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Who's really responsible for the death of grizzly bear No. 8?

LAKE LOUISE, Alberta - Who's to blame for the death of No.

LAKE LOUISE, Alberta - Who's to blame for the death of No. 8, a grizzly bear in Banff National Park?

Parks Canada killed the six-year-old bear in late September after it stalked a mountain guide and his client, forcing them to climb a tree, with the bear in pursuit.

Wildlife managers in Parks Canada say the bear had a hand in his own demise. This summer, he chased cyclists, charged a wildlife officer armed with a shotgun, and even held a grain train hostage - although how that's done isn't exactly clear.

Managers told the Rocky Mountain Outlook they devoted hundreds of hours, using aversive conditioning to try to keep him out of trouble and, with the help of a radio collar, were able to track his whereabouts constantly.

"He truly believed he was the big bear and he could do anything he wanted to," said Hal Morrison, a human-wildlife conflict specialist in the Canadian Rockies.

Morrison said that the availability of grain along the Canadian Pacific railway had conditioned him to people, yielding a more aggressive stance. "Part of it is also his personality, and he was a six-year-old trying to test everything."

The bear had lost 20 pounds in the last few months, because of a poor berry crop, but appeared to be in very good health.

A local conservationist however, points the finger at Parks Canada and its policy of wanting to encouraged more use of Banff and other national parks when it comes to the bear's death.

"The bottom line from decades of research is that as you increase human activity, from hiking to industrial development, you negatively impact grizzly bears," said Jeff Gailus, author of "The Grizzly Manifesto."

"Like Frankenstein, bear No. 8 was something we created," said Gailus. "He became habituated because he had to live among so many people, and he became food-conditioned because of sloppy campers and residents and grain on the railway tracks."

Yellowstone National Park, he added, does it much better, by closing off a significant portion of the park, while still allowing access to large parts of the park.

The grizzly followed the mountain guide and his Japanese client as they went up the trail from Lake Louise toward Saddleback Pass. When it was apparent that the bear was stalking them, they climbed a tree. The bear got to within a few metres of them, but after several hours, it went on its way.

The guide said the killing of the bear devastated him. "I understand why, but I also know that he was just being a bear. I'm sad," said Barry Blanchard.

 

Did they kill to eat?

JACKSON, Wyo. - John Wallace, 59, was killed by a grizzly bear in Yellowstone National Park in late August. What caused the grizzly to set upon the 59-year-old man hasn't been determined, and may never be clear. What was evident, however, was that he had been partially eaten -and analysis of hair and scat left at the scene shows there were four bears there.

One of the four bears, which killed another hiker this summer, has since been killed. But that leaves three bears still at large that may have killed Wallace not because of a surprise encounter or to protect a food source, but simply to eat him.

In reporting this, the Jackson Hole News&Guide notes that grizzlies may have killed humans in order to eat them several times in recent years. One occurred just outside the park in 2010, when a sow with three cubs dragged a camper from a tent. The cubs were found to be malnourished. There were also cases in 2006, 2004, and 1983 - altogether, just seven clear cases of predation since the park was created in 1872, spokesman Al Nash told the newspaper.

Nighttime ban lifted

BANFF, Alberta - Banff councillors have ended the nighttime ban on skateboarding. But they remain concerned whether skaters will take the necessarily precautions to avoid being hit by cars.

"Not as a mayor, but as a mom, please be safer, please obey lights and signs, and get a light," said Mayor Karen Sorenson.

Mark Carroll, a skateboarder of 27 years, told the council that many residents employed by bars and nightclubs in Banff use skateboards as their primary mode of transport to and from work, often finishing a shift around 2 a.m.

"They choose an environmentally friendly mode of transport, which doesn't require fuel or a parking space, yet they are told they can't skateboard home," he said.

"Skateboarding deserves respect as a viable form of healthy, green transportation."

The Rocky Mountain Outlook reports that councillors tinkered with mandating lights, but deferred that discussion to a broader one about lighting requirements for all non-motorized vehicles.

Sympathetic nods to W.S. occupiers

CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. - Here and there were nods of sympathy in ski towns to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

A rally last weekend in Aspen drew 10 people. Across the Sawatch Range, a similar small gathering occurred in Salida.

"I was laid off a year ago, and I'm a single father with a four-year-old child struggling to make ends meet," Jeffrey "Mo" Shacklett told the Mountain Mail .

"Our point is that 99 per cent of the people who do the work are up in arms that 1 per cent of the people make the most money and make the decisions in this country, and they are not giving jobs to people," Shacklett said.

Taking stock of the protests, Crested Butte News editor Mark Reaman finds a trickle-down effect from the avarice of money managers that is now making life more difficult in his ski town.

"Most reasonable people would agree that Wall Street suits had a hand in essentially wrecking the economy three years ago," he writes, before citing a litany of abuses.

"How many people have been held accountable? None. Not one. But the taxpayers bailed "them" out and now a lot of those taxpayers can't find a job. The bailout was touted in part with the hope and intent of seeing some cash flow back into the general economy to fuel some job growth. Instead, Wall Street types paid themselves rather large bonuses, bought back their own stock and now are holding on to large amounts of cash instead of reinvesting it," he charges.

He adds: "If people can't afford to come here on a vacation, we all get hurt. Maybe these occupiers of Wall Street are on to something...Good on 'em."

Hiker snoozes way across the 14ers

EAGLE, Colo. - It's getting harder and harder to come up with a superlative achievement when it comes to Colorado's superlative peaks, those over 14,000 feet. They've all been climbed, of course, and often in multiple sets. One individual has climbed all of them at least 14 times over.

Lou Dawson, the mountaineer from Carbondale, some years ago became the first to ski from the summits of all of the 53 peaks. Another individual, Bart Miller, climbed them all without use of motorized vehicles to shuttle among them, a tall endeavor, given their broad geographic dispersment.

And then there are the speed hikers, constantly whittling down the amount of time it takes to climb all of them.

Now comes a new feat: the first person to sleep on top of them all . The Vail Daily reports that Jon Kedrowski, who grew up in the Eagle Valley, accomplished the feat in September.

Sleeping atop a mountain does have risks, given that lightning tends to strike the highest object in any given locale. Kedrowski had at least one close call. Sensing the imminent hit, Kedrowski had fled the tent. "I could tell it was going to hit, so I jumped off the summit block to the side. I could feel the heat on my back when it struck," Kedrowski told the Daily . He said the poles were fried and even the fabric was vaporized.

Kedrowski, who teaches geography at Central Washington University, plans a photo book, which should be out next summer.

 

Gene may reveal altitude sickness

BRECKENRIDGE, Colo. - Will a simple blood test soon allow doctors to determine who will get sick at high altitudes? That's the goal of experiments being conducted by the Altitude Research Center at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. So far, there's some evidence that just such a test is possible.

In a recent 28-person study, Dr. Robert Roach, director of the research center, found that a blood test "almost perfectly predicts who gets sick and who doesn't."

The Summit Daily News reports that additional research was conducted last week, when 25 volunteers from Texas flew from Dallas to Denver, jumped on a bus to Summit County, and then immediately ran two miles - as fast as they could at the local high school track, which is at an elevation of about 2,800 metres. They had also run 3.2 kilometres in Dallas.

Roach is measuring oxygen level and keeping track of those who show symptoms of altitude sickness. At the end, students will give blood samples, reports the Daily News . Researchers then try to identify genes that predict who does well at altitude, and who doesn't.

This is the fourth of six research groups in Roach's effort to isolate genes that predict performance in thin air. "If we can predict mountains sickness from a low-altitude blood test, that would change the world," he said.

The research is funded by a $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense. The government wants to find ways to swiftly overcome acute mountain sickness, which often strikes those serving in Afghanistan.

 

Vail planning for 50 th anniversary

VAIL, Colo. - The first ski lifts at Vail started operating commercially in December 1962. In anticipation of the 50th anniversary, organizers are now trying to raise $3.7 million. The Vail Daily reports that they want $500,000 from the town government, which itself was formed in 1966, and town officials haven't said yes, but neither have they said no.

 

Plastic bags banned

ASPEN, Colo. - Aspen has made it final. The town's two grocery stories in May will cease offering throwaway plastic bags to shoppers. Paper bags will cost 20 cents.

Aspen had set out some months ago to step in concert with two other towns in the Roaring Fork Valley, requiring that grocers levy a fee on both plastic and paper. That's the route now being taken by Basalt. Along the way, however, several Aspen council members decided that if curbing use of plastic bags was their intent, an outright ban would be more forward, explains The Aspen Times . Another local municipality, Carbondale, has yet to take formal action.

 

Enthusiasm thins for cloud seeding

CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. - Enthusiasm for cloud seeding seems to be waning in the Gunnison Basin. The Crested Butte News reports that the ski area operator has cut its $10,000 funding, and other participating government jurisdictions are similarly considering dropping out.

The consortium has pooled money since the drought of 2002, under the general grounds of, "I don't know if it works, but I'm afraid to gamble that it doesn't," as one rancher said several years ago. The Utah-based cloud-seeding operator estimates that seeding augments snowpacks by 10 to 20 per cent, yielding water at a cost of between 83 cents and $1.25 per acre-feet - extremely cheap, by most reckonings.

Does cloud-seeding work? The best evidence that it does work comes from experiments conducted in the Breckenridge-Vail area in the late 1960s, followed by experiments at Steamboat springs in the 1970s. Now, courtesy of the Wyoming Legislature, a more definitive study is being conducted in the Snowy Range southwest of Laramie. No results have been announced yet.

While cloud-seeding has been used extensively in California and Utah since the 1970s, the only persistent cloud-seeding in Colorado has been at Vail, which began after the drought of 1977. Other seeding programs have picked up, but then support drops-off, as droughts become more distant memories.

 

Allen Best publishes a monthly newsmagazine called Mountain Town News. He can be reached at allen.best@comcast.net .