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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

“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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

“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 […]