Armed men in camouflage drove their muddy vehicles out of Western towns in droves this month, with or without deer and elk in tow. Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department staffer Mike Thompson says his state used to put hunters on the spot by asking drivers at a check station near Missoula to queue up, […]
Heard Around the West
Posted inNovember 10, 1997: Drain Lake Powell? Democracy and science finally come West
Heard around the West
If your product is ostrich and emu and you call your Missoula, Mont., business the Alternative Meat Market, it just makes sense to try to send some un-beef steaks directly to the White House, right? Right, though marketer Kim Mecca first found herself trapped in switchboard limbo. Finally she connected with White House chief usher […]
Posted inOctober 27, 1997: Deconstructing the age of dams
Heard around the West
Pity poor Joe Camel, the billboard cigarette huckster now out of a job. “Cancer-mongering just ain’t the same without Joe Camel,” laments Eric Scigliano in the Seattle Weekly. But thanks to the e-mail grapevine, folks in Washington state have come up with new careers for the cool spokes-cartoon. Our favorite: Filling potholes with tar from […]
Posted inOctober 13, 1997: The land is still public, but it's no longer free
Heard around the West
Imagination is a wonderful thing. Conjure up this scenario: It is a hot summer day at Yellowstone National Park, and hundreds of tourists await an eruption of the Old Faithful geyser. Everyone checks watches, wondering about a delay. What is Old Faithful if not relatively faithful? What no one knows is that beneath the heaving […]
Posted inSeptember 29, 1997: The timber wars evolve into a divisive attempt at peace
Heard around the West
“Welcome hunters!” say the blaze-orange signs on stores in many rural Western towns. Out in the woods, the sentiment is not necessarily shared by other mammals. One bowhunter in Wyoming unexpectedly became prey himself, AP reports. A grizzly bear with two cubs nearby charged Greg Dolph, who thought to escape by climbing 15 feet into […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 1997: Yellowstone at 125: The park as a sovereign state
Heard around the West
Cows continue to get heat for everything from spreading E. coli bacteria to stomping on salmon eggs. But ranchers protest that no one ever talks about the good things cows do. Heard around the West just read about one good thing in the Salem, Ore., Capital Press. It seems cows tend to push objects with […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
Heard around the West
Now people all over the country, if not the world, refer to it as the “sunscreen speech”: “Wear sunscreen” it begins. … “Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth … Do one thing every day that scares you … Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly … Get to […]
Posted inAugust 18, 1997: The West that was, and the West that can be
Heard around the West
The Aspen Daily News isn’t shy about its willingness to dish the dirt. Its motto? “If you don’t want it printed, don’t let it happen.” Bren Simon, the wife of shopping-mall developer and Indiana Pacers owner Melvin Simon, may have recollected those words once the free paper began printing juicy stories about the couple’s illegal […]
Posted inAugust 4, 1997: Vanishing habitat
Heard around the West
Once a plump owl earnestly told boys and girls: “Give a hoot, don’t pollute!” Then the bird went mute during the controversy over northern spotted owls losing their nests to loggers. Well, the 25-year-old mascot of the Forest Service is back, reports the Jackson Hole News. While on sabbatical Woodsy may have enjoyed a stay […]
Posted inJuly 7, 1997: While the New West booms, Wyoming mines, drills ... and languishes
Heard around the West
For sheer chutzpah, nothing beats Las Vegas. This gambling boomtown dares to downsize New York’s Statue of Liberty, compress Egyptian pyramids into city-block-size containers, and as wry writer Dave Barry put it in a bazillion dailies recently, “every week or so somebody out there builds a new casino the size of Czechoslovakia, but with more […]
Posted inJune 23, 1997: On the trail of mining's corporate nomads
Heard Around the West
If this is heresy, so be it: We’ve begun to pity bureaucrats in the West who take the brunt of the public’s contradictions and righteousness. When some of these non-elected officials stick their necks out to protect a public resource, they often get them cut off. And because they’re “public” servants, all of us get […]
Posted inJune 9, 1997: Chaos comes to Costilla County
Heard around the West
“You better run a BIG retraction,” howls Dan Feller, a history professor at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. What was Heard Around the West’s little error? Informing you that a recent “Darwin Award” to a lawn-chair-flying fellow last year was a netmyth. The story of Larry Walters soaring to 16,000 feet for almost […]
Posted inMay 26, 1997: The sacred and profane collide in the West
Heard around the West
Reader Frazier Nichol in John Day, Ore., had a deep thought the other day, maybe the same day he opened his fortune cookie and found a contemporary bit of wisdom: “All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.” We know that’s the way the cookie crumbled, because he […]
Posted inMay 12, 1997: Planning under the gun: Cleaning up Lake Tahoe proves to be a dirty business
Heard around the West
From the EPA joke network comes a sampling of signs seen across the United States, the first at a Santa Fe gas station: “We will sell gasoline to anyone in a glass container.” On the window of a New Mexico dry cleaner: “38 years on the same spot.” And in the window of an Oregon […]
Posted inApril 28, 1997: Evangelical Christians preach a green gospel
Heard around the West
Stolid and solid at 1,500 pounds each, beef cows keep getting a bad rap. Fear of mad cow disease is chasing away burger eaters, and doctors have long warned that juicy steaks clog arteries. Now come two researchers who tell us in Conservation Biology magazine that cows cause fires. Joy Belsky and Dana Blumenthal connect […]
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
Heard around the West
Spring is here. We know, not because our boots sport two-inch mud platforms after a step outdoors or because sunny mornings tend to mutate into dramatic whiteouts, but because news from around the West seems to zero in on the human body: in the classroom, in the buff and in the rough. The student story […]
Posted inMarch 31, 1997: Big Sky, big mess in Montana
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Vail and most other ski resorts in Colorado have enjoyed deep snow and sunny days lately, and everything should be hunky-dory, right? Wrong. Vail and other destination ski areas are “desperate” because they lack lift operators, maids and other workers, reports the Steamboat Pilot. Part of the problem stems from pre-employment drug testing that screens […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
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When birds fall from the sky as thick as snowflakes and a stunned moose splays itself over the hood of a car, does this portend something … weird? First, the phenomenon of the falling web-footed grebes: 3,000 of them plummeted to the snow-covered fields of central Utah apparently believing they were dropping safely onto bodies […]
Posted inMarch 3, 1997: Hunters close ranks, and minds
Heard around the West
Virtual relationships? They’re all the rage. But over at the San Francisco regional office of the Forest Service, leaders of the forester team fret. In a nutshell, nobody talks shop face to face; the preferred method of communication is computer e-mail. So the team leaders sent a message – by e-mail, of course: On the […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
Heard around the West
We should all have the problem Mark Wattles has just south of Portland. “I have a lot of money. I don’t know what to do with all the money I have,” he told the Oregonian. Hollywood Entertainment Corp. president Wattles does think he needs a bigger house, so he’s building a 50,000-square-foot mansion on the […]