Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

Whenever I hear Christmas music I gnash my teeth and ball my fists. It’s worse than someone scraping the tips of a fork across a dinner plate. My love for holiday songs was completely ruined by a harrowing winter road trip experience, and I’ve never gotten over it. Now, 25 years later, the tale can finally be told.

I’ve had debates with mountain bike supporters over the question of whether bikes and, by extension, other wheeled vehicles, should be permitted in designated wilderness. The mountain bike crowd feels their activity should be allowed in wilderness areas.

Many mountain bikers oppose any wilderness that does not permit biking and/or at least if designation closes a trail that mountain bikers have come to use. Since by definition of the Wilderness Act, mechanical access is prohibited, any lands designated under the 1964 Wilderness Act is automatically off limits to mountain biking. There are many reasons to exclude mountain bikes from wilderness--not the least is that recreation is not the prime reason for wilderness designation.

From the Panhandle: North Idaho Blog

In the excitement and enjoyment of significantly greater than usual snowfall over the past few weeks, the challenge of getting to Grandma’s house for the turkey, the closing of schools due to extreme cold, the general search for snow shovels, and the scramble to get the car off the street before the plow arrived, I’m not at all sure that adequate appreciation has been shown for some of the gnarliest participants in this frigid drama: the diehard anglers who participate in the Lake Pend Oreille Idaho Club’s Fall Fishing Derby.

During the last session of Congress many wilderness and park bills were reported out of committee, but have not yet been voted on by the entire legislative body. Many of these bills will protect important wildlands across the country. And the recent election of many anti-wilderness legislators means that if these bills are not passed in the Lame Duck session coming up, these wildlands may not garner protection for a long time into the future.

From the Idaho Panhandle

A recent bit in The River Journal (“A Newsmagazine Worth Wading Through” published in Clark Fork) notes that someone saw something on the Internet indicating that the ubiquitous “they” were going to put lithium in our drinking water to help us happily weather the recession that, as we all know (or at least as we’re all told), is well on its way to being over anyway.

The writer, Trish Gannon, whose title on the journal’s masthead is “Calm Center of Tranquility,” might be expected to find such supplements superfluous. But her source, local geoscientist John Monks, checked out the National Uranium Resource Evaluation database—a handy collection of data from water samples collected and analyzed by the U.S. Geological Survey—to identify the extent to which panhandle residents are being chemically mollified.

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

I’ve been a caffeine junkie since my dad first introduced me to the acidy splendor of canned Folger’s brewed up in a chrome electric percolator when I was 16. There were no Starbucks in those days. No City Brew, no espresso huts with goofy names like Bean Me Up or Grounds For Divorce. There was Folger’s, the diner and the truck stop. And I loved it. I spent more days in college sitting in the student union lounge drinking cup after cup of their gutless institutional brew than I did going to class. But, oh, the world problems we solved, the glorious plans we made. And it was all fueled by coffee.

A hot cup is the first thought that forms in my head each morning (sadly, sometimes even my last thought at night) and over the years, coworkers and family have been made acutely aware of my strict NWBC policy: No Work Before Coffee. Or decisions or questions or hostile attacks like, “Good morning, daddy,” or anything else that requires cogent thought or a reasonably intelligent response.

One of the unquestioned and unspoken assumptions heard across the West is that ranchers have a right to a predator free environment. Even environmental groups like Defenders of Wildlife more or less legitimize this perspective by supporting unqualified compensation for livestock losses to bears and wolves.  And many state agency wolf management plans specifically call for compensation to livestock producers—but without any requirements that livestock husbandry practices be in place to reduce or eliminate predation opportunity. 

From the Idaho Panhandle

The Idaho Conservation League held a kaffeeklatsch yesterday morning at Monarch Mountain Coffee House in Sandpoint to encourage local sippers to support water monitoring in the state.

According to ICL, water monitoring costs less than 30 cents per person per year, but it represents one of many cuts that have been made to the state budget in these cost-conscious times. Restoring the funding now would attract matching federal funding, and more important, it would enable us to keep collecting data that would identify problems early, so they can be addressed before they become big and expensive.

From the Idaho Panhandle

One outcome of the elections a few weeks ago was completely passed over by the pundits on TV, but it will have a significant effect on residents of and visitors to central Bonner County.  I refer, of course, to the passage of a bed tax in the community of Ponderay, a burg of 1000 or so souls just north of Sandpoint. By a margin of 140 to 48, voters in that community approved a 5% tax to be assessed on short-term stays in the town’s hotels and motels. Added to funding from several other sources, proceeds from this tax will provide for a bus system that will connect Ponderay with neighbors Kootenai and Sandpoint, as well as the town of Dover, three miles west of Sandpoint.

Despite the burden it will put on them to collect the tax, a majority of lodging owners and operators in Ponderay supported the measure.

State wildlife agencies and hunting organization demand that predators like wolves should be controlled, preferably by sport hunting. Among the underlying assumptions are that hunting can reduce human conflicts, including livestock depredation, and potential attacks on humans. Yet there is little scientific evidence to back up those assertions. In fact, recent research suggests that sport hunting disrupts social organization among predators, thereby increasing social chaos which manifests itself with greater human conflicts. A self fulfilling feedback mechanism results whereby state wildlife agencies institute hunting of predators, creating more social chaos, which in turn leads to greater human conflicts, and more demands for even greater predator control.