it i Wildlife Refuge in Utah in hopes that they would learn to migrate were mistaken for the look-alike tundra tun-dra swan and shot by hunters. The petition asks that the Rocky Mountain breeding population of the birds - which are the largest waterfowl species in North America and are considered the largest swans in the world - be classified as endangered endan-gered on an emergency basis. That means the Fish and Wildlife Service could skirt the yearlong study normally nor-mally performed before it lists an animal as endangered Chuck Davis, the endangered species listing coordinator for the Fish and Wildlife Serviced Denver office, had not seen the petition. But he said usually emergency status is only granted when entire populations popula-tions are threatened, and listing part of the trumpeter swan population as endangered could be problematic John Comely, the Fish and Wildlife Service regional migratory bird coordinator, said he could not discuss the petition, but trumpeter swan populations generally are doing well. "We're always concerned about all migratory birds, but we believe the Rocky Mountain population of trumpeter swans is continuing to increase and its overall health is good," he said. Lococo said there are about 350 birds in the Rocky Mountain population, popula-tion, mostly living in the greater Yellowstone Park area. 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