Heard Around the West

Forget gambling casinos and the songs of Wayne Newton; these days the state of Nevada is selling stupid tricks on public lands. Print ads in Outside, National Geographic Adventure and other publications describe Nevada “as a primal playground with more … tear-yourself-to-shreds terrain than any other place in this great nation.” The ads go on […]

Is there no compassion in Aspen? Maybe not much for Kenneth Lay, former honcho of the bankrupt corporation Enron. The good drinkers at the Woody Creek Tavern recently placed a contribution bowl on the bar to raise money for Lay, a quasi-local and occasional neighbor. Lay owns several properties in Aspen as well as a […]

What does the well-dressed park ranger wear to work at Yellowstone National Park? A gas mask, of course, if the work station is at the park’s western gate. Especially on dead-calm winter days, a pall of pollution awaits staffers as they deal with up to 1,200 snowmobilers idling their gaseous engines. The Clinton administration tried […]

It’s good to be queen – the food is better – but then you get stale and lay fewer eggs, and pretty soon you’re out of a job. Buying new queens is what honeybee breeders face every year, reports Capital Press, and “requeening” has usually been no big deal. Queens can easily be shipped from […]

Can drinking milk be considered cool? Former Idaho Dairy Princess Colleen Underwood thought so, if she could just copy some tricks from Coca-Cola and Pepsi. So during her reign as cow-milk royalty two years ago, Underwood leased a vending machine, put photos of the Dixie Chicks guzzling milk on the front, then filled it with […]

He had nothing but the best intentions, says a Stanford University surgeon. Then the publicity got out of hand. So Dr. Simon Stertzer reluctantly sold the three Nevada strip clubs he’d bought to finance his medical research. Stertzer tried to explain to the North Las Vegas City Council that owning the all-nude Palomino as well […]

Reading a book in these tense times can get you kicked off an airplane – not just once but twice. It happened in Philadelphia to 22-year-old Neil Godfrey. The book was Hayduke Lives! by Edward Abbey, and Godfrey was carrying it when he tried to board a plane to Phoenix. Noticing a security guard staring […]

Where’s Humpty Dumpty when we need him? The egg on the other side of the looking-glass told Alice that “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” The word in question these days is “organic,” whose definition counts a lot in the booming billion-dollar […]

Living with wildlife in the West can be a lot like living with a spouse – annoying. Just when you think you’ve figured out how to make the relationship hum, new quirks appear. And since black bears and coyotes can’t talk about it, we have to be canny enough to figure out what’s going wrong […]

Quick, cover your eyes, that statue is naked! To avoid offending the sensibilities of some 2,500 parents and their home- schooled children last year, the Convention Center of Sacramento, Calif., agreed to dress its 7-foot-tall statue of Poseidon, Greek god of the sea. Usually, the replica of an ancient work attracts no attention; it has […]

Firefighters in the West battle extreme heat, unpredictable winds that can send wildfire racing up draws and endless hours on a fire line, but fish falling from the sky? It happened in Libby, Mont., reports Kevin Cardwell, who says the event will enter Forest Service firefighting lore. The incident occurred Aug. 17 as Todd Murray […]

How do we resemble our fellow Westerners – the black bears? Let me count some of the ways. We like to share dessert. Near Ketchum, Idaho, a 225-pounder broke into a home, opened the freezer and pulled out half a gallon of rocky road ice cream, reports the Idaho Express. When the home’s residents saw […]

One hundred and ninety million years ago, give or take a few millennia, a meat-eating dinosaur walked to an oasis in a place now close to Vernal, Utah, and bent down for a drink. The 12-foot-tall beast was heavy, and its clawed, three-toed feet sank deeply into what is now wonderfully preserved sandstone rock. Scores […]

Oh, Smokey Bear, what have they done to you now? Smokey has a new day job. If you visit the lobby of the Forest Service’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., you can see the agency’s famous spokesbear, looking, perhaps, like one of the bureaucrats upstairs. The plump bear lounges at a rolltop desk, his feet crossed […]

Washington, D.C., satirist Mark Russell came to Cody, Wyo., for a fund raiser recently and found so much to poke fun at, he had 700 people in tears from laughing so hard, says Buzzy Hassrick in the Cody Enterprise. All of his material, Russell swore, came from reading the weekly Enterprise, an effort that took […]

With fast-growing lawns in the West sucking down immense amounts of water, Andrew McKean of Helena, Mont., passes on two apropos comments. The first is from University of Utah political scientist Daniel McCool: “Utah doesn’t have a water problem; Utah has a Kentucky bluegrass problem.” The second comes from the side of a bus spotted […]

Redi Kilowatt has seen the light – and it’s a green one. Once the hyper-kinetic spokesbolt for the electric utility industry, Redi recently preached to the Los Angeles Times. Though still flashing a happy-face grin, these days Redi is decidedly cranky. The power mascot says he was forced to come out of retirement at age […]

James Watt is positively basking in nostalgia these days. For those who don’t recall his bumpy years in Washington, D.C., Watt was the former Interior Department secretary under President Reagan, who pushed for energetic energy development on all public lands. When The Denver Post caught up with Watt recently, he was delighted to talk about […]

Our hearts go out to that beloved icon of the Forest Service, Smokey Bear. Anxiously, perhaps, the big bear awaits his new makeover. Sure, he’ll still be pot-bellied, furry and sport a forest ranger hat. But it’s a safe bet he will no longer deliver the message: “Only you can prevent forest fires.” The spokesbear […]