Young BLM chief faced trial by fire in turbulent first year [ Neil Kornze ]

E&E ^ | December 23, 2014 | Phil Taylor

[george76]

Kornze's BLM faced an angry, armed mob as it tried to round up Cliven Bundy's cows in a Nevada desert. Weeks later, a Utah county commissioner brazenly flouted the agency's closure of a sensitive river canyon. Wyoming recently sued BLM over its management of wild horses.

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Kornze's no stranger to land conflicts given his upbringing in Elko County, a stronghold of the 1970s and '80s Sagebrush Rebellion.

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On July 4, 2000, hundreds of protesters drove from Elko to Jarbidge, Nev., where they cleared a 4-ton boulder and rebuilt a road that the Forest Service had closed to protect endangered bull trout.

Just last year, Nevada's Legislature passed a law establishing a task force to identify federal lands that could be transferred to the state.

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Kornze had ordered BLM to round up and impound several hundred cows owned by Cliven Bundy, the renegade Nevada rancher. Anti-federal protesters showed up at Bundy's Bunkerville ranch by the hundreds, armed and ready for a firefight.

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Less than a month later, Utah's San Juan County Commissioner Phil Lyman led dozens of protesters, including one of Bundy's sons, on a motorized escapade into a canyon BLM had closed to all-terrain vehicles to protect Native American ruins.

BLM declined to intervene, fearing a Bundy-like reprisal.

The U.S. Attorney's Office in Salt Lake City this fall pressed charges against Lyman and four others, and the case is in a federal court.

Just this fall, Elko County Commissioner Grant Gerber, a lifelong sagebrush rebel, led a coast-to-coast horseback ride to Washington, D.C., to demand that BLM fire Battle Mountain District Manager Doug Furtado, who last summer had ordered grazing reductions to preserve Nevada's rangeland from a severe drought.

Gerber died days later from complications stemming from a fall from his horse.

[Paladin2]

Rustler Reid’s foreman.