Strip Poker

Agreeing to a wilderness pact

The Arizona Strip has long been an eagerly contested prize. Six million acres of largely federally owned desert, forest, canyons and mountains, it stretches 60 miles from the Grand Canyon in northwest Arizona up to the Utah border. Environmentalists, impressed by the region's spectacular scenery and rare wildlife, have wanted part of it declared a protected wilderness area. Developers, coveting the mineral deposits, among them perhaps the richest veins of uranium in the U.S., have been pressing for the area to be opened to mining.

Frustratingly for both sides,...

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