Vail Daily:

While no one is exactly sure how it happened, officials near Eagle say there is a cow elk wandering around with a bar stool stuck on its head.

The elk was first seen on a conservation easement property south of the Eagle Ice Rink.

Resident Bill Johnson told the newspaper that he saw the elk with the metal bar stool stuck on her head from his house. The legs were pointed up and the elk’s head was pushed through the metal rig that holds the legs together, he said.

Johnson said the stool didn’t seem to prevent the elk from grazing or moving around.

“Apparently she is fully mobile,” Colorado Division of Wildlife officer Craig Wescoatt told the Daily. Wescoatt said he has been receiving reports about the animal for several days.

Efforts to get near the animal have not been successful. When approached, the elk scampers away.

“She’s very active. The bar stool doesn’t seem to be impairing her to any great degree,” he observed. “She just looks kind of goofy.”

The antics of Bailey the dog enjoying the snow at his home near Ward, Colorado have attracted over 3,000,000 hits.

2:26 video

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Is there any sight more ridiculous than some aging baby boomer peddling away in his spandex outfit and insectoid helmet on a bicycle? Bicycles are alright for small boys to use on paper routes or to get to the park to play baseball, but their use as a fitness tool by aging hippies is unseemly and undignified and only results in inconvenience to motorists and unnecessary accidents.

Not even the bears in the Rocky Mountain West are safe these days.

Last Thursday, UPI reports:

A 57-year-old man in Missoula, Mont., says he is lucky to be alive after accidentally crashing his bicycle into the side of a wild bear.

Middle school teacher Jim Litz said while he is no stranger to seeing bears during his daily commute along an area dirt road, this week he didn’t’ have time to avoid one of the wild animals that had wandered into his way, The (Missoula, Mont.) Missoulian said Thursday.

“I didn’t have time to respond. I never even hit my brakes,” Litz said of Monday’s accident.

The teacher said after the impact flipped him off his bike, the bear began clawing at him apparently in confusion and anger. That attack left Litz with scratches and bruises along most of his body.

While Litz admits to being sore and a bit clawed up following the unexpected crash, he says he is lucky to have survived the incident and holds no ill will toward the animal.

“I was lucky. I was truly lucky, because I accosted the bear and he let me live,” he told the Missoulian. “I truly respect them. They’re beautiful creatures.”

That bear may be “a beautiful creature,” but a spindle-shanked, potbellied goofball in day-glo spandex certainly is not.

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Last June, there was another incident of the same kind in Colorado, as the Rocky Mountain News reports:

A cyclist in Boulder County was injured after a run-in, literally, with a bear.

Tim Egan, 53, was riding on Old Stage Road Tuesday afternoon when suddenly a bear appeared in front of him. Egan hit the bear and ended up skidding across the road.

“This bear looked at me with a look of terror on his face and sort of made a noise,” said Egan. “I looked at him with a look of terror and we went, ‘aaaahhhhh.'”

He cracked some ribs, suffered cuts on his head and had road rash. Egan said he and the bike flipped and flew over the bear, hitting the pavement hard.

The bear ran away after the accident when a deer appeared.

Egan’s nephew ran to help the injured cyclist.

“When I tell people, they say ‘Right, are you kidding me, who hits a bear?'”

Egan estimated he was going about 45 miles per hour at impact. He said the bear was about 6 feet tall and probably weighed 500 pounds.

When are these bears going to wise up? A fully-digested bicyclist is a safe bicyclist, I always say.

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Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Apple, a heifer resident of Hygiene, Colorado, discovered an intruder in her pasture. She touched noses investigatively, doubtless reaching the correct conclusion that the visitor was a black bear cub, and promptly proceeded to run him off.

TheDenverChannel.com

slideshow

29-year old Saleman Abdirahman Dirie, a Canadian citizen from Ottawa of Somali origin, was found deceased in his room at the Burnsley Hotel in downtown Denver, about four blocks from the State Capitol.

The cause of death remains to be determined, but the pound (.45 kg.) of Sodium Cyanide found by authorities next to the body may provide an important clue.

A suspicion person might conjecture that the late Mr. Dirie was visiting Denver in connection with some kind of plans related to the upcoming Democrat Party Convention, taking place August 25-28, and that the unlucky, or possibly maladroit Mr. Durie, while examining or otherwise manipulating the cyanide compound he had brought along for reasons of his own, met with an unhappy accident when he breathed in its vapors or somehow contacted the very dangerous chemical with his bare skin.

Mr. Dirie’s death (now being described as a suicide) somehow reminds me of the 2005 “suicide” of Joel Henry Hinrichs III, an engineering student with a Pakistani roommate who mysteriously chose to kill himself with a bomb containing the highly unstable and explosive compound triacetone triperoxide, in the very near vicinity of a football stadium where a game was being played with more than 80,000 people in attendance.

Fascinating, isn’t it, the way some people choose to commit suicide using very much the kinds and quantities of materials suitable for use in mass terrorism attacks in locations suspiciously close to suitable targets?

Denver Post:

The most remote area in the United States’ Lower 48 is:

A) Inyo County, Calif., home of Death Valley.

B) Park County, Wyo., which includes part of Yellowstone National Park.

C) Hinsdale County, Colo., 95 percent federal land.

D) Piscataquis County, Maine, with Mount Katahdin.

The answer, according to a new analysis of roads and people, is C) Hinsdale.

The southwest Colorado county, the U.S. Geological Survey says, has more wild and roadless land per capita than anywhere else in the contiguous U.S.

Kings County, N.Y. – better known as Brooklyn – has the least roadless land per capita.

Hinsdale also is one of the few places a person can wander more than 10 miles from a road, according to the study in today’s edition of the journal Science.

Complete article.

Pay attention for planning our next move, Karen.

Two experienced hunters reported sighting (9/20) a female grizzly bear, accompanied by two cubs, in the vicinity of Independence Pass in Colorado.

The wildlife authorities declared Ursus arctos horribilis extinct in Colorado in 1952.

Not everyone, however, believed that they were right. For many years, sightings of grizzlies continued to be reported in the San Juan Mountains. They were all dismissed by the authorities.

Finally, in 1979, an archery hunter named Ed Wiseman was attacked by an extinct Colorado grizzly. Though severely mauled, Wiseman survived. He miraculously managed to kill the attacking bear, stabbing it repeatedly with a broadhead arrow. Officialdom responded by dispatching teams of learned scientists to trap and tag “Old Ephraim” without success. And the bear returned safely to extinction. Until this month.

News of a surviving grizzly bear population in the Centennial State inevitably throws a monkey wrench into the vexatious quarrel between environmentalists and stockmen about whether or not so large and dangerous a predator ought to be re-introduced.

Some writers have taken an interest in the question of the possibility of a surviving Southern Rockies subspecies.

David Peterson published Ghost Grizzlies (1995) reviewing the evidence, and leaning toward the affirmative.

Rick Bass’s The Lost Grizzlies (also 1995) treats the same question more literarily as a personal, and comedic, quest.

Aspen Daily News

Colorado Springs Gazette

Yahoo map

Yesterday evening, a mountain lion pushed his way through the screen door of Clifton Sanches’ home in El Paso County, Colorado, near Colorado Springs. The home owner declined to contest possession, and fled to a neighbor’s house to phone police. The local sheriff’s deputies adopted the New York City Police Deparment’s philosophy of declining to prosecute minor cases of burglary, and proposed waiting for the lion to leave on his own. Perhaps adverse possession laws are not so favorable in Colorado as they are in some other states, and the feline intruder, after an hour or so, got bored with things and made his exit, breaking through a window screen on the way out. Someone filmed his departure.

Story and video at CBS4 Denver.

Even in Western states where lions are still hunted, mountain lion numbers are up, and the big cats are being forced to hunt more widely and more frequently by competition from (now completely protected) scavenger species. Dick Ray, a lion hunting outfiter, believes:

pressure from other predators and scavengers is causing the big cats to kill on a more frequent basis today than they have in the past. Dick and I have shared a number of lion chases together and it used to be, when you found a fresh lion kill it was generally a partially eaten deer carcass covered by raked up pine duff, sticks and leaves. In most cases the satiated cat would stay in the vicinity of the kill until the carcass was consumed, before hunting again. Such isn’t the case today.

With the proliferation of the protected scavenger birds such as ravens, crows and magpies, a fresh cougar kill is located by the keen eyed birds within a short time and their raucous racket soon attracts the attention of opportunistic coyotes that key on the boisterous birds to locate carrion or kills. (Every magpie may not have a lion or coyote following it, but you can bet every coyote or lion has a magpie.) The constant harassment by a few determined coyotes quickly drives the frustrated cat from its fresh kill. Under the onslaught from coyotes and flocks of voracious scavenger birds, within forty eight hours or less the only thing left at the site of the cougar kill is a few scraps of hide and scattered bones, forcing the cat to kill again.

This Sunday, a young mountain lion entered a North Boulder home through a pet door, killed and ate the family cat, then went back outside and curled up for a nap on the lawn.