Fast asleep at 5
a.m., while illegally camped in a parking
lot in YellowstoneBillings Gazette. Yellowstone Park employee
Bob Lindstrom says Steamboat is the world’s highest geyser, more
than twice the size of Old Faithful and comparable to the 555-foot
Washington Monument. It sounded “like a jet airplane engine” as it
converted near-boiling water to steam, Lindstrom says. After five
hours, though, the geyser had played out, leaving boardwalks
covered in water. Steamboat’s first recorded blast in 1878 killed
trees and threw up boulders. It was quiet from 1911 to 1961, but
blew 90 times between 1961 and 1969, according to The Geysers of
Yellowstone, by T. Scott Bryan. Last year, when Steamboat Geyser
began occasionally to splash and steam, Yellowstone aficionados
hoped the “Holy Grail of geyser-gazing” was getting ready for a
re-release. Lindstrom, a Yellowstone employee for 25 years, says
the eruption this May was his first glimpse of Steamboat letting
loose.
Ever wonder
what beauty contest contestants do
backstage? Miss Wyoming USA, Rebecca Smith,
told the Jackson Hole News that rebellion
erupted at the Miss USA event last February. The University of
Wyoming junior says that toward the end of 18 days of pageant
preparation, participants had grown sick of a steady diet of
granola bars and chicken and were getting definitely edgy. So when
pageant part-owner Donald Trump was shown on stage making a
smooching motion toward a TV camera, “the women backstage
collectively squealed in distaste and threw food at the television
monitors,” Smith says. “We felt like members of a cult mental
hospital. We could not comb our hair without supervision.” Smith,
21, never took the hoopla seriously, wearing a four-year-old
bathing suit, for instance, and a recycled prom dress for
evening-gown duty. But the experience still ranked as an
accomplishment, she says, and her father got a kick out of wearing
her crown around the house for hours after she got home. Her hint
for pageant hopefuls: “Now, they want a real woman, not a Barbie
doll. In that sense I was lucky, because I didn’t have to work on
unlearning how to be a successful pageant
woman.”
Those
so-called killer bees keep making news; now,
they’re going urban. Associated Press reports that confronted with
unusually dry weather, the touchy Africanized honeybees are leaving
the Arizona desert for cities. In Tucson, seven men working on a
store roof were recently attacked by the flying bullies, and a
76-year-old man suffered more than 300 stings at his home.
Researchers say the bees create new hives every six weeks, compared
with about once a year for other bees, and they already outnumber
gentler honeybees in Arizona. Shades of a horror movie: Killer bees
can cover up to 300 miles a year.
A backcountry skier in Wyoming’s Grand Teton
National Park broke his ankle at the start
of a solo campout and was faced with a dilemma: He was high up in
snowy Death Canyon, five miles from the trailhead, and nobody
expected to see him for four days. So Vito Seskunas, 53, from
Baltimore, Md., began to hike out through the snow on his rear end,
his left foot held out in front of him. It was “contorted in a
gruesome way – a full 90 degrees from what it should be,” said the
man who discovered him three days later. He was just 400 feet from
the trailhead, reports the Jackson Hole News.
Seskunas was shivering and in shock, but joked to
rescuers that he hoped to get to his car and drink some Coke before
driving to the hospital. A park ranger said what seemed to save the
cross-country skier was his “bright and bubbly” personality: “It’s
been shown time and again the folks that have a positive attitude
can somehow keep it together mentally and push it physically.”
Is the Clinton
administration really against smoking? A
conservative Missouri Republican, Christopher Bond, says the
government makes an exception when it comes to Native Americans. He
points out that since 1997, the federal Department of Housing and
Urban Development has given $4.2 million to tribes in Nevada,
Oklahoma and elsewhere to build smoke shops. They sell cheaper
cigarettes. Studies have shown that Native Americans have the
highest smoking rate of all ethnic groups in the United States,
reports the Los Angeles Times. An amendment to
the budget that Bond has proposed would end smoke-shop subsidies.
But some Native American officials were upset by Bond’s move,
saying that it’s unfair to single out tribes when the federal
government also subsidizes tobacco on military bases. Native
American leaders say the real contradiction is the government
telling tribes to be self-sufficient but not letting them start
businesses.
In San
Francisco, 20 lizards have been turned loose
in a 122-year-old giant greenhouse in Golden Gate State Park. The
hope is that “nature will succeed where roach motels have failed,”
reports Associated Press. The targets of the 4- to 6-inch lizards,
called geckos, are Australian roaches. They probably stowed away on
plants brought to the Conservatory of Flowers 100 years ago. Since
then, the 2-inch roaches have feasted on rare plants, particularly
orchids, with not a natural enemy around to keep their increasing
numbers in check. No word on what will keep the geckos in
check.
Heard around the West invites
readers to get involved in the column. Send any tidbits that merit
sharing – small-town newspaper clips, personal anecdotes, relevant
bumper sticker slogans. The definition remains loose. Heard, HCN,
Box 1090, Paonia, CO 81428 or
betsym@hcn.org.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Heard around the West.
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