July 12, 2010
Flagstaff–Halfway through 7th grade, Reagan McGuire quit school and became a pool shark. His father and grandfather were boxers, and McGuire, who inherited their taste for fisticuffs, turned to the tables to stay out of trouble. But he continued to learn, browsing voraciously through the public library, and 40 years later, while taking his son to enroll in Flagstaff’s Northern Arizona University, the Pennsylvania native discovered that even a trucker without a diploma could go to college. He signed up.
Now a 56-year-old junior, McGuire’s applying what he learned on the green felt — discipline, focus and a touch of swagger — to a different game: battling bark beetles. Under the guidance of NAU Professor Richard Hofstetter, McGuire’s spent almost five years trying to use sound to disrupt these insects’ devastating march through Western forests. The hope is that the beetles’ “stridulations” — the romantic clicks and territorial ticks created by their cricket-y leg-rubbings –might be the key to a less expensive and less toxic form of control than today’s ubiquitous chemical strategies.
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June 2, 2010
The Yellowstone Business Partnership held its annual conference at the Jackson Lake Lodge recently to tackle the sticky issue of winter use in Yellowstone National Park. This is not a new issue, of course. In fact, to most Wyomingites, it’s such an old issue that many have trouble engaging it. At the Tuesday May 25 session, however, people were engaged.
Perhaps it was the fact that only the day before snow fell steadily at the southern end of Yellowstone. Perhaps it was the conference theme, “Re-envisioning Winter,” and the diverse group of panelists sitting at the same table – the National Park Service, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, a snow coach concessioner, a snow-mobile organization, an outdoor recreation group – that gave participants a sense that this would be a different conversation about the same old topic.
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