High Country News recently helped host Forest Service whistleblower and sustainability advocate Gloria Flora, who spoke at the Paonia Town Hall on Aug. 26 during a tour through the West. Flora is best known for banning oil and gas leasing on Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front in 1997, when she was a forest supervisor (HCN, 10/13/97: Forest Service acts to preserve 'the Front'). The next year, in Nevada, she enforced an unpopular Forest Service decision to close the Jarbidge Road (HCN, 11/22/99: Nevadans drive out forest supervisor). She has since resigned, and is now on a mission to help land managers and citizens alike understand that the West’s natural resources provide "a source of continuing wealth if we protect them."

VISITORS

Bozeman, Mont., reader Mary Vant Hull, her daughter, Noelle Hagan, who’s on the city council of nearby Montrose, and her granddaughter, Celia Hagan, dropped in. Celia is a student at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash.

Vicki Simarano of Durango, Colo., dropped in to tell us about her work with Wild PAC, an organization dedicated to electing wilderness-friendly politicians. Paul Bousquet, a Boulder, Colo.-based photographer, came by while shooting pictures of nearby wineries for Sunset magazine.

Subscribers Meg Ewald and Bryce Krueger of Las Cruces, N.M., toured the office. Bryce studies exotic species on the White Sands Missile Range, including an antelope that’s a long way from home: the African oryx.

One of our 17 Rhode Island subscribers, Josh Cott, stopped by for a visit. He’s completing an internship in the emergency department at nearby Montrose Memorial Hospital. A pair of hydrologists from Arvada, Colo., Mike and Barbara Galloway, brought us The Man Who Loved Wasps, a collection of essays written by Barbara’s father, Howard Ensign Evans.

Jordan Busch and Dawn Stender visited us from Portland, Ore. Jordan owns a Buffalo-style chicken wings restaurant called "Fire on the Mountain," where he distributes copies of HCN to customers. He left us jars of his spicy peanut sauce and his searingly hot "El Jefe" sauce.

And subscribers John and Barbara Kastner from Rochester, N.Y., left us a note on a Saturday: "We were here to say hello, but you decided to have a day off."

NOTES FROM READERS

From Spokane, Wash., John Douglas wrote, "Your recent item in ‘Heard Around the West’ about an eagle flying into someone’s home with a salmon reminds me of an incident a few years ago (HCN, 7/25/05: Heard around the West). Our family has a cabin on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. One day I was in the cabin when my wife outside yelled, "Hey, there’s an eagle in the top of the tree." I ran out the door, slamming it. This spooked the eagle, which then dropped an intact salmon, which it was holding in its talons, right on our doorstep. We had fish for dinner that night."