Hungry bears breaking into cars and cabins at Yosemite National Park in California are racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. Bears have learned it’s easy to get into the driver’s seat if they “place their claws on top of car doors and peel them off,” reports AP. Relocating the black bears hasn’t […]
Heard Around the West
Posted inJune 22, 1998: Western water: Why it's dirty and in short supply
Heard around the West
Maybe it had to happen. The “green glow” emanating from cool corporations in the laid-back Northwest has faded, reports the Los Angeles Times, with just the merest hint of gloating. There’s gigantic Microsoft, targeted by the Justice Department for monopolizing computer software, and Starbucks, assailed for cruelty to songbirds for removing shade trees from coffee […]
Posted inJune 8, 1998: Don't fence me in
Heard Around the West
Old myths die hard, especially when perpetrated by Hollywood. On the Flathead Reservation in western Montana, tourists regularly want to know: “Where are the flat heads?” reports the Great Falls Tribune. And some people visiting the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning, Mont., expect Native Americans to live in tepees and to wear feathered […]
Posted inMay 25, 1998: Tackling tamarisk
Heard around the West
Many federal bureaucrats like hiding behind a desk. Jim Furnish is admittedly gregarious. He also loves the Oregon coast and hopes eight citizens from around the United States will want to join him for an expense-paid weekend of brainstorming while taking hikes along the cliffs. Furnish makes no bones about needing help. Supervisor of the […]
Posted inMay 11, 1998: The working West: grassroots groups and their newsletters
Heard around the West
Maybe Denver International Airport was built to test the tempers of travelers. Flighty state-of-the-art baggage system? No backup. Access road blocked by snowdrifts? No backup. A busted concourse train? No backup – so 30,000 passengers were stalled and enraged Sunday, April 26, some of them trapped for hours in darkened train tunnels without ventilation or […]
Posted inApril 27, 1998: The old West is going under
Heard around the West
Bears are so smart. In Mammoth Lakes, Calif., nestled in the Sierra Nevada mountains, some 30 black bears have chosen to become New Westerners by denning underneath hotels, restaurants and homes. They’ve become so used to gourmet food, snug basements and the amenity of a no-hunting ordinance that the animals are now familiar figures in […]
Posted inApril 13, 1998: Oil clashes with elk in the Book Cliffs
Heard Around the West
During the day, Polly Letofsky, 35, takes reservations at a ski lodge in Vail, Colo., but several nights a week she turns into Fitness Woman, snowshoeing up Vail Mountain as she trains for her dream of walking around the world. She figures that ambitious jaunt, totaling 7,000 miles across four continents, will require three years […]
Posted inMarch 30, 1998: A bare-knuckled trio goes after the Forest Service
Heard around the West
There’s hot news from Anchorage, Alaska, and many hikers are going to recoil in horror when they hear it. The red pepper spray that’s supposed to ward off black bears may do just the opposite – attract them. Evidence so far is anecdotal, but U.S. Geological Survey researcher Tom Smith (contact him on the Internet […]
Posted inMarch 16, 1998: Olympic onslaught: Salt Lake City braces for the winter games
Heard around the West
Drenching rain, slip-sliding houses on the edge of eroding cliffs, not a glimpse of sun for weeks – blame the rotten weather on Al Nino. Drunks and the unruly frustrated do. But Nino, a retired Navy man in the Southern California county of San Luis Obispo, says he’s getting a little tired of complaining phone […]
Posted inMarch 2, 1998: Wild horses: Do they belong in the West?
Heard around the West
Apre-ski style in Aspen, Colo., can lurch widely, from rhinestone cowboys and “meppies” – mountain preppies – to gold-toned glitterati and “grunge puppies,” reports the Aspen Times, but what do (presumably) ordinary people on the street really find to be fashion faux pas? Some examples: “Those goofy, furry little boots. What’s up with that?” “Plastic […]
Posted inFebruary 16, 1998: Private rights vs. public lands
Heard around the West
Why did a logging company “rape 30,000 acres of virgin forest?” A satirical magazine on the Internet, The Onion, says the answer can be found in the provocative behavior of the trees themselves: “If you’re going to tease, openly flaunting your abundant natural resources, don’t be surprised by the consequences. “It’s only natural for any […]
Posted inFebruary 2, 1998: Looking at dams in a new way
Heard around the West
Spam, that quivery quasi-meat, needs a support group. In a list of 1997 bests and worsts in the food world recently, the Arizona Republic zeroed in on the Jell-O-like pink substance as top contender for “worst recipe.” The winning (or losing) recipe came from Spam’s national recipe contest, which “always provides a good candidate,” according […]
Posted inJanuary 19, 1998: After the gold rush
Heard Around the West
Ski-hats off to 33-year-old Karen Hartley, the stranded Utah skier who kept warm for 18 hours on Christmas Eve by dancing in the dark and singing “old disco songs, show tunes, popular and current stuff, Christmas tunes and even camp songs,” reports AP. She never panicked; she kept her head, and when a helicopter arrived […]
Posted inDecember 22, 1997: Gold Rush: Mining seeks to tighten its grip on the 'last, best place'
Heard around the West
The driver was a Romanian-born mathematician zooming 96 miles per hour through Montana – a state famous for its disdain of speed limits – and he was royally ticked off when Highway Patrol Officer Silkitwa Rivera pulled him over. Constantin Pirvulescu ranted and screamed, the officer recalled, and kept insisting, “There is no limit. You […]
Posted inDecember 8, 1997: Mono Lake: Victory over Los Angeles turns into local controversy
Heard around the West
What, me worry? That’s the question Alfred E. Neuman has been asking ever since his creation in 1950 by Al Feldstein, a Brooklynite who recently moved to the Paradise Valley, near Livingston, Mont. Sacred cows from political pundits to the pontiff were all fodder for Feldstein’s Mad Magazine, which encouraged kids to question authority and […]
Posted inNovember 24, 1997: Restoring a refuge: Cows depart, but can antelope recover?
Heard around the West
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, […]
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 […]