The price of a Jackson Hole season pass used to be the highest in the nation, and a running joke here in Utah. Not this year. In a belated apology for breaking my collarbone last March, Jackson Hole officials just announced an all-access adult Grand Pass for only $1255. Might still sound pricey, but for reference, the last time a JHMR pass cost under $1300 was back in the 80’s. Even those of us lucky enough to ski the Greatest Snow On Earth still love us some Jackson (real drinks and Disco Night, anyone?), plus it’s always nice to see the recession working in our favor for once.
Oh and a special shout-out to Keith, star of the video. Brilliant performance, man. See you this winter.

The hiker who blasted a charging grizzly in the Alaskan National Park will not get into any trouble. While it’s legal to carry guns in national parks, it’s illegal to shoot them.

“He turned and drew a .45 caliber semi-automatic weapon from a holster on his waist belt. Within seconds, a large grizzly bear emerged from the brush about 25 feet away and charged the woman,” the officials said. “The man rapidly fired seven to nine rounds at the right side of the bear. The bear stopped several feet from the woman and then moved back into the brush. Both hikers retreated and hiked to the park road, after noting the location on a GPS.”

The investigation found no evidence to contradict the claim that the man was shooting the bear to defend his hiking companion from danger. That’s not exactly the same as saying, “We believe you,” but it’s good enough to get away without anyone going to jail.

Turns out that fluorescent red stuff that planes drop on forest fires isn’t all-natural. A federal judge has ordered that the U.S. Forest Service complete an adequate environmental assessment of just how bad for the eco-system the toxic spray is. The USFS will continue using the fire retardant this summer, and will have to complete their survey by 2011.

“If a farmer took a 3,000-gallon truckload of liquefied fertilizer and dumped it in a creek, that farmer would be in jail in a heartbeat,” Stahl said. “But when the Forest Service does it, everybody looks the other way because it is a war on fire.”

via Get Outdoors

The Foreign Policy blog offers you Good Times in Really Bad Places. Just make sure you stay on the Iraqi side of the desert hike if you go near the Iran border - it’s no good being accused of spying and confined to lengthy imprisonment for no good reason.

Thanks Jeff

Forget for a moment that the massive whitewater park in Charlotte, North Carolina - one of the largest parks around and an Olympic training ground - is on the verge of bankruptcy. Instead, turn your mind to the straight economics pitched by whitewater dreamers across the U.S. There are 86,000 dams in America, and their average age is 51 years. It costs on average $2.7 million to tear them down, but only $50k to $2.5 million to turn them into whitewater parks. Am I making sense yet? I guess we need to get more voters interested in playboating.

One camper is dead and two injured after at least one bear rampaged through a campground near Yellowstone National Park. The animal or animals crushed tents, killing one male and injuring two others. Authorities put the campers in their cars by 6am and closed the Soda Butte campground in case the bear returns. The attacks appear to be unprovoked, and it doesn’t seem that food in the tents was an issue.

A California teacher bought a box of glass negatives and stored them under his pool table for a decade. He joked to friends that they were shot by Ansel Adams since they were Yosemite images, and eventually his joking culminated in an investigation that verified their authenticity and valued them at $200 million. The photos come from Adams early work - most of which was destroyed in a darkroom fire. The man paid $45 for the box at a garage sale after bargaining the previous owner down from $75. On an unrelated note, I’ll sell you a box of garbage for $75 - oh, ok $45 - you never know, it could contain the original Bill of Rights (or a bunch of socks with holes).

via Backpacker

Jack Hanna, the guy who used to hangout with Johnny Carson and Dave Letterman, recently filmed a PSA urging hikers to carry pepper spray instead of guns into national parks to deal with charging grizzlies. Yesterday he was able to offer some firsthand notes along with his PSA. The guy was hiking with his family when they encountered a grizzly and her two cubs. They backed down the narrow trail yelling loudly for five minutes.

Then Hanna saw a small rocky clearing they could back into just off the trail.

“I said, ‘Crawl up the hill and put your backs against the wall.’”

Two bears walked past, but one of the 150lb cubs followed them and began to charge from 30 feet out. Hannah shot pepper spray from 30, 20 and finally 10 feet - the bear charged until the last shot right in its face, when it turned and ran off.

Alex Honnold filed a blog post for Black Diamond on how one goes about climbing the Nose, the Salathe Wall and Lurking Fear in one day. The post is worth reading, even if you have no intentions of ever dragging yourself up a big wall. He describes it like a 24-hour marathon, complete with mind-bending exhaustion, and it’s easy to forget that one missed step in this race would mean his and climbing partner Sean Leary’s deaths.

Here are a few choice excerpts:

“I stopped to re-rack at Camp 6, I think, but we moved pretty quickly. We accidentally woke some folks up on Camp 6. I’d thought that we had the route to ourselves so we were yelling back and forth. But when I popped over the ledge there were two poor dudes trying to sleep. They didn’t seem too bothered though.”

“Taking off my climbing shoes was an orgasmic pleasure, though my feet were so rocked that my comfy approach shoes hurt a lot, too.

The hike down was, again, surreal. It felt like we’d climbed the Nose the week before. We kept almost saying things like “the other day when we were on the Salathe,” only to realize that we’d topped out the Salathe 12 hours before.”