Betsy Marston

WYOMING With the cutting of a ceremonial barbed wire fence, the Heart Mountain Interpretive Learning Center near Cody, Wyo., officially opened Aug. 20. It was a dramatic moment for the more than 250 Japanese Americans who were present: All had been imprisoned there during World War II. A crowd of nearly 1,200 other people joined […]

WYOMING Some people say that the most thrilling thing about any Western Independence Day parade comes toward the end, when the old-time stagecoaches and horse-and-buggy outfits take over. But there’s always the possibility that the animals will get spooked, run amok and end up stomping on people. That almost happened in Cody, Wyo., July 3, […]

WYOMING There’s sad news about Buford, Wyo., a blip of a place halfway between Cheyenne and Laramie that’s home to one Don Sammons. He serves as the town’s “everything” man since he is its only resident. But after 20 years of running Buford’s trading post, liquor store, hardware and grocery store and — what really […]

WASHINGTON Size mattered not a whit during a backyard encounter in the town of Kirkland, in northwest Washington, that pitted a “yapping teacup poodle” against a 200-pound black bear, reports The Week magazine. The tiny dog acted so ferocious that the bear climbed a tree, leaped into an adjoining yard and hightailed it back to […]

WASHINGTON You have to hand it to the 12,000-to-15,000 people who traipse every summer to some national forest — usually in the West — where they live for a week as reunited friends who call themselves the Rainbow Family of Living Light. They’ve had 40 years of practice, so they’ve learned how to avoid leaving […]

COLORADO On hot summer days at the Aspen Airport, private planes from all over the world crowd the tarmac. For some reason, the pilot of an eight-seater Citation X decided that the afternoon of July 1 was the perfect time to gun the engines and do a high-powered “gauge test.” Unfortunately, the pilot failed to […]

IDAHO Jeffrey John Shaw was not what you’d call a “natural” rancher when he moved to Marsing, Idaho, population 890, in the mid-1990s. He had a thick Boston accent, knew beans about cattle, and wore bib overalls and straw hats that were a little over-the-top country, says a neighbor. But he gained the trust of […]

THE WEST A tourist from North Carolina received a chastening lesson during a guided fishing trip on the Colorado River. Trenton Austin Ganey’s group had stopped at a beach below Glen Canyon dam, leaving Ganey, 29, free to hike up to a petroglyph known as the “Descending Sheep Panel.” Alone there, Ganey scratched “TRENT” in […]

WYOMING At 23, Kathleen Vernon is definitely young for her job as Albany County coroner in southeastern Wyoming, but she seems born to do the work. Her mother was a homicide detective in California, her father was a special agent for the BLM, and “the walls of her childhood home were decorated with framed pictures […]

THE WORLD The U.S. military would love to send sure-footed robots to Afghanistan so that machines — and not soldiers — can hump bulky equipment straight up mountains. Boston Dynamics has worked since 2004 on what it calls its “Big Dog cargo ‘bot,” yet the robot is still too big, too noisy and too expensive […]

THE WEST We may be intelligent, but we’re hardly in the same league as the Clark’s nutcracker, a member of the keen Corvidae family. They cache “up to 100,000 nuts in dozens of different spots at the end of spring, and can find them all again up to nine months later,” says scienceblogs.com. And the […]

NEVADA What helps someone survive an ordeal that would most likely kill anyone else? Rita Chretien, 56, should know. She and her husband, Albert, 59, who own an excavating company, were on their way from British Columbia to a trade show in Las Vegas when they lost their way in the mountains of northeastern Nevada […]

MONTANA So far in the West, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer is the only one who kills bad bills by whipping out his custom branding iron, which spells out VETO. The latest Tea Party proposals that have flamed out include a bill making it harder for people to register to vote, another to permit the use […]