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Hikers snoozes way into record books One individual has climbed all of them at least 14 times over. Another, Lou Dawson, a mountaineer from Carbondale, some years ago became the first to ski from the summits of all 53 peaks. Bart Miller climbed them all without use of motorized vehicles to shuttle among them, a tall endeavor, given their broad geographic dispersment. And then there are the speed hikers, constantly whittling down the amount of time it takes to climb all of them. Now comes a new feat: the first person to sleep on top of them all. The Vail Daily reports that Jon Kedrowski, who grew up in the Eagle Valley, accomplished the feat in September. Sleeping atop a mountain does have risks, given that lightning tends to strike the highest object in any given locale. Kedrowski had at least one close call. Sensing an imminent strike, he once fled his tent. “I could tell it was going to hit, so I jumped off the summit block to the side. I could feel the heat on my back when it struck,” Kedrowski told the Daily. He said the poles were fried and even the fabric was vaporized. Kedrowski, who teaches geography at Central Washington University, plans a photo book, which should be out next summer. In a recent 28-person study, Dr. Robert Roach, director of the research center, found that a blood test “almost perfectly predicts who gets sick and who doesn’t.” The Summit Daily News reports that additional research was conducted last week, when 25 volunteers from Texas flew from Dallas to Denver, jumped on a bus to Summit County, and then immediately ran 2 miles as fast as they could at an elevation of 9,300 feet. They had also run 2 miles in Dallas. Roach is measuring oxygen level and keeping track of those who show symptoms of altitude sickness. At the end, students will give blood samples, reports the Daily News. Researchers then try to identify genes that predict who does well at altitude, and who doesn’t. This is the fourth of six research groups in Roach’s effort to isolate genes that predict performance in thin air. “If we can predict mountains sickness from a low-altitude blood test, that would change the world,” he said. The research is funded by a $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense. The government wants to find ways to swiftly overcome acute mountain sickness, which often strikes those serving in Afghanistan. “Not as a mayor, but as a mom, please be safer, please obey lights and signs, and get a light,” said Mayor Karen Sorenson. Mark Carroll, a skateboarder of 27 years, told the council that many residents employed by bars and nightclubs in Banff use skateboards as their primary mode of transport to and from work, often finishing a shift around 2 a.m. “They choose an environmentally friendly mode of transport, which doesn’t require fuel or a parking space, yet they are told they can’t skateboard home,” he said. “Skateboarding deserves respect as a viable form of healthy, green transportation.” The Rocky Mountain Outlook reports that councilors tinkered with mandating lights, but deferred that discussion to a broader one about lighting requirements for all nonmotorized vehicles. Occupy Wall Street hits the mountains A rally last weekend in Aspen drew 10 people. Across the Sawatch Range, a similar small gathering occurred in Salida. “I was laid off a year ago, and I’m a single father with a 4-year-old child struggling to make ends meet,” Jeffrey “Mo” Shacklett told the Mountain Mail. “Our point is that 99 percent of the people who do the work are up in arms that 1 percent of the people make the most money and make the decisions in this country, and they are not giving jobs to people,” Shacklett said. Taking stock of the protests, Crested Butte News editor Mark Reaman finds a trickle-down effect from the avarice of money managers that is now making life more difficult in his ski town. “Most reasonable people would agree that Wall Street suits had a hand in essentially wrecking the economy three years ago,” he writes, before citing a litany of abuses. “How many people have been held accountable? None. Not one. But the taxpayers bailed ‘them’ out, and now a lot of those taxpayers can’t find a job. The bailout was touted in part with the hope and intent of seeing some cash flow back into the general economy to fuel some job growth. Instead, Wall Street types paid themselves rather large bonuses, bought back their own stock and now are holding onto large amounts of cash instead of reinvesting it,” he charges. He adds: “If people can’t afford to come here on a vacation, we all get hurt. Maybe these occupiers of Wall Street are on to something ... Good on ’em.” Aspen had set out some months ago to step in concert with two other towns in the Roaring Fork Valley, requiring that grocers levy a fee on both plastic and paper. That’s the route now being taken by Basalt. Along the way, however, several Aspen council members decided that if curbing use of plastic bags was their intent, an outright ban would be more forward, explains The Aspen Times. Another local municipality, Carbondale, has yet to take formal action. Wildlife managers in Parks Canada say the bear had a hand in his own demise. This summer, he chased cyclists, charged a wildlife officer armed with a shotgun, and even held a grain train hostage – although how that’s done isn’t exactly clear. Managers told the Rocky Mountain Outlook they devoted hundred of hours, using aversive conditioning to try to keep him out of trouble and, with the help of a radio collar, were able to track his whereabouts constantly. “He truly believed he was the big bear and he could do anything he wanted to,” said Hal Morrison, a human-wildlife conflict specialist in the Canadian Rockies. Morrison said that the availability of grain along the Canadian Pacific railway had conditioned him to people, yielding a more aggressive stance. “Part of it is also his personality, and he was a 6-year-old trying to test everything." But a local conservationist points the finger at Parks Canada. “The bottom line from decades of research is that as you increase human activity, from hiking to industrial development, you negatively impact grizzly bears,” said Jeff Gailus, author of The Grizzly Manifesto. “Like Frankenstein, bear No. 8 was something we created. He became habituated because he had to live among so many people, and he became food-conditioned because of sloppy campers and residents and grain on the railway tracks.” Yellowstone National Park, he added, does it much better, by closing off a significant portion of the park, while still allowing access to large parts. The guide said he was devastated by the killing of the bear.” I understand why, but I also know that he was just being a bear. I’m sad,” said Barry Blanchard. The consortium has pooled money since the drought of 2002, under the general grounds of “I don’t know if it works, but I’m afraid to gamble that it doesn’t,” as one rancher said several years ago. The Utah-based cloud-seeding operator estimates that seeding augments snowpacks by 10 to 20 percent, yielding water at a cost of between 83 cents and $1.25 per acre-feet – extremely cheap, by most reckonings. Does cloud-seeding work? The best evidence that it does work comes from experiments conducted in the Breckenridge-Vail area in the late 1960s, followed by experiments at Steamboat springs in the 1970s. Now, courtesy of the Wyoming Legislature, a more definitive study is being conducted in the Snowy Range southwest of Laramie. No results have been announced yet. While cloud-seeding has been used extensively in California and Utah since the 1970s, the only persistent cloud-seeding in Colorado has been at Vail, which began after the drought of 1977. Other seeding programs have picked up, but then support drops off as droughts become more distant memories. |