New West Network

<< Newer articles <<    Home     >> Older articles >>

As Wyoming’s college rodeo coaches converge on the National High School Finals in Gillette this week, they will be recruiting top student athletes who waver between going to college and turning pro right out of high school.

The most ambitious competitors will want to ride on the college and Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association circuits at the same time. And many of those may follow some of Wyoming’s top young cowboys to Texas, where the pro rodeo season is longer and richer than in the Northern Rockies

“I do hear kids say they want to go to Texas and pro rodeo,” said Dan Mortensen, a world champion saddle-bronc rider and the interim head rodeo coach at Northwest College in Powell. “I know it’s really tempting to head off to the pros. The ones who are winning in college are probably good enough to win pro rodeos, too.”

Case in point: JR Vezain of Cowley, who won last month’s College National Finals Rodeo bareback competition. With $29,000 in winnings, he is a top contender for rookie of the year on the PRCA circuit.

“I never wanted to go to college,” said Vezain, the 2009 national high school bareback champion, as he stripped several yards of tape from his forearms after riding last month for Vernon College at the CNFR in Casper.

Western Writers

Writer Manuel Muñoz grew up in Dinuba, California. Beginning in fourth grade he worked alongside his family in the fields, harvesting grapes. He was a good student, and according to his website, he applied to Harvard “for no other reason than I knew the name.” After he graduated from Harvard, he earned an MFA in creative writing from Cornell and worked in the publishing industry in New York. He wrote and published two acclaimed story collections, 2003’s Zigzagger and 2007’s The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue. Since 2008, Muñoz has taught in the creative writing program at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Muñoz’s honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award, a NEA Fellowship, and an O. Henry Award. Muñoz’s dazzling new novel What You See In The Dark reimagines the filming of Psycho in the sleepy town of Bakersfield, California. Muñoz sets the filming of that classic movie against the moving fictional story of the murder of Teresa, a young Mexican-American woman, by her white lover. I recently interviewed Muñoz via email about the inspiration for What You See In The Dark, his love of books that “honor the sentence,” how a small town that seems to have nothing “actually has everything,” and Tucson’s literary scene.

New West: What first inspired What You See in the Dark?

Manuel Muñoz: I had many inspirations for this novel, but one I haven’t spoken about much is a dream I had. I’m not a believer in dreams as anything metaphysically significant; it’s just the brain’s way of clearing out the day’s debris. But one night, I had a dream of walking into an empty room and a woman was sitting on a bed, smoothing out the beautiful baby-blue cowboy skirt she was wearing. When I woke, I tried to recall where I might have seen that image—a TV commercial or a flash of something while flipping channels—but I came up empty. But the image stuck, so I wrote it down. It soon became a simple question. Who is she?

High Country News Post

Despite their reputation as hangouts for brawny hook and bullet types, fly-fishing shops--particularly the fly-tying sections--have always been a tad swishy.  No matter how you slice it, scores of straight-faced men poking through purple Krystal Flash and pearl Flashabou or inquiring about the next shipment of pink chenille isn’t exactly manly.

But a recent women’s hairstyle trend has upped fly-fishing’s “fabulous” factor another notch: rooster feather hair extensions. According a recent NPR story, the trend originated at western music festivals like Burning Man and Sasquatch, but has since spread to various pop celebrities, most visibly, “American Idol” judge and Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler.

And while some fly tiers decry the increased competition--and higher prices--for their materials, a few fly shop owners are happy to see a boom in business.

Touring

It is easy to see why Jeep tours are popular in Ouray, Colorado. The small town is only nine blocks long and six blocks wide, set in a river valley at 7,792 feet and surrounded by 13,000- to 14,000-foot mountain peaks of the San Juan Mountain Range. Its city streets slope toward the mountains. Ouray, like many Colorado mountain towns, originated as a mining town. The town, founded in 1876, is a mecca for outdoor enthusiasts.

Jeeps here can traverse the steep grades of old wagon trail roads and trails that pose a challenge to traditional vehicles. There are a number of operators to select from depending on interest and length of tour.

A few impressions from a recent tour:

Rafting

The Middle Fork of the Salmon is a legendary river. From put-in at Boundary Creek near Stanley, Idaho, to the confluence of the Main and Middle Fork near North Fork, the river flows for about 100 miles through the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness.

I hadn’t been back to the Middle Fork since my husband and I first floated it in 1995. More than anything else, I recalled how midway through our eight-day trip, time ceased to exist. When we drew one of the limited permits this year, I was thrilled at the prospect of introducing our 12- and 14-year-old children to this place where time stops.

Our launch date of July 7 should have been ideal, but this year’s runoff proved to be formidable. Just weeks before our put-in date, a private boater died shortly after the Boundary Creek put-in with the river gauge measuring flows at about 6.5 feet—about the same level we were facing. But by July 7, the river had dropped to about 5 feet—guaranteeing fast, fun rapids without subjecting our family to jaw-locking terror.

New West Feature

In the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, grizzly bear management faces a major constraint – all the best habitat for grizzly bears is already occupied, even over-occupied.

Or is it?

“I call it the ‘too many fish in a bucket’ scenario,” said Mark Bruscino, the veteran bear manager for the Wyoming Game & Fish Department. Fish, meaning bears, keep jumping out of the best habitat, he said, landing in rural habitats where they can get in trouble with people.

It doesn’t always work to scoop up the fish and put it back in the bucket – not when the fish/bear becomes habituated to human food sources or gets pushed around by bigger, badder bears and keeps jumping out of the bucket, said Bruscino.

New West Feature

Bullis Creek Ranch, a property near Livingston, Montana, once planned as a high-end eco development complete with cooking classes by Alice Waters and dinosaur digs with famed Western paleontologist Jack Horner, has hit the auction block.

The ranch that would have been the Ameya Preserve, an ambitious and controversial gated community owned by entrepreneur and American Skandia executive Wade Dokken, was on the market for $30 million last year, according to Adam York of Sublime Public Relations, which represents the auction house.

Now the minimum reserve bid for the 11,000-acre property is set at $15.6 million. Sealed bids are being accepted through Thursday, July 21.

Hiking

I come from a family of blatant waterfall oglers. No hike is too difficult, overgrown, or ridiculous if a waterfall has even been rumored to be in the area.

So when we found ourselves in eastern Idaho for a baseball tournament recently, we couldn’t pass up a detour to Mesa Falls. The Mesa Falls Scenic Byway is a 28-mile drive through the Caribou-Targhee National Forest and serene barley, potato and wheat fields between Island Park and Ashton.

In the middle of the drive, the famed Henry’s Fork of the Snake River stretches to 200-feet wide and then tumbles 114-feet over Upper Mesa Falls, then 85-feet over Lower Mesa Falls, about a mile downstream.

Big Rigs

In what appears to be a major victory for those fighting the transport of oversized oil refinery equipment through Idaho and Montana to the Kearl Oil Sands in Canada, a judge has ruled that the Montana Department of Transportation is in violation of the law and issued a preliminary injunction.

Judge Ray Dayton, a district court judge in Anaconda, found the Department of Transportation was in default in accepting a less-than-adequate environmental assessment regarding the construction of turnouts, which are essential for the rigs as they travel from Lewiston, Idaho, along the Lochsa River on Highway 12 over Lolo Pass and into Montana, where they’d also traverse Highway 200 and other two-lane roads. The judgment was in favor of the four plaintiffs, most notably Missoula County, which was joined in the suit by environmental groups National Wildlife Federation, Montana Environmental Information Center and the Montana chapter of the Sierra Club. 

Wildlife Management

If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
– Aldo Leopold

The wolves of the Rocky Mountains are under attack. Idaho recently released its proposal for the 2011 hunting season, which calls for no limit on the number of wolves that can be killed. Yes, you read that correctly. The state that professed it will not manage its wolves has followed through and issued a public plan expressing there will be no limits on wolf hunting for this year. Based on the fact that Idaho, Wyoming and Montana are required to maintain a specific number of wolves in the three-state region, an undue burden has been placed on the other two states. One hopes Wyoming and Montana will take heed; however, at this writing, Montana has announced it expects to issue 220 permits, permission to take out roughly one-third of the total Montana wolf population.

There are those who argue that all wolves should be protected, no matter what. This is not an acceptable management approach when even endangered grizzlies that cause harm to a rancher are being culled. The other end of the spectrum is represented by a vocal and polar-opposite. These individuals profess a vested interest in nature, albeit a nature of their own design. 

<< Newer articles <<    Home     >> Older articles >>