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River festival stays afloat for 66 years

SALIDA – FIBArk, which calls itself America’s oldest and boldest whitewater festival, was held last weekend in the river town of Salida. The festival name consists of the acronym, “first in boating the Arkansas.”

It was launched in 1949 in a contest to see who among 23 entrants could boat the swollen Arkansas River from Salida through the frothy, sharp-edged Royal Gorge. Just two of them, both from Switzerland, completed the 50-mile journey.

Since then, much has changed. FIBArk has grown to include 10 different river events, including one to test the retrieving abilities of dogs. There are also land events, including a parade.

The river has changed, too. It has more water, courtesy of diversions from the Aspen area delivered via tunnels under the Continental Divide.

The bed of the river has also been altered. In 1966, a bulldozer pushed boulders around to create a more difficult slalom course. In 1988, more tinkering yielded a kayak playhole near downtown Salida. There is also a standing wave that, on Saturday afternoon, was used to much merriment by stand-up surfers and stand-up paddleboarders.

A railroad town, streets were predicated not on an east-west grid, but instead a perpendicular layout from the depot. The depot is gone now, and trains stopped running over the transcontinental route in 1997. Instead, like so many of the old mining towns of the Rockies, Salida is a place for Tevas, GoPro and Patagonia. You might be able to buy steel-toed work boots at the Wal-Mart, but don’t count on it. This is no longer a blue-collar town.

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Boaters want a wave on Columbia River

REVELSTOKE, Alberta – A group of whitewater enthusiasts hopes to build a wave park in the Columbia River as it passes through Revelstoke.

“Whether they’re stand-up surfers, stand-up paddleboarders, or whitewater kayakers, they all want the same thing,” said Brendan Ginter, president of the Revelstoke Community Wave Park Society. “They all want a big wave they can surf on that’s predictable, and they don’t have to go in the ocean to do so.”

The Revelstoke Times Review explains that the enthusiasts hope to modify the river with rocks, concrete or other hard materials to create a standing wave.

“There are hundreds of these things throughout the world,” said Ginter. “People started making modifications to rivers, or doing man-made rivers for kayaking purposes, in the ‘60s, mostly for slalom kayaking.”

He sees the need for three permits and $500,000 to get the job done. He hopes to secure both within a year.

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Mountain tornadoes rare but not unique

LAKE GEORGE – In early June, a small but unusual tornado spun across Colorado’s South Park, damaging several homes, uprooting trees, and knocking out power lines near the community of Lake George.

A tornado of that magnitude would barely make the news in Oklahoma or Alabama, but tornadoes in mountains are quite rare. The highest ever recorded in the United States was at 12,000 feet in Sequoia National Forest in California. That was in 2004. The second highest was at an elevation of 11,900 feet on Mount Evans, southwest of Denver in 2012.

The most destructive tornado at a higher elevation shredded a 24-mile path through Yellowstone National Park and the Teton Wilderness Area in 1987. In some places, the swath was a mile and a half.

This was in mid-summer, and you’d think somebody would have been camped out there. But no injuries were reported. Most of the damaged forest burned the next year in the Yellowstone fires.

That Yellowstone tornado was assigned a rating of F4 on the Fujita scale, just one step below the very worst, such as killed 24 people near Oklahoma City last year.

Why aren’t tornadoes more common in the mountains? Writing on a website called US Tornadoes, meteorologist Kathryn Prociv explains that higher elevations typically have cooler, more stable air. Warm, humid “unstable” air is required to create the explosive thunderstorms in which tornadoes originate.

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Dead tree kills hiker in Yellowstone Park

WEST YELLOWSTONE, Mont. – A 36-year-old man from Taiwan was in the wrong place at the wrong time in Yellowstone National Park.

The Jackson Hole News&Guide explains that he left a trail and was ascending a slope in an effort to get a better view of Grand Prismatic Spring, a colorful hot spring north of Old Faithful, when a lodgepole pine fell and hit him in the head. He was killed.

The pine itself had died in the great fire of 1988. Park Service officials said it was windy when the tree fell.

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Early birds don’t always get worms

JACKSON, Wyo. – Our culture is rich with aphorisms about the virtues of early rising. But a three-year study of 9,000 students, including those in Jackson Hole High School, found several benefits for starting classes later.

A University of Minnesota researcher found students who were required to start classes later got more sleep, had fewer auto crashes and attained higher grades.

The study conducted by Kyla Wahlstrom showed that the number of car crashes involving drivers between ages of 16 and 18 dropped by more than 70 percent over the course of two years. The study also showed that GPAs increased for all grade levels.

Jackson Hole High School had started classes at 7:35 a.m., but school trustees shifted the starting time to 8:55 a.m.

Students reported getting an average 8.2 hours of sleep on school nights with a later start as opposed to 7.5 hours before the change, reports the Jackson Hole News&Guide.

They slept less on weekends, however.

The research also included two schools in Boulder and several more in Minnesota.

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Throwing a tender artist into battle

HAILEY, Idaho – Hailey, as well as other towns in Idaho’s Wood River Valley, usually enjoys getting press attention. This is, after all, the resort region better known to the world as Sun Valley.

But the story of Bowe Bergdahl, the local boy who enlisted in the U.S. Army and ended up in trouble in Afghanistan, has brought the world’s press to get a better sense of the individual. Many descended on a coffee shop where Bergdahl had worked before enlisting.

“Zaney’s Café on River Street in Hailey provided a makeshift television studio for more than a week as ABC, CBS, CNN, Al Jazeera America, and other news networks lined up to interview locals in order to patch together an impression of the town where Bergdahl grew up,” reports the Idaho Mountain Express.

But Sue Martin, the owner of the coffee shop, closed the doors after getting telephone threats and unwelcome visitors. She then called Larry Schoen, the chair of the local county commissioners.

He told the reporters it was time to back off and let locals get back to business as usual.

The coffee shop has reopened now, and Martin tells the Express she’ll do interviews again – but not with Fox News. The network’s O’Reilly Factor featured interviews with Hailey residents in which the question was asked whether Bergdahl and his father, Bob, had become Taliban sympathizers. The elder Bergdahl let his whiskers flow, in the style of his son and also in the style of many followers of Islam.

The Washington Post, however, delivered perhaps the most interesting story. The newspaper was given access to the soldier’s journal that showed him as a “complicated individual with a fragile psyche and a deep concern about his place in the world,” in the words of the newspaper.

Kim Harrison, a close friend of Bergdahl’s, had shared the journal. They met when Bergdahl began taking ballet and fencing lessons at an arts center she ran in Ketchum, Idaho, near his hometown of Hailey.

– Allen Best For more, go to www.mountaintownnews.net.