Dart 'em and Release 'em

Via Patrick Burns' Terrierman blog:

Biologist Heather Reich of the the Nevada Department of Wildlife is not afraid of grizzly bears in Montana or black bears in Nevada, but she's terrified of a "Tahoe-area animal rights activist" by the name of Carolyn Stark who lives in Incline Village and who has chased her down the freeway as she works trapping and moving bears in conflict with humans.

Ear-tagging, now that may be going too far.

Yes, "bear-human conflicts" are usually the humans' fault, but I have worked with many game wardens and biologists who genuinely love bears. They don't deserve such treatment.

Why I Would Not Man the Barricades for Cliven Bundy

The stand-off over Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy's refusal to pay public-lands grazing fees has energized a lot of people who are starting to think that the federal government is oppressive.

Maybe so. You can count on federal law-enforcement to be clumsy and oppressive, and idea of a "First Amendment Zone" is ludicrous. The entire country is a "First Amendment Zone."

But still. This is an ongoing story that the anti-federal zealots have just recently discovered, but I think they picked the wrong poster boy.

Consider the timeline. It goes back for decades.

In my opinion, here we have a patriarchal Mormon who thinks that God gave the land to him to abuse however he chooses. Range management? Heck no! Habitat protection? Heck no! Paying the Animal Unit Month fees? Heck no!

Besides, this particular anti-federal government narrative just won't get traction, as compared to, say, NSA spying on your emails. Two reasons:

1. It involves agriculture, and 97 percent of the people in this country feel no emotional connection to agriculture.

2. It involves Nevada. What is Nevada to most Americans? Las Vegas and Area 51? They probably do not even know that there are ranches in Nevada, aside from those non-agricultural establishments with "ranch" as part of their name.

The Bureau of Land Management should have removed his cattle long ago for non-payment, but they have been politically cowed (pun intended) by people like Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.). As a former BLM contractor, I have seen how sensitive to the political winds that agency can be.

UPDATE: "Sorting Fact from Fiction on Chinese Solar in Nevada." Or, "Look at the map, people."

Blog Stew at the Hot Springs

Bathing at Pagosa Springs, Colorado. See third link below.

•  I did not know it at the time, but I spent most of my childhood in the "state of Absoroka," one of twelve proposed states that never formally existed. "Jefferson," the one in northern California-southern Oregon, came close to formation in 1941 and still lives on in the hearts of some.

•  Despite campaigns against it, fashion designers are returning to fur. Some are conflicted:

Alice + Olivia designer Stacey Bendet, herself a vegan, wears fur and uses it in her collection. "It doesn't make sense," she once admitted. "Something about putting it inside me [sic] feels really barbaric. Something about wearing it just feels a little glamorous."

 • Peruse some photos taken 150 years ago in Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico,  and Utah.

Preparing for the SHOT Show

Call me un-American if you like, but I have never visited Las Vegas, Nevada — as opposed to Las Vegas, New Mexico, many times. This is true even though I worked in the "gaming" industry at one time as a slot-machine repairman—in Oregon. (Yes, legally, mostly.)

The conventions that I usually attend do not meet there, and my short time in the industry cured me of any delusions of glamor about gambling.

But my old friend Galen Geer, a long-time outdoor writer and editor, has persuaded me to go to Las Vegas for the 2012 SHOT Show next month.

The Shooting, Hunting, and Outdoor Trades Show is enormous. People say it takes days to see all the exhibitors' booths. It is so big that there are applications to help you plan your time and routes in the exhibit halls.

Its sponsoring organization, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, recognized bloggers as news media several years ago, leading to much more mention in the blogosphere of new products and developments in those industries.

And while I am not a shooting-sports blogger like Michael Bane or a hunting blogger like Holly Heyser, NSSF extended me the same credentials. Maybe it helped that I agreed to lend my illustrious name to The Pines Review's masthead as associate editor as well.

So free admission to a "trade-only" event + relatively cheap hotel rooms + the chance to gawk at the entertainment machine that is Las Vegas means that this year I'm going to do it.

There ought to be something to blog about.

Amtrak, Raccoons, and the California Zephyr

The California Zephyr climbs the Big 10 curve west of Denver

M. and I are home from a week-long trip to San Francisco -- mostly business for me, but she got to spend time with family.

We took the California Zephyr west from Denver, "mountains and rivers without end."

And we got where we needed to go, although there was one rough patch at the beginning.

As usual, click the photos to enlarge them.

You usually end up dining with strangers but can always talk about the trains.

We woke up at dawn in our Denver hotel, checked the Amtrak train-status page, and oh no, the westbound train was six hours behind schedule. Later we would learn that it had been held up waiting for work crews to repair some damaged track somewhere in Iowa or Nebraska.

So we went out to breakfast, read exotic magazines at the Tattered Cover's LoDo store, and eventually got a lift in the hotel's town car to the temporary station that Amtrak is using while Denver Union Station is being renovated.

In the photo, two guys who just met through the dining steward's command to "Sit there" are getting acquainted.

Passengers ("Pax" in train-speak) on the platform at Fraser, Colo.

The first "fresh air stop" after Denver is Fraser/Winter Park, immediately after you come out of the long darkness of the Moffat Tunnel through the Continental Divide.

The station in Glenwood Springs, Colo., right in the center of town.

After Fraser, the railroad follows a roadless area of the Fraser River Canyon, breaks out into Middle Park, and then enters roadless Gore Canyon, where the river is already freezing over in spots. It then passes a few isolated spots like Radium, State Bridge, and Bond, before rejoining I-70 at Dotsero and continuing on down Glenwood Canyon.

Western terminus of the Zephyr: Emeryville, Calif.

And a bus ride over the Bay Bridge, a taxi to the hotel, and we're there, only three hours late at the end.

We left Wednesday the 23rd for home. Everything started well: up through the across the Delta, up through the eucalyptus, cypresses, and palms of Roseville, then into the Sierras, with cedar, manazanita, firs, and other conifers.

Into Reno on time. Through basin and range -- Winnemucca in the late afternoon, Ely after dark, then salt flats and Salt Lake City. The "gray desert" around Green River, Utah. Into Grand Junction on time, and we saw a bald eagle sitting in a snag along the Colorado River somewhere between Dotsero and State Bridge.

Through Middle Park and the Moffat Tunnel, everything tickety-tock, running even a bit ahead of schedule.

Then Conductor Renée comes on the p.a. system: the westbound Zephyr hit a "herd of raccoons" in Iowa the previous evening, had to wait for a replacement locomotive, and has now limped into Denver many hours late. We must wait for it to clear the wye at the station before we in turn can back in. So we wait, somewhere in Arvada, and eventually arrive an hour behind schedule. No problem. 

But a "herd of raccoons"? Since when do coons come in herds, as opposed to small family groups? And how big a herd does it take to damage (air hoses, etc., she said) a full-size locomotive?

You know Amtrak does not put out news releases about such incidents, so it must remain a mystery of rail travel.

UPDATE: Here is a posting on a train-fan web site, which gives a location and speaks of a "pack of raccoons."

Getting Kinky on the Truckee

Only in Nevada: The link between prostitution and riparian restoration.