Word: valleyful
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Pete Dube, who is from Buffalo, Wyo., pulls up in a pickup hauling a trailer with six horses and looks out across his land. In 1995, when he bought the 5,000-acre ranch in the Middle Prong Valley of the Powder River basin, nothing much disturbed the landscape except the deer, the pronghorn and the few cows that grazed the rolling hills and valleys...
Today semis are thundering along new dirt roads, heavy bulldozers are digging trenches for pipelines, overhead power lines are crisscrossing the valley, and drilling rigs are going up like mushrooms after a spring rain. Dube's spread is just another block on a gas company's exploration map as the Powder River basin becomes the center of a sudden boom in natural-gas drilling, one driven by rising prices, new extraction techniques and a recent federal decision to put 2,500 new wells on public land...
...there, the canyon is designated as Federal Lease MTM-74615. Should the company's wells pan out, the canyon could be worth millions. Finally, to the numerous Native American tribes that revere the canyons' ancient rock drawings of warriors, shields and animals, the place is known as the Valley of the Chiefs. To the tribes, the spot is holy and has no price...
Howard Boggess, 64, a Crow historian, attended one of these parlays. Boggess, who is legally blind but can read and write with high-tech assistance, describes hearing a clash of many tongues. An Arapahoe elder offered a short prayer and invoked the valley's "sacredness." The Anschutz executives, as Boggess recalls, invoked their legal rights and complained about media coverage. The Indians too were worried about coverage because they feared revealing too much about their cherished valley. But when their letters to Denver and Washington went unanswered, they went public...
...also over language. To the Bureau of Reclamation, Upper Klamath Lake is habitat that supports endangered fish, and when the water level began to drop from drought this year, its federal keepers cut off irrigation water to 240,000 acres of cropland. To the Klamath's farmers, however, the valley has a simpler name: home. Its federally subsidized waters support their very way of life, and have for decades...