Grenades still flying in wolf battle
JACKSON, Wyo. – Wolves in Jackson Hole last week were doing what wolves do best: chasing bighorn sheep, pronghorn and elk.
In other words, wolves are doing well on this, the 20th anniversary of their reintroduction into the Northern Rockies.
The reintroductions began in January 1995 when 14 wolves from Canada were released in Yellowstone National Park’s Lamar Valley. They were supplemented by later releases in Yellowstone and central Idaho.
From those first few dozen, the population grew to 1,749 in 2011, although the total has now fallen back to 1,592, reports Jackson Hole News&Guide’s Mike Koshmrl.
Koshmrl talked with Ed Bangs, now retired, who oversaw the wolf reintroduction for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He described them as big, bold, adaptable and resilient.
“Once you turned them loose in really good habitat, they did really, really well,” Bangs said. “It’s not like we were really smart.”
The 1995 releases came with great controversy. Renee Askins, director of the Wolf Fund, an advocacy group, said that even after the federal government put out a plan for “nonessential experimental populations” in Yellowstone and Idaho, prospects looked grim.
“Western agriculture had been in control of the politics of the West for so long that no one thought there was a chance in hell it would ever fly,” said Askins.
Inch by inch by inch, however, it did fly. “Both politically and logistically, it was about changing the culture. It was about changing the national public in a way that empowered them to want to achieve something,” she said.
Bangs thinks the controversy has generally died down. “I think the average person is kind of over it,” he said.
But extremists on both ends have kept the dispute noisy. “It takes two to maintain a dysfunctional relationship,” Bangs told the News&Guide. “You’ve got the wolf lovers and wolf haters still lobbing grenades.”
Grizzly cubs rarely survive their youth
BANFF, Alberta – Last spring, two sow grizzlies emerged from hibernation in Banff National Park, one of them from a den that had forced Lake Louise to close a portion of the ski mountain.
The two sows each had two sets of cubs. None of the cubs survived. All are believed to have been killed by male grizzlies.
Wildlife experts tell the Rocky Mountain Outlook that the numbers illustrate just how hard it is for bears to survive to breeding age.
“There’s a reason they stay with their mothers for three or four years,” said Mike Gibeau, a grizzly bear expert. “It’s too much to hope for that routinely cubs of the year will survive. All odds are stacked against them, though some pull it off. The end game here is to survive until breeding age, and that’s six years out.”
If older male grizzlies don’t get the cubs, trains and cars do. Several grizzlies were killed by each in Banff during recent years.
Newest avi tool impressive, but limited
WHISTLER, B.C. – Can technology slash the number of avalanche deaths occurring in the backcountry? There’s always hope, and the newest device is impressive.
The AvaTech SP1, developed by three students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, uses sensing technology to measure snow hardness. By plunging a probe into the snow, the penetrometer measures the varying hardness of each layer and instantly draws a graphical snow profile on its LCD screen.
This compares with the traditional laborious method of digging a snow pit and measuring the hardness of layers by hand.
Sam Whittlemore, one of the students, tells Pique Newsmagazine that the SP1 allows a guide to take dozens of readings a day. “We’re excited about it because it’s an objective measurement and it lets you gather a lot more data very quickly,” he said.
It is, however, far from the “second coming” for avalanche safety, he said. It’s expensive, at $2,249, and requires expertise. And he notes that it only measures hardness, not stability.
Karl Klassen, the public avalanche warning service manager for Avalanche Canada, is skeptical. “There’s a saying that data is not information, information doesn’t lead to knowledge, and knowledge doesn’t necessarily lead to wisdom,” he said.
“It creates an incredible amount of data very easily, but more data isn’t always the solution to the problem. It’s not like a snow profile, where someone digs a profile, looks at the layers, tests the bonds between those layers, and determines their characteristics. It’s just telling you that the layers exist.”
Too, there’s the matter of remembering what you already know.
“So often, we get caught up in the moment. You see that untracked powder slope. You want to make those turns so bad that you can almost go into this tunnel vision,” said Mike Douglas, who made the documentary “Snowman.”
“It’s one of the toughest things I think we face as humans. We don’t want to be the one who brings the group down. There’s a lot of that peer pressure or tendency to defer judgment to the ‘wisest’ person in the group.”
Robert Craig’s long and interesting life
KEYSTONE – From war to high mountains to peaceful negotiation, what a life Bob Craig had.
Craig, who died recently at 90, had grown up partly in Seattle and was on the first naval ship to arrive in Nagasaki after the atomic bomb was dropped. From 1953-65, he was the first executive director and chief operating officer of the Aspen Institute. And while in Aspen, he was co-founder of the Aspen Center for Physics.
He owned and operated a ranch near Aspen and then, after the Keystone ski area opened, he moved to Summit County to found the Keystone Center, in 1975.
And along the way he climbed mountains. He led the first attempted American ascent of K2 in 1953 and his book, Storm and Sorrow, about a harrowing expedition in the Pamir Mountains of Asia, remains a staple of mountaineering literature. He also spent a decade in the industrial design industry.
At the Keystone Center, the goal was to address complex environmental and public policy issues by applying the discipline of science and bringing all relevant stakeholders to the table.
Among the issues, the Keystone Center addressed nuclear waste, biotechnology, AIDS research and a myriad of natural resource topics.
The Summit Daily News talked with mountaineer Tom Hornbein, one of the first Americans on Everest. Now living in Estes Park, Hornbein said that Craig was “a consummate mountaineer. He was a caring catalyst with a patient ear and an uncanny ability to guide you without your ever knowing you were being steered.”
What is justice? 3 cases from Aspen
CARBONDALE – What is justice? Two highway deaths in the Roaring Fork Valley last year call up that question.
The Aspen Daily News says in the first case, an 89-year-old man strayed into ongoing traffic and killed a 53-year-old man on a motorcycle. He will not be charged, however, because the Colorado Mental Health Institute found the man not competent to understand the judicial proceedings. As such, the family of the victim cannot seek restitution, at least not through criminal proceedings.
In the second case, a 47-year-old woman drifted into oncoming traffic on the same highway and caused a collision that killed a 21-year-old woman, who parents seek restitution. They say that in preparing for a career in an engineering-related field their daughter stood to make at least $11.4 million during her lifetime.
Finally, there’s the case of a Carbondale woman charged with attempted murder. Prosecutors say the 33-year-old woman served her two daughters milkshakes laced with rat poison. She has been deemed competent to stand trial.
The woman also drank the milkshake. She told an investigator while still in the hospital that she poisoned her kids because she wanted them to die along with her, and that she would rather they be dead than live with their father in Mexico.
– Allen Best
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