Heard Around the West

Quick, cover your eyes, that statue is naked! To avoid offending the sensibilities of some 2,500 parents and their home- schooled children last year, the Convention Center of Sacramento, Calif., agreed to dress its 7-foot-tall statue of Poseidon, Greek god of the sea. Usually, the replica of an ancient work attracts no attention; it has […]

Firefighters in the West battle extreme heat, unpredictable winds that can send wildfire racing up draws and endless hours on a fire line, but fish falling from the sky? It happened in Libby, Mont., reports Kevin Cardwell, who says the event will enter Forest Service firefighting lore. The incident occurred Aug. 17 as Todd Murray […]

How do we resemble our fellow Westerners – the black bears? Let me count some of the ways. We like to share dessert. Near Ketchum, Idaho, a 225-pounder broke into a home, opened the freezer and pulled out half a gallon of rocky road ice cream, reports the Idaho Express. When the home’s residents saw […]

One hundred and ninety million years ago, give or take a few millennia, a meat-eating dinosaur walked to an oasis in a place now close to Vernal, Utah, and bent down for a drink. The 12-foot-tall beast was heavy, and its clawed, three-toed feet sank deeply into what is now wonderfully preserved sandstone rock. Scores […]

Oh, Smokey Bear, what have they done to you now? Smokey has a new day job. If you visit the lobby of the Forest Service’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., you can see the agency’s famous spokesbear, looking, perhaps, like one of the bureaucrats upstairs. The plump bear lounges at a rolltop desk, his feet crossed […]

Washington, D.C., satirist Mark Russell came to Cody, Wyo., for a fund raiser recently and found so much to poke fun at, he had 700 people in tears from laughing so hard, says Buzzy Hassrick in the Cody Enterprise. All of his material, Russell swore, came from reading the weekly Enterprise, an effort that took […]

With fast-growing lawns in the West sucking down immense amounts of water, Andrew McKean of Helena, Mont., passes on two apropos comments. The first is from University of Utah political scientist Daniel McCool: “Utah doesn’t have a water problem; Utah has a Kentucky bluegrass problem.” The second comes from the side of a bus spotted […]

Redi Kilowatt has seen the light – and it’s a green one. Once the hyper-kinetic spokesbolt for the electric utility industry, Redi recently preached to the Los Angeles Times. Though still flashing a happy-face grin, these days Redi is decidedly cranky. The power mascot says he was forced to come out of retirement at age […]

James Watt is positively basking in nostalgia these days. For those who don’t recall his bumpy years in Washington, D.C., Watt was the former Interior Department secretary under President Reagan, who pushed for energetic energy development on all public lands. When The Denver Post caught up with Watt recently, he was delighted to talk about […]

Our hearts go out to that beloved icon of the Forest Service, Smokey Bear. Anxiously, perhaps, the big bear awaits his new makeover. Sure, he’ll still be pot-bellied, furry and sport a forest ranger hat. But it’s a safe bet he will no longer deliver the message: “Only you can prevent forest fires.” The spokesbear […]

Somewhat of a ham when it comes to boosting Idaho’s agriculture or timber industry, Idaho Sen. Larry Craig has obligingly posed for photos standing next to a large person peering out from a bulging potato costume. But his Web site, www.senate.gov/~craig/frontpage.htm, recently featured the beaming Republican senator showing off his perky six-month-old West Highland terrier. […]

“WOW! Did I miss something?” asks Patrice Mason in her letter to the Moab, Utah, Times-Independent. Then she jumped into the fray: “I have a vagina. Half of the people in Moab have vaginas. And let us not forget that each and every one of us passed through one on the way into the world. […]

How low-flow can you go? In Redmond, Wash., the developer of a “Green Built” resort community touts its toilets as so advanced, they adapt to individual behavior, reports the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The Australian-made Caroma toilets require their users to decide how much water to flush with: one button for No. 1 and another for No. […]

Boing, boing, boing … Ridgway, Colo., sculptor Clifton Barr looked up from work in his metal and wood studio and saw a large, antlered deer “jumping like a bucking horse” in the neighbor’s yard, reports the Ouray County Plaindealer. Barr did a double take and took off his glasses just to make sure, but when […]

As far as anyone knows, the dead explorer William Clark did not use a ouija board, or e-mail, or teleport a petition to the White House in the final flurry of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Still, after a couple of centuries, Clark found the president receptive, as did guide Sacajawea and slave York, the first black […]

When the mighty stumble, satirists have a field day. California, the sixth-largest economy in the world, became an easy target once its halfway deregulation of electricity triggered billion-dollar deficits.A commentator on the Web site F–kedCom- pany.Com chortled, “All this whining and complaining that there’s no juice to run the Jacuzzis and there’s no way to […]

California’s rolling blackouts have marooned people in elevators and left hundreds of cows bellowing for their milking machines. Yet high prices and scarce supply won’t affect everyone in the state: not, for instance, residents of the 1970s-era “Eco-House” in Arcata, north of San Francisco. For 21 years, three students at a time from Humboldt State […]

“One of the reasons environmental protection is so hard is that it is so embarrassing,” says Oliver Houck, a law professor at Tulane Law School in Louisiana. It’s one thing to say you got ticketed for speeding, but another to confess “that you are using the Boise River as a sewer,” which explains why the […]

Cattle have always enjoyed right of way in the West. If the road is suddenly filled with mooing and manuring animals, it’s up to a motorist to slow down and enjoy the passing herd. If you’re unlucky enough to crest a hill and crash into a 2,000-pound cow, the animal is legally innocent; it’s the […]