Heard Around the West

“Hello” seems like such an innocent word. It’s not Western and boisterous like howdy! stuck up like How-do-you-do? or ethnic like hola, but it does the job; it gets the gab going. But not in Kingsville, Texas. There, hello smacks of Satan. So county employees now answer their phone with a cheery “HEAVEN-O,” avoiding all […]

Does everyone become slightly unhinged when one year lurches into another? We detect a certain recklessness in late 1996-early 1997 news reports. Some stories feature surliness and hostility, while others reveal a plucky determination to survive anything – even a flood in the middle of winter. We begin with the better news, although it features […]

You can be feminine and far fetched, or is it petite and a patriot? The shy editor of a newsletter called Marilyn the Patriot Matchmaker, admits, “I’ve always liked the kind of guys who’ll get me shot.” Enter this female foe of the New World Order, Marilyn, no last name given, who wants to link […]

Did you think intellectual activity at the Forest Service is strangled with red tape? Then you’ve never heard them on the subject of wilderness golf. Forest Service employee Wendy Keeler recently sent an e-mail about her encounter with a group of families in the midst of a friendly golf tournament in the middle of a […]

Visitors to one of north Idaho’s most popular spots – the 200-acre “Samowen” campground on the shores of Lake Pend Oreille – have often been stumped by its Polynesian-sounding name. ” ‘Can you tell me about Samoan campground?’ they ask,” Idaho Panhandle National Forest spokeswoman Judy York told the Spokane Spokesman-Review. Now the area has […]

When two grizzlies in Glacier National Park began snuggling up to tourists, the agency brought in a pack of Karelian bear dogs. These black-and-white canines specialize in chasing their fellow carnivores in a very aggressive way. At least one grizzly has taken the hint. A bear biologist told the Hungry Horse News in Columbia Falls, […]

At a pizzeria in Telluride, we recently overheard a couple of shopping-bag laden tourists discuss their vacation. “It’s like Switzerland,” one sighed happily, “only cheaper.” But Colorado is not Switzerland, despite the best efforts of Telluride and Vail. The chocolate here is not nearly as good; our passenger train system is just about nonexistent, and […]

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation may be in terminal decline, but its spirit lives on over at the Federal Highway Administration. The FHA recently rebuilt Highway 9, from Murray, Idaho, to Thompson Falls, Mont., and the new road is so high and so water-resistant that during wet periods it backs water into Murray, population 63, […]

Vail Resorts Inc. should be on top of the world. The already enormous ski area is about to swallow the Breckenridge and Keystone ski areas, making it gargantuan. And Vail president Adam Aron is not just a formidable businessman but also something of a wizard with words. The former cruise-line president recently “mused aloud” to […]

When we saw a copy of the Boobyprise out of Cody, Wyo., we thought: “That’s it! This endangered species stuff has gone too far.” For there was a photo of a flying dinosaur carrying off a human being. Worse than the photo was the headline – “Dinosaur reintroduction in Yellowstone Park has gone better than […]

In an attempt to keep a tragedy in perspective, one small-town editor is said to have written the following lead paragraph: “While 200 students studied quietly at their desks, Johnny Jones threw principal Bob Smith out of his fourth-floor office window.” A similar lead out of Steamboat Springs, Colo., in early August might have read: […]

Mountain guide Forrest McCarthy told us he had learned a valuable lesson recently: Assume nothing – absolutely nothing. He learned that while leading a couple up a mountain in Grand Teton National Park. The range, he told them, is a 40-mile-long block fault into which glaciers, over the eons, had carved the mountain peaks above […]

Congregational minister Glover Wagner of Bozeman, Mont., recently reported on his drive home from Madison, Wis.: “I walked into an interstate cafe somewhere in North Dakota,” he wrote in the pamphlet he regularly distributes to his congregation. “Next to me on the stool sat a toothless man banging on the counter. I couldn’t tell what […]

As people like you and me swarm through the West’s national parks and forests, transmuting into that dreaded specimen, the summer tourist, agency staffers resort to trading quotes by e-mail to make the hot, hectic days pass more pleasantly. We are deliciously quotable because we are uninformed, stubborn, and we lie a lot. Darryl Stone, […]

At least once a day, High Country News is mistaken for the local High Country Shopper. In the Shopper you can find goats, chain-link fence, slightly used wedding dresses and the like for bargain prices. Depending on your blood sugar level, the headlines for ads in the Shopper can seem anything from commonplace to hallucinatory […]

The West has no shortage of strange juxtapositions: Gold prospectors and mountain bikers, Utah’s tabernacle and Nevada’s casinos, Denver International Airport and airplanes. But a new pair of strange bedfellows has recently sprung up: The Forest Service and Wal-Mart. The federal agency and the retail behemoth are going to spend the summer jointly promoting environmental […]

Ah, spring. Tender new buds of May. Raging rivers. Baseball. Senior prom. And, in at least one Western county, an explosion in teen pregnancies. “Going to the prom does not mean that you have to have sex,” Terrie Guthrie of Campbell County, Wyoming’s Planned Approach to Community Health coalition, pointed out to the Associated Press. […]

It’s not unusual to find strange items along road shoulders, but David Shiffler’s discovery along a New Mexico road last October deserves special mention. While taking a pee break, the 3-year-old toddler decided to do a little excavation with his yellow Tonka backhoe. According to The Denver Post, he came back to the car with […]

A new logic is unfolding in Montana: If too many quality-of-lifers find your state attractive, get really, really unattractive. The much-publicized stakeout of the Freemen and the arrest of alleged Unabomber Ted Kaczynski have helped Montana step off its pedestal as the compulsory destination for those Americans who can lay claim to a laptop computer, […]

In North Dakota, when they say extension agents have contacts in high places, they aren’t talking about the halls of North Dakota State University. They’re talking about heaven. Flood-prone Devils Lake, N.D., has inundated thousands of acres in recent years. When an uncharacteristically warm spell caused an anxiety outbreak among local residents last month, extension […]