NEVADA “Forget the needle; it’s the haystack that Nevada sheriff’s deputies are looking for,” reports The Associated Press. Thieves driving a long-bed pickup have been swiping hay at night, targeting a ranch about 15 miles southeast of Elko, Nev. In the third and latest incident, some 2,000 pounds of hay disappeared from the ranch where […]
Heard Around the West
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Cultural exchange
OREGON Someday, there may be a Disney movie based on a black bear named Windfall who didn’t know she was a bear because she was brought up to be a princess, doted on by two loggers in the dense backwoods of Coos County, Ore. Writing in the Medford Mail Tribune, Mark Freeman says the father-son […]
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Is that a gun in your Speedo?
WYOMING When the city council of Cody, Wyo., met recently to update policies for the town’s recreation center, it did more than overhaul some rules for playing games. In response to a gun owner’s complaint, the council also voted unanimously to permit all firearms carried legally — whether concealed or carried openly on someone’s person, […]
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Llamas and coyotes and bears, oh my
THE WEST We’ve always relished the anecdote about the brand-new Wyoming congressman who made the mistake of bringing his border collie to Washington, D.C. Border collies originally hail from the English-Scottish borderlands, and they are super-smart and quintessentially alert: They live to round up animals, including ducks and people — virtually anything that moves if […]
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Cock-a-doodle-brouhaha
COLORADO Don’t even think of toting roosters along if you’re moving to Ridgway in western Colorado. The birds are unwanted, and not just because they tend to cock-a-doodle-doo at the crack of dawn. They’ve become the symbol of a town that’s no longer rural, relaxed and live and let-live. For proof, just ask resident Janet […]
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Tougher than most
WYOMING Surely she was exaggerating, but maybe not. Republican Cynthia Lummis, Wyoming’s lone congressional representative, insisted that she knew people in her state who would actually choose death over taxes — resolving to quit dialysis or other live-saving treatments — “in order to die so their estates won’t be taxed” if the Bush-era tax breaks […]
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States’ rights gone wrong
UTAH We hate to pick on the Beehive State, but sometimes Utah picks on itself. Take the $101 million in federal funds earmarked for the state to spend avoiding teacher layoffs — Utah’s share of a $10 billion package covering all 50 states. But was the Republican Legislature grateful for this windfall from Washington? Not […]
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Missing item
WYOMING Drivers along a section of Highway 22 near Jackson, Wyo., wondered why drug-sniffing dogs and squads of patrol officers, two or three abreast, were walking the road a few weeks ago. Then the story emerged: They were on the trail of a box of drugs. A dog handler from the sheriff’s department had placed […]
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Cheaters and cheatgrass
THE WEST Everybody hates cheatgrass, though it must be admitted that the fluttery plant with the prickly seeds succeeds on sagebrush lands like nobody’s business. A Eurasian invader, it pops up in the spring before native plants do, spreads like wildfire — and burns like wildfire, too. As Wyoming Wildlife magazine put it, cheatgrass “simply […]
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The color-shifting skink
COLORADO Thanks to Colorado Outdoors, the magazine of the state’s Department of Natural Resources, we have a new favorite wild animal — the color-shifting skink. It resembles a stocky snake with lizard-like legs. And like many lizards, it has the wonderful ability to discard and then regenerate its tail any time a predator pounces on […]
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Roll up your sleeves and get cranking
THE NATION Common Cause, the nation’s good-government nonprofit, celebrated its 40th anniversary recently at a party in Denver, helped mightily by the humor and smarts of Pat Schroeder. In 1972, Schroeder was the first Colorado woman to be elected to Congress, where she spent a dozen terms focusing on fiscal accountability from the military and […]
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That bites!
ARIZONA As foreclosures increase throughout the West, ex-homeowners slamming the door on the way out sometimes abandon cats, dogs and other pets, including exotic snakes. And then there are the native snakes that slither back to reclaim their turf once the humans are gone. The variety of poisonous and non-poisonous snakes co-existing with subdivisions can […]
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Fascinating conundrums
THE SOUTHWEST That wistful Iowa farm boy in the ads for a language-learning software called Rosetta Stone — “He was a hardworking farm boy. She was an Italian supermodel. He knew he would have just one chance to impress her” — now has an opportunity to learn Navajo, too, reports the Daily Times of Farmington, […]
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What to do with the dead?
MONTANA The funniest picture in Montana Magazine’s profile of coffin-maker Willy von Bracht shows him and an assistant putting the cover on a casket painted to look exactly like a giant box of Marlboro cigarettes. This was a “personal project” of von Bracht, whose lively sense of humor informs his business, Sweet Earth Caskets and […]
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Once I caught a fish thi-i-i-i-i-s big
UTAH There he was, an eight-point buck, stranded on a narrow ledge five feet above Lake Powell. What could two law enforcement officers — one from Utah, the other from the Glen Canyon National Monument — do? They didn’t want to tranquilize the mule deer, so after making it leap into the water, the two […]
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Love thy neighbor
ARIZONA You know times are tough in Phoenix when more than 15,000 people cram into McDonald’s restaurants to apply for one of 800 to 1,000 jobs, all of them part-time and most of them minimum wage. The Arizona Republic says the success of McDonald’s new McCafe line of smoothies and frappés has spurred the restaurant […]
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Fire and brimstone
COLORADO There’s no doubt that the college town of Boulder has grown all too familiar with fire, thanks in part to those young people — and there are some 30,000 undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Colorado — who have a developed a strange tradition: They ignite couches in front yards or in […]
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Tough job, but someone’s gotta do it
UTAH Baptizing stand-ins for dead people doesn’t seem like a hazardous activity, but Daniel Dastrup of Las Vegas recently sued The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for medical expenses after injuring his back performing about 200 baptisms on Aug. 25, 2007. Lowering volunteers into a pool all day apparently became arduous: “The then […]
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Finding treasure in the “Treasure State”
MONTANA Billings Gazette reporter Diane Cochran decided to personally test her state’s voter-initiated Medical Marijuana Act recently, timing exactly how long it took to get a doctor to recommend the use of pot. Eight minutes was the answer, courtesy of an Internet consultation, but according to the executive director of the pot-advocacy group, Montana Caregivers […]
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Milk and cookies
ARIZONA A McDonald’s restaurant in Phoenix learned a valuable lesson recently, but only after an assistant manager ordered a breastfeeding mother — and her 6-month-old baby — to leave. The lesson: Don’t mess with moms! As TV reporters flocked to the restaurant, dozens of nursing mothers converged inside it to protest what they called discrimination, […]