Planet Jackson Hole 09.27.17 by Planet Jackson Hole

JACKSON HOLEâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S ALTERNATIVE VOICE | PLANETJH.COM | SEPTEMBER 27-OCTOBER 3, 2017

INSIDE THE

FIRESTORM

New technology allows scientists to see the forces behind the flames. BY DOUGLAS FOX

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: /NEWS> SNOWMOBILE SQUABBLES p.10 /FILM> FERRET FLICKS p.24

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JACKSON HOLE'S ALTERNATIVE VOICE

VOLUME 15 | ISSUE 37 | SEPT 27-OCT 3, 2017

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12 COVER STORY INSIDE THE FIRESTORM New technology allows scientists to see the forces behind the flames. Cover Photo by Gina Troy via inciweb.nwcg.gov

20 CULTURE KLASH

6 THE NEW WEST

24 DON’T MISS

8 THE BUZZ

26 IMBIBE

10 THE BUZZ 2

29 COSMIC CAFE

THE PLANET TEAM

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BY METEOROLOGIST JIM WOODMENCEY

Overnight low temperatures last week were very close to normal, near the freezing mark. This week the average low temperature is in the upper 20’s, a sure sign of fall and increasing chances for frost on the pumpkin. There have been some years when it was so cold in late September and early October that it actually felt more like late December. For instance, on September 30th, 1985 and also back on October 1st, 1950 the overnight low was 9-degrees.

WHAT’S COOL

The record high temperature this week is 87-degrees, set back on October 1st, 1997. I mention that to make you feel warmer, as we set a record here last week, but it was for a record cold maximum temperature. On September 21st, 2017, the last day of the summer season, the high temperature in town was just 41-degrees. That broke the old record for that date of 42-degrees, which was set back in 1968.

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NORMAL HIGH 67 NORMAL LOW 28 RECORD HIGH IN 1997 87 RECORD LOW IN 1985 9

THIS MONTH AVERAGE PRECIPITATION: 1.27 inches RECORD PRECIPITATION: 6 inches (1927) AVERAGE SNOWFALL: .02 inches RECORD SNOWFALL: 2 inches

Jim has been forecasting the weather here for more than 20 years. You can find more Jackson Hole Weather information at www.mountainweather.com

SEPTEMBER 27, 2017 | 3

Summer made an abrupt exit from Jackson Hole last week, fall made a brief appearance, then winter barged in for a short stay. Yes, that was snow on the ground Monday morning, to the lowest elevations in the valley. It is unusual to have snow that low in elevation this early, but it has happened before. Most recently in 2013 on September 26th we had a trace, and as early as September 13th in 1970 we had snow stick to the ground in town.

THIS WEEK

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JH ALMANAC WHAT’S COOL

SEPT 27-OCT 3, 2017

4 OPINION

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FROM OUR READERS Setting the Record Straight Of course we knew Dick Mulligan was going to go after “inadequate laws” and of course we know that’s absolute bullshit! The laws are inadequate, but AMPLE for bringing FELONY charges against Stearns in a number of cases. The second thing we knew to expect was the old argument that Stearns has used for years that his methods may be antiquated, but they are legitimate training methods. NO, NO, NO!!! They are torture, plain and simple. We are not a bunch of emotional women, clueless as to what we are seeing. The gamut from mild abuse to torture has been witnessed of Stearns’ treatment to his horses for years- not to mention his treatment of people. Mulligan cited two local vets- Ken Griggs and Theo Schuff. I understand many like Theo. Tough. Both of these vets have been utterly negligent. They have been part of the entourage of local “authority” that have chosen time and again to look the other way when Stearns commits his cruel acts. We need to get to the bottom of that, and we will. In the meantime, Becket Hinkley needs to be arguing that that old school of corrupt players has seen their time and proven themselves unworthy, as well as either negligent or corrupt. Their time is through, and professional witnesses that are objective and educated will weigh in on this treatment at the trial. Finally, Dick Mulligan went on a long diatribe about Stearns being a lifelong resident of this community for all of his 64 years. He and his extensive family have lived and operated businesses here, blah blah blah… . All I can think is that that is part of the problem. People look the other

way because of the Stearns family? Did his father, the well-liked “Stearnsy” pay the sheriff’s department years ago to “look the other way when my bad boy acts out?” What’s going on here? Againshame on the entirety of our local system, including the sheriff’s department, prosecutor’s office and judges, for allowing such an egregious person to terrorize the community, no matter who he is! Let’s get to the bottom of this. Let’s set the record straight. Let’s get this dark and foul situation into the light and behind us?! Thank You ALL for your part in the fight!  - Mary Wendell

Coming Out I find myself becoming increasingly incensed by the manner in which working people are treated in Jackson Hole. Ugly truths are being swept under the rug, as we work hard to project to the world an image of a “mountain paradise.” But like most lies, the truth has a way of coming out. You may ask me, why do I care? It is not because of religious conviction; it is not because I want to be publicly recognized as an advocate. I care because the level of injustice these people are subjected to has reached unsustainable levels, and even more so because of the willful ignorance of so many citizens who would rather ignore the issue. A lot of workers are underpaid for what they do; this creates problems that are worsened by the high cost of living and an absence of benefits. A great number have to commute on roads that are dangerous in winter. I get exasperated when people take refuge behind the fact that we are, by

some measures, “the most giving County in the nation.” The truth is that out of all philanthropic donations in Teton County, less than 25% are given to non-profits dealing with social services. The affordable housing issue came to a head when local employers could not find or retain good employees. As a local businessman myself, I have seen firsthand that a lot of businesses do not respect their workers; they pay them skimpy wages, offer no benefits, and do not provide housing. These types of owners give fuel for the people who say that creating new jobs aggravates the housing quandary, but it does not have to be so. Yvon Chouinard wrote a visionary book on the subject that was proved by his own business success; if employers provide a quality of life and respect to their workers, they will be rewarded in return with hard work and employee loyalty. While employers are part of the issue, the other major problem facing housing is zoning regulations, which have made it nearly impossible to develop homes that are affordable for working people. Habitat for Humanity, the Housing Trust and the Housing Authority have worked exceptionally hard to address the challenge head on, and their vision, compassion and effort has helped tremendously- I praise them. But the blunt choice we are facing is this: the landscape or a sustainable community, where our children have the chance to live with less social inequity ? Being a Type-A guy, I dislike the concept of “just going with the flow,” and as a community we have done just that as far as our economic life is concerned. We have never looked to create innovative economic sectors producing new types of

SINGLE-TRACK MIND It’s a tough time in Jackson to be a mountain biker. Many of our favorite trails are shut down by rain or snow, days are shorter and the focus is moving toward skiing. But don’t hang up your bike just yet. Mark my words that that enough trails will dry out in order to get your dirt fix. October can be splendid riding in town if you play your cards right, watch the weather and hit the windows. It’s also a perfect time for a road trip. There are so many gems nearby that will remain open. It can be as simple as a day trip to Dubois or Lander. Or if you want to go a bit further, Pocatello has an incredible trail network that can keep you busy for a day or a weekend. Vernal, Utah has been building trails west of town and there are also possibilities north of town on the way from Flaming Gorge. Helena is making a name

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for themselves in the MTB world and they’re also in the sun belt so they should stay dry for a while. Boise offers almost year-round riding with everything from fast, smooth singletrack to a great bike park in Eagle, just fifteen minutes from downtown. And, of course, southern Utah is the mecca for winter riding. The Moab Ho-Down is Halloween weekend with lots of fun events planned. St. George is warmer than Moab so it’s perfect in January if we’re in a high pressure and the skiing is blown out. Every one of these towns have great bike shops to glean some local knowledge. But it never hurts to have the TrailForks app on your phone to keep from getting too lost when you venture into the unknown. So don’t mope, go explore! - Cary Smith

prosperity. The people who would have Jackson be simply a playground for the rich are well on their way to succeeding. Yet many of them don’t seem to consider the people who make this place work, and where those people are supposed to live. Maybe it is simply more convenient for them to let employees commute long distances, but we, as a community need to take a stand if we want to reverse this insidious trend. The solution is to elect local representatives who are ready to take on the necessary zoning changes so that we can rebuild a community where the white and blue color workers, professionals, teachers, and first responders can live side by side. Zoning, as it stands now, is the culprit. There is also a great need for young people, particularly those in their 20’s to 40’s, to take a more active role in politics. With their lack of engagement, they open the door to representatives who are elected by an aging non-progressive electorate. This is a wasted opportunity, and one mistake they cannot afford to keep making if they hope to make Jackson a place they can afford to call home. In conclusion: the points I tried to put across are the following: Ignorance of the hardship of the working people. The choices are either the Status Quo that will result in the death of our community or a humanly sustainable one where inequalities are reduced to a minimum. The younger generations have to become conscious of their electoral power in order to elect representatives who will deal with an economy which can give quality of life for its people and that entails changing the zoning drastically. - Yves R.H. Desgouttes

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DEMOCRACY IN CRISIS Where the Hell is Kekistan? How have Pepe-posting meme warriors responded to real violence of alt-right? BY BAYNARD WOODS @demoincrisis BAYNARD WOODS

whatever they want so long as they’re the ones who bought it and own it themselves,” said Diogenes. “If it’s their property, like-” “I just mean to have your thing associated with other things,” I said. “Being associated with what happened in Charlottesville. Is that weird or is that-?” “No” he said. “People are going to freely associate with whatever they want. I mean it’s unfortunate that they they had to bring an insane racism to it but there are those people and if they’re doing it. Some of them do it just to be an asshole and they think that they’re edgy and it will hurt people’s feelings.” He paused. “And it does,” he said, almost admiringly, of the ability of racist remarks to cause emotional pain. “It’s when they legitimately mean it that it becomes an issue and it’s when they’re trying to make it [racism] law that it becomes an issue.” That really stunned me, but it shouldn’t have. For shitposters like Diogenes, it seems that the big problem with the Nazis is that they aren’t ironic enough in their hatred. This ironic stance that embraces and simultaneously denies embracing racist hate also explains the deep affinity between the trolls and Trump. Like the President, the shitposters think they’re wised up but have ended up as “useful idiots” using their digital skills to help normalize Nazis and also further Russian active measures to undermine our democracy. PJH

SEPTEMBER 27, 2017 | 5

I talked to one guy who carries a flag and wears a green robe but he had nothing much to say before skimpering off behind an Eric Trump-looking Proud Boy like a cartoon puppy. There was another more practical Kekistani looking battle-ready and standing over around a group of militia members. His allegiance to his online community was expressed in a T-shirt with a green fist rising up above the word “Kekistan.” Below, it said something about the “normie occupation,” a phrase used to indicate the oppression of the nerd by normal people. He was wearing a fur hat with a Gopro camera mounted on its front. A walkie talkie and a megaphone hung from his backpack straps. With his long beard and cossack hat, it half looked like he was cosplaying Alexander Dugin, the bearded Russian theorist sometimes called “Putin’s Rasputin.” When I asked him why he is out repping Kekistan rather than something else, he rather politely asked: “How ok with swearing are you?” “Totally fine,” I said. “I am an ethnic shitposter,” he said. “Which is essentially I’m an asshole for the sake of being an asshole.” He said his name was Diogenes, because Diogenes the Cynic was the first real troll. “At Charlottesville I saw people burning a Kekistan flag as well as like a confederate flag and stuff and if a shitposter is just being an asshole to be an asshole, is that cool?” I asked. “Is that part of being an asshole or does that bother you like…” “Oh, people have the freedom to do

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man, these guys—and they are decidedly guys—had a mythology and a god. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s entry on the alt-right’s association with the deity, “Kek was portrayed as a bringer of chaos and darkness, which happened to fit perfectly with the altright’s self-image as being primarily devoted to destroying the existing world order.” To go along with their new half-ironic religion, they created a purely digital (and imaginary) country called Kekistan and after the election they made trump their God-Emperor. And they started getting flags made. Now, to free his Pepe from the far right and the racists, Furie has sent cease and desist notices to a number of alt-right figures such as Richard Spencer, Mike Cernovich, and Baked Alaska. Baked Alaska, who claims to have been almost blinded by antifa activists in Charlottesville, tweeted. “Hillary Clinton’s lawyers have been summoned to sue me & others over a cartoon frog meme. Bad idea to start this battle,” he tweeted. The ability to post whatever they want online is the main political issue for many of the shitpostetrs and so they have called for a new meme war attacking Furie for challenging their use of his creation. But the two flags burning beside each other stuck in my mind so the next time I saw some of Keksters, at the Mother of All Rallies on the National Mall earlier this month, I asked them about the association of their flag with that of the Nazis in Charlottesville.

n Charlottesville, when it seemed like the Nazis had been driven from town, shortly before the terrorist attack that killed Heather Heyer, a group of antiracist protesters gathered in a small park and set fire to several confederate flags and a big green, white and black Kekistani flag. I stood in the dirt beneath a tree watched the two flags wither and curl beneath their own combustion on the dark ground. One was born of the slaveholder insurrection against the U.S. and the other from what some in the message-board subculture call the “great meme war of 2016” and both, somehow, represent the Trump coalition. The fictional nation of Kekistan grew out of the Pepe the Frog meme. Pepe became popular after a “Boys Club” comic strip by his creator Matt Furie depicted him peeing with his pants all the way down because “feels good man.” The videogamers, “men’s rights” activists, hackers, trolls, and shitposters who populate sites like 4chan started embracing the Pepe the Frog meme to symbolize, as Dale Beran wrote in a post that went viral last February, “embracing your loserdom, owning it.” Soon, Pepe, who had come to embody the troll ethos, also found an analogue in politics. “Trump, the loser, the outsider, the hot mess, the pathetic joke, embodies this duality. Trump represents both the alpha and the beta,” Beran wrote. In May, Furie drew another strip, showing Pepe lying dead in a casket. But his creation had by then already escaped him. At the same time as the far-right elements on message boards began to adopt Pepe, they also began using the letters KEK instead of LOL to indicate online laughter. Then, when they noticed that there was an Egyptian god named Kek, which was depicted as a frog-headed

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Rite of Passage To be men, real warriors don’t have to kill lions BY TODD WILKINSON @BigArtNature

aniel Ole Sambu and I were sitting in the second-floor grand room at Jackson Lake Lodge discussing predator conflicts this week when he said, “American cowboys love their cows and we love our cows too.” Mr. Sambu isn’t a wrangler; he’s a herdsman-warrior by identify—a member of the mighty Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania. Daniel’s people for 600 years have venerated the killing of lions as a rite of passage for boys becoming men. They’ve also adhered to a long tradition of taking lethal revenge on big cats that eat their livestock. Cattle are treasured assets on the same African plains where great wildlife migrations still happen. Think of the Disney film The Lion King. Yet this is the real-life region that serves as a comparative reference point for the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. While lions have caused conflict with the Maasai, they are simultaneously beheld with profound reverence. Still, the outlook for lions is grim. In the span of two human generations, lion populations in eastern and southern Africa have plummeted from hundreds of thousands to just 20,000, raising fears that by the middle of this century they might cease to exist in the wild. Finding this outcome unacceptable, Daniel got involved with an organization called Big Life Foundation, where he serves as predator protection coordinator. Big Life Foundation has ushered forth two game-changing initiatives. It has a compensation program that reimburses livestock losses caused by lions. Further, it has advanced an alternative to the deeply-engrained belief that a young man must kill a lion to earn warrior credentials. In its place is something called “the Maasai Olympics,” where men from different clans compete with one another to earn honor and respect in their community.

Daniel knows how difficult it can be to tweak culture so that new ways of thinking are possible. During his younger years, he and his friends carried their traditional spears on five unsuccessful lion hunts. Today he is a role model for a different way of thinking. At age 41, Daniel holds status as a Maasai elder. He is also a father of four (two boys and two girls) and, equally important, a mentor to young men, showing that culture can be respected and lions kept alive as assets. Of course, conflict in Maasai land is much more complicated than just lions vs. people. Hyena predation on livestock is a serious problem—and there are leopards. But there’s also an insidious link to climate change that has created an epic challenge In the wake of devastating drought, many Maasai switched from herding cattle to sheep and goats—animals not only more vulnerable to predators, but their grazing is causing desertification, destroying the land’s ability to support cattle and wildlife. Just as Daniel and colleagues have made tremendous strides in resolving one dilemma, they face another. For just $1.2 million annually, Big Life is nonetheless achieving extraordinary results. It funds the predator compensation program, employs 360 community rangers involved in anti-poaching efforts and has a scholarship program for 200 students. Big Life is helping both lion and elephant populations (the latter racked by ivory poachers) to rebound. The Maasai’s story is told in a moving new film, Tribe Versus Pride, by Dereck and Beverly Joubert (Terra Mater Factual Studios). Every time I attend the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival, which attracts the best nature filmmakers and most innovative conservation thinkers in the world, I leave with three emotions: Inspiration as a result of breathtaking work happening at a time of global ecological crises; admiration for film fest director Lisa Samford who, together with her team, put on an extraordinary event; and tinges of sadness. Why sadness? First, the world needs courageous underdogs like Daniel and his associates who, against overwhelming odds, are fighting battles to save wildlife. They deserve our support but don’t always get it. Second, I wonder: Are we as humans capable of paying attention to the big picture?

DANIEL OLE SAMBU

THE NEW WEST

Photo of Daniel Ole Sambu

Third, with such a profound combination of hard-earned experience, insight and talent assembled in one place, why do federal and state wildlife managers in Greater Yellowstone not use the knowledge pouring out of the film festival as a vital resource? Answer: There is still a prevailing imperialistic/post-colonial mindset that we in the developed world have all the answers. Yet it’s clear with ongoing, often irrational, mindsets prevailing in our own region with issues like “predator management” that we don’t. There is a lot rural communities in the U.S. could learn from the Maasai on how to change culture to achieve better outcomes for

co-existence between humans and predators. If you care about lions, elephants and the future of other iconic African species, if you believe in the power of local people to make positive change, and if you root for underdogs, then you ought to think about Daniel Ole Sambu of Big Life Foundation (biglife.org) in your giving. PJH

Todd Wilkinson, editor of mountainjournal.org, is author of Grizzlies of Pilgrim Creek (mangelsen.com/grizzly) about famous Jackson Hole Grizzly 399 featuring 150 pictures by renowned local wildlife photographer Tom Mangelsen.

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Wyoming’s abortion providers fight back against threats, crazy religious bullshit, and most importantly, misinformation BY SHANNON SOLLITT @ShannonSollitt

linic bombings, picket lines and threats to life and safety — these are just some of the hurdles abortion providers in the state of Wyoming and across the nation face to provide women safe, legal access to reproductive medicine. It’s common knowledge at this point that Wyoming offers limited options to women who want or need an abortion. According to Wyoming Women for Women, a nonprofit that helps women find funding for abortion treatment, Jackson is home to the only two abortion providers in the state. Abortion is a risky business in a red state, and Dr. Brent Blue is the only physician in all of Wyoming that provides surgical abortions. He’s paid the price to do so. His clinic was bombed in 1993. It was at night, and luckily no one was inside,

but the incident shut his operation down for weeks. He’s had paint thrown in his car parked in the driveway at his home, received more death threats than he can count, 3 am phone calls. “All that sort of stuff,” he says, as if it were as common as a traffic jam at rush hour. As if it weren’t already hard enough for Dr. Blue and the one other provider in Wyoming to provide access to safe abortions, legislators made it even harder earlier this year when they passed two new laws restricting abortion—the first such restrictions in 28 years. The laws took effect in July. Laws like these will only make it harder to receive women’s healthcare, according to Dr. Blue, and for no good reason. “There’s a tremendous amount of misinformation,” Dr. Blue said. The first law requires physicians to offer women a chance to see an ultrasound of the fetus and listen to the fetal heartbeat. “In our office, if they wanna see the ultrasound, all they gotta do is turn their head to the right,” Dr. Blue said. Besides, he added, at 12 weeks (the point to which Blue will provide a surgical abortion), a fetus is “only about the size of a lima bean.” Most terminations occur at around six weeks, according to Dr. Blue, at which point “it’s so tiny you can barely see it.” The second law makes it a federal offense to use fetal tissue for science or experimentation. That law, Blue said, is based on a “bullshit ideas someone put together about

Planned Parenthood. They ended up getting indicted. No one has ever sold fetal parts, the passage of that bill was just stupid.” Indeed, such laws are based on debunked accusations from anti-choice organizations that Planned Parenthood was selling aborted fetal tissue. “That never happened,” Dr. Blue said. The fabricated videos, which first surfaced in 2016 and purported to show Planned Parenthood representatives discussing the sale of fetal tissue and parts, have been widely debunked. The allegations were investigated by more than a dozen states, none of which found evidence supporting the claims, and the two anti-choice activists who recorded the videos found themselves in hot water, facing felony charges in California over illegally recording the subjects in the video without permission. Still, the debunked videos created enough public rage that Planned Parenthood funding has been in jeopardy ever since. Wyoming’s sole Planned Parenthood in Casper shut down July 21, and it didn’t even provide abortions. But the fetal tissue law is more insidious than it seems, says local obstetrician-gynecologist Dr. Giovannini Anthony. “This is the way anti-abortion people chip away at your rights,” Antony said at a screening of “Trapped,” a documentary about reproductive rights, hosted by Women for Women. Such a law scares physicians away from all sorts of medially relevant practices—say, for example, an In Vitro patient discovers their pregnancy isn’t viable, and

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Funds are available through Women for Women and Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, but the costs are still high. “Nobody should have to drive for three hours to get healthcare,” Dr. Blue said. “Especially when there’s healthcare in the area. It doesn’t make sense.” Dr. Blue is highly critical of anti-abortion lawmakers, protesters, and individuals. They are not “pro-life,” he says. There is no such thing. Instead, “there’s anti-choice.” “Pro-lifers don’t start bombing places,” he said. They also don’t threaten doctors— whose job it is to keep people alive—with their lives. “It’s crazy religious bullshit is what it is,” he said. “What if it was a rape? Is the father gonna pay for the pregnancy?” Blue suspects not. He also suspects that such a debate wouldn’t even exist if men could get pregnant. “We don’t tell men when to have vasectomy’s, there’s such a double standard,” he said. Besides, Dr. Blue said, even in a conservative state, choice in an inherently Wyoming value. When anti-choice protesters from Kansas paid Jackson a visit in 2011, even local “pro-life” organizations told them to buzz off. “In Jackson, you can disagree with somebody, but you don’t tell them what to do,” Blue said. PJH

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SEPTEMBER 27, 2017 | 9

they want to examine that tissue. The implications of such a law, Dr. Anthony said, are broader than people, and lawmakers, realize. But the threats have not deterred Dr. Blue’s practice—“probably foolishly,” he said. “I don’t think that as a provider I’m gonna be intimidated by people who are anti-choice and basically anti-woman,” said Dr. Blue. Providing terminations is just part of the job, Dr. Blue said. Abortions are less than one half of percent of his practice, but they are essential to it. “We provide full-service family practice,” Dr. Blue said. “Pregnancy termination is just part o being a family physician.” Approximately 70 percent of Wyoming women cross state lines for pregnancy terminations, Dr. Anthony estimates. They drive to Denver or Fort Collins, where Planned Parenthood is available and affordable. But those in the western part of the state, and in eastern Idaho, often opt for a three-hour drive to Jackson instead of an eight-hour drive to Colorado. Dr. Blue sees patients from Idaho Falls, Pocatello, Lander, Rock Springs “and every place in between.” Terminations are expensive—a medical abortion, or the abortion pill, costs at least $600, and a surgical abortion is upwards of $1,000. Weigh that with the extra travel costs and time off work, and it’s a daunting undertaking. The decision often comes down to whether it is less daunting than carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term, and then providing for a child.

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Slednecks vs. Hippies Residents flip, flop and flounder on a proposed snowmobile event in Jackson BY SHANNON SOLLITT @ShannonSollitt

all it an identity avalanche of epic proportions. Following three subsequent town council meetings where council members shot down, then agreed to reconsider, then flipped and approved, a snowmobile race at the base of Snow King, community members once again faced an age-old identity crisis: Is Jackson a community of conservationists, hippies and free concert-farmers-market-goers? Yes. Is it a community of snowmobilers and slednecks? Also yes. Over the past three weeks, councilors’ — and subsequently PJH’s — inboxes flooded with messages from community members either staunchly opposing or vigorously supporting the International Series of Champions Snocross, a twoday snowmobile event. There was no in between.

Sound familiar? A similar reaction ensued after one councilman and one mayor decided to replace the president’s portrait in town hall chambers with one of Native American Chief Washakie. The same councilman and mayor voted against the snow cross race, and maintained their positions through Monday night (though Mayor Pete Muldoon was absent from Monday’s meeting and did not get to vote). Each decision seemed to split the town in two. Councilor Hailey Morton-Levinson, meanwhile, surprised even herself on September 18. She was one of the original three votes that shut the event down on September 5. But after receiving over 200 emails and listening to nearly an hour of public comment overwhelmingly in favor of the event, she made a motion to reconsider the event application. Finally, the application was in front of council again this past Monday. Snow King Mountain Vice President Ryan Stanley proudly presented councilors with amendments to the application, all of which he thought addressed the council’s concerns: an earlier finish, no fireworks, and more restrictive alcohol sales. Instead of donating $1 to the Doug Coombs Foundation, ISOC (the event host) will donate a flat five percent of all ticket sales. Throughout the three-week deliberation, “community character” became the biggest buzzword. “What does this say about our character?” questioned Franz Camenzind in public comment.

The question, Camenzind offered, was whether Jackson is the place for such a raucous event. But snowmobiling is, in fact, essential to “community character,” many reminded the council. Snowmobilers are part of the community, and have been for a long time. “Snowmobiling is an essential part of the fabric of our community,” said Jesse Combs at the September 18 meeting. Combs offered statistics to prove his point: There were more snowmobile tags sold in Teton County last year than any other part of the state. Local residents bought 339 tags last year—13 percent of all sold in the state. One need only look around town in the wintertime, he said, to see an abundance of sleds being towed behind trucks. “To deny [snowcross] would be sending the wrong message to young snowmobilers, and the snowmobiling community in general,” Combs said. Young snowmobilers like Zach Mason, whose mom Marty spoke up on his behalf, also stated their cases. Zach has participated in snowcross since he was four years old, his mom said. Contrary to the rowdy reputation snowmobilers often have, Mason said, snocross is a family event. “ We’re watching as families continue to grow and bond with each other,” she said. “I implore you to allow an opportunity like this to come to Jackson Hole so you can experience what it is we do every weekend.”

In his initial presentation, Stanley compared the snowcross race to the Hill Climb, arguably to his demise. Councilman Jim Stanford reminded the public what Hill Climb is most known for: Chaos. “How would you characterize the hill climb?” Stanford asked Police Chief Todd Smith “It would definitely qualify as one of the busiest weeks we have,” Smith replied. Smith described a weekend full of fights, DUI’s, and public intoxication charges. Last year, 78 kegs of beer were sold in just one day. “There are definitely public safety issues in the evening,” he said. “An event that promises the atmosphere of the hill climb is not something I’ve ever heard a single resident wish for,” Stanford said. He continued, stating that the community members he talks to merely “tolerate” the hill climb. “It’s not their favorite thing, but they tolerate it,” he said. That didn’t sit well with a lot of people. Cue the emails. “You as elected officials have a duty to the community, not to your personal agenda,” wrote Tom Kostreba. “Snowmobilers are good people who do great things for many. Look at the real facts on what the Jackson Snow Devils [the entity behind the Hill climb] are donating to the Shriners.” “I think the discriminatory comments and opinions toward a particular

Ewwwww!

OF THE

WEIRD

Forget the horrifying clown from It. The newest inhabitant of your nightmares is a giant “fatberg” in the sewer system beneath the streets of London. A fatberg is created by a buildup of fat and grease combined with used diapers, sanitary napkins and wipes. This one is almost the length of three football fields and weighs more than 140 tons. Matt Rimmer with London’s Thames Water said the current glob is “a total monster and is taking a lot of manpower and machinery to remove, as it’s set hard.” He said it’s basically like trying to break up concrete.

Wait, What?

Entrepreneur Miki Argawal, 38, of Brooklyn, N.Y., was a hit at this year’s Burning Man gathering in Nevada, where she pumped breast milk and offered it to fellow attendees to help with hangovers or use in lattes. She even tried some herself, saying it tasted a bit like coconut milk. She estimated that 30 to 40 people tried her milk. “The fact that any part of that could be seen as taboo … It’s time that conversation changes,” Argawal said.

Least Competent Criminals

Terror suspect and Uber driver Mohiussunnath Chowdhury, 26, of Luton, England, was detained in London on Aug. 25 after using his navigation program to direct him to Windsor Castle. But the technology led him astray, and he pulled up outside The Windsor Castle pub in Windsor. After realizing his mistake, Chowdhury headed for London, where he parked his car next to a marked police van outside Buckingham Palace, brandished a 4-foot-long sword and yelled “Allahu Akbar.” Chowdhury was charged in the Westminster Magistrates Court with one count of preparing to commit an act or acts of terrorism.

Bright Ideas

An unnamed man in Plymouth, Minn., went to extraordinary lengths and wasted two days of police investigators’ time just to get a few days away from his wife, police Sgt. Keith Bird said. The woman reported her 34-year-old husband missing on Aug. 28 and showed police a text from him saying he had been kidnapped. The kidnapper demanded a paltry $140 for his return, and the wife agreed, but the kidnapper said she could wait for the husband to receive his paycheck. Eventually police caught up with the husband, who insisted he had indeed been kidnapped but asked officers to stop investigating. “He’s fine,” Sgt. Bird said. Paul J. Newman of Rensselaer, N.Y., was sentenced to prison for 2 1/3 to seven years on Sept. 6 after pretending to be a licensed and registered architect, after an investigation the New York attorney general’s office dubbed “Operation Vandelay Industries” in a nod to “Seinfeld.” Newman’s charges included larceny, forgery, fraud and unlicensed practice of architecture. He will also have to pay more than $115,000 in restitution to his victims.

Sweet Revenge

Neven Ciganovic, 45, of Croatia was undergoing the latest in a series of plastic surgeries (this one a rhinoplasty) in Iran when he “reacted badly” to the general anesthesia

A LOCAL LISTICLE

BY PL ANE T JACKSON HOLE S TAFF

Unusual Hobbies

British tree surgeon Gary Blackburn, 53, moved to Germany 32 years ago but holds a soft spot for Britain. So when the Brexit vote passed last year, “I decided to make my own little Britain here in Germany,” Blackburn said from his home in Kretzhaus. His exhibition includes a demilitarized Centurion tank (decorated with poppies and white doves, to symbolize peace), red telephone boxes and a life-size model of Queen Elizabeth. Neighbors have complained about the tank parked on his lawn, but so far officials have not demanded that Blackburn remove it. n Farmer Jeremy Goebel of Evansville, Ind., has honored the late actress Carrie Fisher with a corn maze planted in the shape of her iconic character, Princess Leia from Star Wars. He planted the maze last spring using a GPS device, and it was scheduled to open in early September. “I’ve always been a Star Wars fan and I just wanted to pay tribute to Carrie Fisher,” Goebel said.

Why Not?

In Santa Fe, N.M., tens of thousands of people gathered at a city park on the evening of Sept. 1 to revel in the burning of the effigy Zozobra, a six-story monkey puppet filled with handwritten notes about anxieties and problems they hoped to send up in smoke. Locals dropped their notes in a “gloom box” at a shopping center, with subjects ranging from an ill family member to hurricane victims to government corruption. The tradition began in 1924 and was named for the Spanish word for upset or worry.

Errant Butt-Dials

The New York court system’s former spokesman David Bookstaver, 59, is under investigation after accidentally admitting to a New York Post reporter in August that he “barely shows up to work.” The incident happened after Bookstaver had talked with the reporter on his cell phone. Without realizing it, Bookstaver redialed the reporter’s number, and the reporter listened in as Bookstaver talked with two other people about how little he works. The court system’s inspector general is working with the district attorney’s office on an inquiry, and two county officials are calling for Bookstaver to repay $149,900 of the “ill-gotten” taxpayer money.

Dumb Luck

Forklift driver Arron Hughes, 28, of Ruthin, Wales, England, has claimed the distinction of being the first person to successfully swim across the Hoover Dam reservoir on the border between Nevada and Arizona. The dam, which provides electricity and water to Las Vegas, has sucked in and killed 275 other swimmers. But Hughes, on a 37-hour bender during a bachelor party with 10 friends on Aug. 10, jumped in on a day when nine of the 10 hydroelectric turbines were not operating. “I just thought, let’s do it … so told the lads I was off. Got sucked in—well, pushed by—the flow of the dam, so had to swim hard,” Hughes noted. “It’s a hell of a sight to see the dam from underneath.” He credits his fearlessness to his Welsh upbringing. “I’m a bit of an adrenaline junkie, really,” he said. Still, he couldn’t escape the police waiting on the other side when he pulled himself out of the water. They fined him and sent him on his way. Send your weird news items with to weirdnewstips@ amuniversal.com

5 HEADLINES WE CAN’T WAIT TO RUN THIS WINTER

Area resident successfully coordinates wool socks and Teva strap colors, or does he?

Seasonal work is so hot this season

3. Pendleton blanket fails to cover local’s white privilege, but whatever it’s like soooo cozy

2. Yellowstone National Park offers car campers free hot showers every 35-120 minutes at Old Faithful

1. Special Report: Sean Spicer reports on size of opening-day lift lines

SEPTEMBER 27, 2017 | 11

After arguing with a security guard about the high price of parking, a woman in Benxi, Liaoning Province, China, left her car in front of the entrance gate to a housing community on Aug. 22. But people have to get in and out, so a crane was employed to lift the car onto the roof of the security building next to the gate. Onlookers can be heard laughing in a video of the incident. The car was later lowered to the ground using the crane.

and developed a painful, long-lasting erection, known as priapism. As he recovered in a Serbian hospital, Ciganovic was denied painkillers and was only relieved of the condition after another surgery, although he says it will be months before he is fully recovered. The tattoo-covered Ciganovic is hoping his latest nose operation will improve his looks enough to launch him to international stardom.

THINGS

| PLANET JACKSON HOLE |

Life Imitates TV

The Price of Vanity

By THE EDITORS AT ANDREW MCMEEL

interest group are not appropriate for public officials,” wrote Firtz Doster. “All the opposing comments and excuses I have read and heard about thus far seem to be fishing for reasons not to host this event.” There is substance to the opposition, though. Any additional noise and raucous that might inconvenience humans is an even bigger bummer to local wildlife. “This is not about profiling or stereotyping as [Councilman Don Frank] felt the need to bring up, but about being good neighbors and having the best interest of our entire community, including our wildlife, at heart,” Mike May wrote. The Conservation Alliance voiced similar concerns. Snow King is home to deer, elk, moose, cougars, bears and even wolves, said Executive Director Skye Schell. “The presence of wildlife shouldn’t be up for debate,” Schell said. Fourth of July fireworks are disruptive enough. There’s no telling what harm this event could do to wildlife populations. In the end, public outcry was enough to convince Morton-Levinson to change her vote Monday night. With Muldoon absent, the council voted 3-1 in favor of the event. Stanford remained opposed. “There has been a lot of opinions on this both for and against,” MortonLevionson said. “I don’t do this to make everyone happy and I know not everyone will be. But I always have the community’s interest at heart, and please note: we are one community. Councilman Don Frank echoed previous condemnations of the brush with which the snowmobiling community had been painted. “I have little stomach for an ‘us and them’ mentality,” Frank said. He also emphasized the commercial benefit the event will have during a time when town is typically at 30 percent capacity, at most. With the council’s blessing, the ISCO Snocross will come to town December 8-9, and be televised on CBS Sports Network. PJH

NEWS

ANY NUMBER OF

| PLANET JACKSON HOLE |

12 | SEPTEMBER 27, 2017

INSIDE THE

FIRESTORM

New technology allows scientists to see the forces behind the flames. BY DOUGLAS FOX HIGH COUNTRY NEWS

“THE PLUME IS ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE HARDER TO STUDY THAN THE STUFF ON THE GROUND.”

spheric layers above the city more unstable and thus easier for a smoke plume to punch through. Scientists theorized that this powerful rise had drawn in the winds that whipped the flames into even greater fury. Later, scientists studying urban fires during the Cold War noticed something that underscored this finding: When a fire plume rotated, the rate of burning seemed to increase on the ground. It suggested that rotation lessened the drag between the plume and its surrounding air, allowing it to rise more strongly and pull in fresh oxygen more effectively on the ground. Fire is so universally familiar that we take for granted our understanding of how it works. Yet these old experiments, finished by 1970, are still a key source of knowledge about extreme fire behavior. Until recently, technology was simply too limited to reveal much more about the specific mechanisms by which a fire plume might feed a firestorm, let alone how beasts like fire tornadoes and fireballs form. Scientists needed new ways to see within the smoke and turbulent flames—to make the invisible visible. As it happens, they began finding them almost by accident. One morning in February 2005, Craig Clements watched as a 6-foot wall of flame crept across a prairie a few miles outside Galveston, Texas. He was not yet a fire scientist; in fact, he was slogging through his seventh year of graduate school, studying a completely unrelated topic—mountain winds. This was just a side project, a favor he was doing for his Ph.D. advisor at the University of Houston, who had a steel weather tower in the field. A prescribed fire had been planned there to prevent fuel buildup that could cause a more serious blaze. What would happen, they wondered, if they mounted extra instruments on the tower to measure the winds, heat and gases released by the fire passing directly beneath it? The results were startling: Clements’ sensors showed that the flames produced a surprisingly strong pulse of water vapor. Scientists knew, theoretically, that the combustion of dry plant matter would release water vapor along with carbon dioxide, but it had never been measured this carefully in a real fire. When Clements showed his work at a conference several months later, scientists there implored him to do more experiments. “It rescued my life, my academic career,” Clements says. “Totally.” Clements abandoned his previous line of study and landed a faculty job at San José State University in 2007, where he continued his research. His instrument towers, deployed in carefully controlled fires, provided yet more unprecedented and precise measurements: how winds accelerate and draft into an advancing flame front, the heat and turbulence above the flames, and the speed of the rising hot air. Still, dangerous behaviors like fire tornadoes, or lofting of embers, usually happen in fires much larger than experiments can replicate. And the plumes of those fires rise thousands of feet. Clements was capturing the action only within a few feet of the ground. He was just getting point measurements—

SEPTEMBER 27, 2017 | 13

buildings and exposing their flammable contents to a rain of incendiary canisters that hissed as they fell. Thousands of small fires sprang up. Families retreated into basements. The buildings above them roared into flame, and these growing fires greedily sucked air from their surroundings. Their collective inhalation drew winds through the narrow urban canyons, pulling along embers that ignited even more buildings. Within minutes, the fires were merging. The winds swirled into flaming tornadoes that swept people up and turned them into human torches. Balls of fire shot out of buildings. Within 60 minutes, a spiraling pillar of smoke had swelled into an anvil-shaped thunderhead that towered 30,000 feet over the city. At least 42,000 people died, and another 37,000 were injured. Sometime during the night, someone scribbled a word for the unspeakable destruction into the logbook of the Hamburg fire department: “feuersturm”—in English, “firestorm.” Such cataclysms had occurred before. Fires destroyed London in 1666; Peshtigo, Wis., in 1871; and San Francisco following the 1906 earthquake. But Hamburg might have been the first time that people intentionally created a firestorm, with chilling calculation. The British chose to bomb that section of the city, not just to demoralize the workers in Germany’s critical U-boat industry, but also because of the tightly packed buildings that covered 45 percent of its ground area. And their tactics were almost certainly influenced by experiments begun four months earlier, across an ocean and half a continent, on a remote desert playa in northwestern Utah. There, at the Dugway Proving Ground, the U.S. Army’s Chemical Warfare Service had commissioned Standard Oil Development Co. to construct a row of steep-roofed European-style apartment buildings. Erich Mendelsohn, an architect who had fled Nazi Germany, specified every detail: 1.25-by-2-inch wood battens, spaced 5.875 inches apart, to hold the roof tiles; 1-inch wood flooring underlain by 3.5-inch cinder blocks, and so on—all to replicate the dwellings of German industrial workers. The wood was maintained at 10 percent moisture to mimic the German climate. Rooms were outfitted with authentic German curtains, cabinets, dressers, beds and cribs— complete with bedding—laid out in traditional floor plans. Then, military planes dropped various combinations of charges on the buildings, seeking the most efficient way to penetrate the roofs and engulf the structures in flames. Those experiments offered clues on what factors could cause firestorms. In the years following World War II, scientists would study Hamburg and other bombing raids to derive basic numbers for predicting when a firestorm might form: the tons of munitions dropped per square-mile, the number of fires ignited per square-mile and the minimum area that must burn. They concluded that Hamburg’s unusually hot weather set the stage for the firestorm by making the atmo-

| PLANET JACKSON HOLE |

kind of structure in a fire plume, ever.” For decades, scientists have focused on the ways that topography and fuels, such as the trees, grass or houses consumed by flames, shape fire behavior, in part because these things can be studied even when a fire isn’t burning. But this line of inquiry has offered only partial answers to why certain blazes, like the Pioneer Fire, lash out in dangerous and unexpected ways—a problem magnified by severe drought, heat and decades of fire suppression. A mere 1 percent of wildfires accounts for roughly 90 percent of the land burned each year in the western United States. Some of these fires “really are unprecedented,” Mark Finney of the U.S. Forest Service’s Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory, says. Their behavior “is particularly threatening because we don’t have a good way to anticipate or predict [it].” So Finney, Clements and a handful of others are increasingly turning their gaze to fire’s invisible incarnations: the hot, roiling gases and smoke swirling among the flames, and the rising plumes they coalesce to form. There, they believe, lies the key to understanding the way a wildfire breathes—roaring into conflagration with bigger gulps of oxygen or sputtering along more slowly on little sips. How it moves, spawning lethal fireballs or hurling burning logs ahead of the flames. The way it grapples with the upper layers of the atmosphere, sending embers in unexpected directions to propagate itself across the land. Even, perhaps, the role its elemental opposite—water—plays in driving its explosive growth. Nailing those connections could provide new tools for monitoring fires and predicting their behavior. This could give firefighters precious minutes of advance warning before potential catastrophes, and better inform the difficult decision to order an evacuation. But it won’t be easy. “The plume is orders of magnitude harder to study than the stuff on the ground,” says Brian Potter, a meteorologist with the Seattle-based Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Laboratory who sometimes works with Clements. Indeed, it took a global c on f l a g r ation much darker than any forest fire to even begin laying the foundations of this work. Kingsmill’s comparison of the Pioneer Fire to a bomb, it turns out, isn’t far off. The evening of July 27, 1943, was stiflingly hot in Hamburg, Germany. The leaves of oak and poplar trees hung still in the air as women and teenagers finished factory shifts and boarded streetcars. They returned home to six-story flats that lined the narrow streets of the city’s working-class neighborhoods. They opened windows to let in cooler air, and folded themselves into bed. It was nearly 1 a.m. when British planes arrived over their target. Searing yellow flares drifted down over the city, and dropped to mark the city’s eastern quadrant. Bombs followed, tearing open

ircraft N2UW has flown through all kinds of weather. The sleek twin-propeller plane is so packed with scientific gear for studying the atmosphere that there’s barely room for two passengers to squeeze into its back seats. Monitors show radar reflections, gas concentrations and the sizes of cloud droplets. The plane has flown through tropical rainstorms in the Caribbean, through the gusting fronts of thunderheads over the Great Plains, and through turbulent downslope winds that spawn dust storms in the lee of the Sierra Nevadas. But the four people on board on Aug. 29, 2016, will never forget their flight over Idaho. The plane took off from Boise at 4 p.m., veering toward the Salmon River Mountains, 40 miles northeast. There, the Pioneer Fire had devoured 29,000 acres and rolled 10 miles up Clear Creek Canyon in just a few hours. Its 100-foot flames leaned hungrily into the slope as they surged uphill in erratic bursts and ignited entire stands of trees at once. But to David Kingsmill, in the plane’s front passenger seat, the flames on the ground 2 miles below were almost invisible—dwarfed by the dark smoke that towered above. The fire’s plume of gray smoke billowed 35,000 feet into the sky, punching into the stratosphere with such force that a downy white pileus cloud coalesced on its underside like a bruise. The plume rotated slowly, seeming to pulse on its own, like a chthonic spirit rising over the ashes of a forest that no longer imprisoned it. “It looked like a nuclear bomb,” Kingsmill says. Undaunted, Kingsmill and the pilot decided to do what no research aircraft had done: Fly directly through the smoke. Orange haze closed around them, then darkened to black, blotting out the world. Kingsmill felt his seat press hard against his back as the plane lifted suddenly, like a leaf in the wind. Then the black turned orange. The plane jolted and fell. Pens, cameras and notebooks leaped into the air and clattered against windows. A technician slammed headlong into the ceiling. A moment later, N2UW glided back into daylight. According to the plane’s instruments, it had been seized by an 80 mph updraft of hot, buoyant air, followed by a turbulent downdraft. It was “the strongest updraft I’ve ever flown through,” Kingsmill, a precipitation and radar scientist at the University of Colorado-Boulder, says. Even stronger forces were at work several-thousand feet below: The plane’s radar waves, reflecting off rising smoke particles, had registered updrafts exceeding 100 mph. Hundreds of miles away, Kingsmill’s research partner, Craig Clements, a fire meteorologist at San José State University, watched the plane’s flight path creep across a map on his laptop screen. The unfolding drama offered a tantalizingly detailed glimpse into the anatomy of an extreme wildfire. “It’s amazing,” Clements says. “We’ve never seen this

TEST OF M-69 INCENDIARY BOMB AT DUGWAY PROVING GROUND. THE VILLAGE REPRODUCTION WAS CONSTRUCTED IN 1943 IN ORDER TO PERFECT FIREBOMBING OF GERMAN RESIDENTIAL AREAS.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

ually descend down the slope of the volcanic plateau where the fire burned, and they noticed something strange. Even as the winds thousands of feet up blew north, the smoke just below those winds was drifting steadily south. They spent the rest of the day following the broad mass of smoke as it oozed 20 miles downhill, like a gauzy, viscous lava flow in the sky. During that drive, they downloaded weather and satellite images of the broader smoke plume from both the Bald Fire and the similar-sized Eiler Fire, 10 miles to the southwest of it. A surprising picture emerged. Smoke from the Bald Fire had shaded broad swaths of the landscape—cooling the ground, and several thousand feet of air above it, by a few degrees. Even as the winds blew north, this cool, dense air was rolling downhill like molasses, pushing under the winds as it followed the contours of the land—carrying a layer of smoke 6,000 feet thick along with it. “We had no idea we were going to see things like that,” says Lareau, who now holds a faculty position at San José State. “It seems like every time we go, we end up with new perspectives.” The team’s insight about the Bald and Eiler fires has implications for predicting smoke and air quality—a constant concern for communities near large fires. It also impacted the fires themselves. Even though both fires existed in the same atmospheric environment of pressures and winds, and burned across similar terrain, they were spreading in opposite directions that day—Bald to the south, and Eiler to the north. This denser current of cold air and smoke was actually pulling the Bald Fire in the opposite direction of what was predicted based on wind alone. Clements imagines a future in which lidar is not simply a tool of research, but also standard equipment mounted with automatic weather stations on firetrucks. This device would theoretically be much smaller and cheaper than current technology. It scans the plume continuously to obtain real-time data, which “is then uploaded into a mainframe computer that’s running a fireweather model,” Clements says, “and boom, problem solved.” The fire crew would receive a fire-behavior forecast that reflects detailed information about a plume’s evolving structure—something not currently possible. That forecast could warn about impending events, such as a strengthening updraft that might conspire with winds higher up to toss embers into unburnt areas, or an incipient plume collapse that might splash the fire and hot gases in unexpected directions.

US ARMY

| PLANET JACKSON HOLE |

14 | SEPTEMBER 27, 2017

like following a single bird to understand the movement of an entire flock wheeling in the sky. Clements wanted to capture the whole phenomenon—to look inside the opaque mass of an entire fire plume from a distance, and see all of its parts swirling at once. In 2011, he found his lens: a technology called Doppler lidar. Unlike the Doppler radar that police use to measure the speed of passing cars, lidar is tuned to detect reflections of its low-powered laser off particles smaller than red blood cells. It actually scans the sky, collecting thousands of pinpoint measurements per second, which can be reassembled into a picture of both the plume’s surface and its internal air currents. Clements and his postdoctoral student, Neil Lareau, mounted this television-sized gadget in the back of a pickup truck and hit the road in search of wildfires. In June 2014, live ammunition fired during an Army training exercise afforded them the chance to watch a fire roll through 4,800 acres of grass and oak hills at the Fort Hunter Liggett training ground in California. They watched through lidar as a rotating column of smoke stretched, narrowed and accelerated into a fire tornado two football fields across, with winds swirling 30 mph. These tornadoes, or “whirls,” can pose sudden dangers in wildfires. During a 1989 blaze near Susanville, Calif., a powerful whirl raced out of a flame front, with winds estimated at 100 mph. Three fire engines retreated just in time to escape being torched, but four crewmembers were hurled into the air—all of them seriously burned. For now, fire whirls are nearly impossible to predict. But that afternoon at Fort Hunter Liggett, Clements and Lareau began to get a sense of how they form. It was an eerie and beautiful process, hidden deep inside the smoke column. First, an embryonic disturbance in the fabric of the plume: Hot rising gases began to rotate with the motion of an air current coming from the side. This vague motion coalesced into two small, separate whirls. They circled around one another like dancing, swaying cobras preparing to mate, then merged into a single powerful vortex. “The laser is seeing through a lot of the smoke,” Lareau says. “It’s showing you something that you can’t necessarily see by the naked eye about what the fire is doing.” If firefighters had access to similar technology, they could potentially recognize an impending whirl in real time before it forms, and escape. A month after Fort Hunter Liggett, Clements and Lareau stumbled onto another discovery at the 17,000-acre-and-growing Bald Fire, north of Lassen Volcanic National Park in California. On a warm, hazy morning, the pair sped in their pickup truck along State Route 44, south of the fire, looking for a good vantage point for seeing the plume. From the bed of the truck, their lidar and radar wind profiler pointed straight up at the sky, recording the smoke, winds and clouds directly overhead. Then the highway began to grad-

Yet, even in its ideal form, that bit of technology wouldn’t be able to forecast everything: Some extreme fire behaviors are driven by smaller-scale forces that even lidar can’t capture. Scientists suspect these might be responsible for some of the more tragic firefighter deaths in recent years. The South Canyon Fire hardly seemed threatening at first. Lightning started it on July 2, 1994, atop a ridge overlooking Interstate 70, a few miles west of Glenwood Springs, Colo. It crept at a civil pace down the mountain’s slopes, through dry grass and Gambel oak. Then, around 3 p.m. on July 6, a cold front swept over the area, spawning winds that pushed the lower part of the fire across the mountain’s southern face—igniting the base of an unburned drainage. The fire crew working there might not have realized

their peril until too late. Fourteen firefighters were crossing the drainage as the fire entered its lower reaches. The flames quickly gained on them as they hurried diagonally across it, toward the ridge top, following a firebreak through the dense vegetation that they had cleared the day before. Firefighter Kevin Erickson, a couple hundred feet in front of the others, glanced back to see a wall of flame advancing up the sides of the gully before he crested the ridge and scrambled down its other side. Firefighter Eric Hipke was 45 seconds behind him. His pace quickened as the heat grew unbearable. Several steps short of the ridge top, a blast of searing air struck him from behind. He slammed to the ground with a yell, then scurried to his feet, shielding his face from a maelstrom of smoke and flying embers, and

INCIWEB.NWCG.GOV

something strange: At one point, a jet of flame seemed to shoot ahead of the fire. It lasted only a second or two, but left a trail of newly ignited vegetation in front of the fire. Not until Coen calculated the size of the pixels and the time between frames could she appreciate its true significance. The jet had surged 100 yards ahead of the fire’s front, advancing 100 mph—“like a flamethrower,” she says. It was 10 times faster than the local wind—generated, somehow, by the fire’s own internal tumult. Coen called it the “finger of death,” and for her it brought to mind the unconfirmed reports of fireballs that occasionally circulated among firefighters. She had never seen such a thing, but as she examined footage of other fires, she was surprised to find fire jets again and again. Her infrared videos were in some ways akin to those classic blurry clips of Sasquatch walking in a forest—a strange and fleeting embodiment of fire’s turbulence, without clear explanation for its existence. When you think about turbulence, what comes to mind is something felt but not seen—like a bumpy airplane ride, where the air currents themselves are invisible. Only in the special case of fire is it possible to see turbulence with the naked eye—sort of. The flames are composed of hot, glowing gases; their flickers and licks are the roiling movements of those gases. That movement unfolds too quickly for the eye to comprehend. So Finney has spent years slowing down videos of fire in experiments at his Missoula laboratory, rewinding and replaying them, exposing the secret details that have long hidden in plain view. An advancing flame front seems chaotic. “But there is organization in there,” he says. There are “flame structures that [are] very repeatable.” In his lab experiments, Finney used highspeed cameras to watch what amounted to miniature forest fires: walls of flame advancing through hundreds of cardboard “trees” the size of matchsticks. The advancing flame front resembles a jagged-toothed saw blade at any given instant, with interspersed high and low points, flickering several times per second. But slow it down, watch a single one of these high points, and you begin to perceive something more complex. The flickering peak of flame repeatedly curls over on its side, like a surfing wave in Hawaii, viewed edge-on as it rolls into a pipe and crashes on itself.

This churning wave of flame rolls over and over, staying in roughly the same place. It is a horizontal, rolling current, driven by the constant push and pull of gases within the fire. Combustion gases heated to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit are only one-quarter as dense as ambient air—a difference that makes them more buoyant and causes them to rise, creating the flickering peaks of flame. Cooler, denser gases rush downward to fill the void, driving the downward side of the rolling current and pressing down on the fire to create low spots in the flame front. F i n n e y ’s slow-motion videos show that these rolling eddies exist in pairs within the fire. They roll in opposite directions, coupled like interlocking gears. Their combined motion periodically pushes down on the advancing front of the fire, causing flames to lick downward and forward, ahead of the fire. Finney believes that these forward flamelicks are scaled-down versions of the “fingers of death” that Coen has seen in wildfires— possibly even related to the fireballs said to have shot out of buildings during the 1943 Hamburg firestorm. Coen has actually documented similar flame-rollers in real wildfires using infrared video. But she believes that the “finger of death” also requires another factor. As bushes and trees are heated by an approaching fire, their decomposing cellulose releases hydrogen, methane, carbon monoxide and other flammable gases in a process called pyrolysis. Coen and Shankar Mahalingam, a fluid-dynamics engineer at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, believe that rolling currents can mix these flammable gases with oxygen-rich air. “The dangerous situation is when the fire is going up on a hill,” Mahalingam says. “Maybe there are pyrolysis products that have accumulated” in front of the fire and mixed with fire-boosting oxygen. As the flame licks forward into this invisible tinderbox, it ignites a blowtorch. Reflecting back on the South Canyon Fire in 1994, it is tempting to wonder whether the same blast that killed Hipke near the ridge top also killed the 12 firefighters behind him—one of them just 40 yards back. Some have even speculated that Hipke would have died along with them—his lungs seared by hot combustion gases—had he inhaled rather than yelled as he fell to the ground. Coen sees the South Canyon tragedy as one of several likely caused by the “finger of death”—a monster created by the turbulent respiration of the fire itself and the violent rise of its hot, buoyant gases. These same buoyant gases also supply the momentum that drives a fire whirl to spin once it is triggered. On a much larger scale, they are what pushes a fire plume ever higher in the sky, powering the in-drafts that keep

SHE HAD NEVER SEEN SUCH A THING, BUT AS SHE EXAMINED FOOTAGE OF OTHER FIRES, SHE WAS SURPRISED TO FIND FIRE JETS AGAIN AND AGAIN.

SEPTEMBER 27, 2017 | 15

them. In the years since, however, scientists have uncovered another possibility—a type of blowup that might have caused multiple fatalities over the years, but left no survivors to describe what happened. Like Clements, Janice Coen stumbled onto these questions by accident. Coen works at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., where she studies fire’s inner workings. In September 1998, she spent several hours aboard a Hercules C-130 aircraft as it circled over Glacier National Park. The McDonald Creek Fire was marching up a steep slope at roughly 3 feet per second. Its smoke obscured the advancing flames, but infrared video cameras mounted outside the plane recorded what was happening underneath. It was only later, as Coen looked through individual frames of that video, that she noticed

| PLANET JACKSON HOLE |

sprinted over the top. Hipke was the last person to reach the ridgeline alive. He later realized that his backpack’s shoulder straps had melted through, leaving it bobbing from his waist belt. He sustained third-degree burns across the back of his arms, legs, torso and head. The bodies of the 12 remaining crewmembers were found that evening. (Two from another party, who died in a separate part of the blaze at the same time, were found July 8.) Hipke’s crew was strung out along the path they’d been following, some with their backpacks still on—as though overcome, simultaneously, by a sudden force. Observers have speculated for years about what, exactly, killed them. The fire might have overtaken them or a gust of wind might have pushed the hot gases of the plume down onto

THE KEYSTONE FIRE BURNED MORE THAN 2,500 ACRES IN THE MEDICINE BOW NATIONAL FOREST THIS SUMMER.

to Clements’ first fire experiment— the prescribed prairie burn back in 2005. It was Potter, who happened to know Clements’ Ph.D. advisor, who suggested it. Neither the results of Clements’ experiment nor those of Flambeau were conclusive about the importance of this pulse of water vapor. Still, some people have latched onto the theory. Michael Reeder, a meteorologist at Monash University in Australia, is one of them. He believes that water was pivotal in fueling the firestorm that swept through the suburbs of Canberra, the Australian capital, on Jan. 18, 2003. The fire consumed 200,000 acres of drought-stricken territory that day, isolating the city under a glowing haze of Halloween orange. Remote infrared scans suggest that during a single 10-minute period, it released heat equivalent to 22,000 tons of TNT—50 percent more than the energy unleashed by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. A series of four pyrocumulonimbus clouds rose into the stratosphere that afternoon. These fire-fueled, anvil-shaped thunderheads lofted black, sooty hail up to 6 miles away. One of them spawned a tornado that snapped the tops off pine trees as it plowed a path of destruction 12 miles long and a quarter-mile wide. The tornado and the height of the clouds “point to something extraordinary,” Reeder says. “[They] require moisture—and the question is: How do you get that much moisture over eastern Australia during drought conditions?” Combustion provides a plausible source for it. Reeder estimates that the fire incinerated over 2 million tons of wood and vegetation that day, liberating at least a million tons of water vapor into the sky. The temperature and density differences that drive such cataclysmic power can seem deceptively minuscule. When N2UW flew through the plume of the Pioneer Fire in 2016, its instruments registered updrafts of 80 to 100 mph. Yet at that elevation, 8,000 feet above the flames, the interior of the plume was only 3 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the surrounding air, meaning that its buoyant stampede through the atmosphere was powered by a density difference of just about 1 percent. In other words, given the right atmospheric conditions, a few degrees of warmth and extra buoyancy could spell the difference between a plume that pushes 40,000 feet up into the stratosphere, powering a vicious blaze on the ground—as Pioneer did—and one whose smoke never escapes the top of the boundary layer at 3,000 feet, leaving the fire stunted, like a weather-beaten dwarf tree gasping for life at timberline.

US FOREST SERVICE - BOISE FOREST SERVICE

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16 | SEPTEMBER 27, 2017

the fire burning below. But the source of the speed and energy with which these gases rise is still the subject of intense speculation. Potter, of the Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Laboratory, has found some surprising possible answers. They arise, in part, from some of those old military fire experiments—these particular ones conducted in the aftermath of World War II by a U.S. government that feared the devastation of Hamburg might represent the future of modern warfare. In the wrinkled, sage-covered mountains of Nevada near the California border, 30 miles east of Mono Lake, there is a meadow that seems to lie in shadow even on sunny days. Spread across it are hundreds of dark patches, where the soil is mixed with charcoal. These spots lie row upon row, like the ghostly foundations of a dead city. In a sense, that is exactly what they are. In 1967, workers with the Forest Service and the Department of Defense stacked 342 piles of juniper and piñon logs in this place—20 tons of wood per pile, spaced 25 feet apart. Then, at 8 a.m. on Sept. 29, they set them ablaze. Project Flambeau comprised some two-dozen experiments like this one, meant to simulate an American suburb under nuclear attack—specifically, the many small fires that would merge into a storm, as happened not only in Hamburg, but also Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Lengthy reports describe how helium balloons released near the experimental fire here rose several hundred feet, then swooped down into the flames, revealing strong downdrafts feeding the fire from its sides. But what drew Potter’s interest was the water. Concentrations of water vapor rose 10 to 20 times higher than the surrounding air. Water is a major product of combustion, second only to carbon dioxide. It forms as oxygen binds to the hydrogen atoms in wood, gasoline or just about any other fuel—creating hydrogen oxide, otherwise known as H2O. Burning 4 pounds of perfectly dry wood releases 1-2 pounds of water. Exhale onto a car window and you will see another form of the same phenomenon, fogging the glass: water produced from the oxidation of food you have eaten. This vapor is familiar and mundane; it hardly seems like a violent force. Yet water vapor fuels the strongest updrafts in nature, Potter says, from thunderstorms to tornadoes to hurricanes. As moist air rises during these storms, the water vapor condenses into cloud droplets, releasing a small amount of heat that keeps the air slightly warmer than its surroundings, so it continues to rise. “Water,” he says, “is the difference between a weak updraft and a really powerful updraft.” Potter wondered if the water vapor released from combustion might infuse extra energy into wildfire plumes. By condensing and giving off heat, it might allow some plumes to rise higher and faster, accelerating the fire on the ground. Through a bit of serendipity, this theory led

A COLUMN OF SMOKE RISES FROM THE PIONEER FIRE IN IDAHO. INSIDE THE OPAQUE PLUME, AIR MOVES AT GALE FORCES, WHICH CAN REDIRECT WILDFIRE INTO UNEXPECTED PLACES.

N2UW made two more passes through the plume of the Pioneer Fire on Aug. 29. During that third and final pass, static electricity roared through the cockpit radio. Concerned that lightning from the plume might strike the plane, the pilot turned off his antenna. That flight yielded far more than the first direct measurement of a plume’s updraft. Days later, Clements found himself looking at a portrait of the fire’s plume unlike any that has existed before: a vertical MRI slice of sorts cut along the path of the plane—captured by its fine-tuned scientific radar, aimed straight down. Color-coded by the velocity of its air currents, the blotchy mass resembled a hovering spirit—large-headed, legless and deformed. Clements’ trained eye began to pick out some basic structures: a 40 mph downdraft next to a 60 mph updraft signified a turbulent eddy on the edge of the plume. Hot air pushing up past cooler, stationary air had set in motion a tumbling, horizontal vortex—the sort of thing that could easily have accounted for the plane’s brief freefall. Those blotchy radar

pictures might finally allow us to see through wildfire’s impulsive, chaotic veneer—and perceive the more predictable, underlying forces that guide its behavior. “We didn’t even know this would work,” Clements says. “This is the most exciting thing I think I’ve ever seen in my career.” Simply seeing can be transformative. Not until people saw microbes could they comprehend and fight diseases like malaria— once blamed on foul spirits or miasmas. And not until Earth’s colorless, odorless magnetic field became visible could people appreciate how it shaped the planet’s environment. While the smoke plume of the Pioneer Fire was apparent to the naked eye, the violent forces within it were also deceptively invisible. As the plane first approached it on Aug. 29, the pilot’s standard weather console showed the plume as nothing but a swath of cool blue—a seemingly gentle updraft, with no hint of what lay in wait. PJH This story was originally published by High Country News on April 3.

THIS WEEK: SEPT 17-OCT 4, 2017

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27

n Dance & Fitness Classes 8 a.m. Dancers’ Workshop, $10.00 - $16.00, 307-733-6398 n Community Volunteer Day 9 a.m. Grand Teton National Park, Free, 307-739-3379 n Toddler Time 10:05 a.m. Teton County Library, Free, 307-733-2164 n Storytime 10:30 a.m. Teton County Library, Free, 307-733-6379 n Storytime 11 a.m. Teton County Library, Free, 307-733-6379 n Raptor Encounters 2 p.m. Teton Raptor Center, $15.00 - $18.00, 307-203-2551 n Docent Led Tours 2:30 p.m. Murie Ranch of Teton Science Schools, Free, 307-7392246 n Writer’s Club 3:30 p.m. Valley of the Tetons Library, n Covered Wagon Cookout 4:30 p.m. Bar T 5, $38.00 $46.00, 307-739-5386 n REFIT® 5:15 p.m. First Baptist Church, Free, 307-690-6539 n Bar J Chuckwagon 5:30 p.m. Bar J Ranch, $25.00 $35.00, 307-733-3370 n Covered Wagon Cookout 5:30 p.m. Bar T 5, $38.00 $46.00, 307-733-5386 n Open Build 5:30 p.m. Valley of the Tetons Library, n The Unsinkable Molly Brown 6:30 p.m. The Jackson Hole Playhouse, $37.10 - $68.90, 307-733-6994 n Jackson Hole Community Band 2017 Rehearsals 7 p.m. Center for the Arts, Free, 307-200-9463 n Salsa Night 9 p.m. The Rose, Free, 307-7331500 n Future Islands 9 p.m. Pink Garter Theatre, $20.00, 307-733-1500 n MICHAEL SCOTT Million Dollar Cowboy Bar,

n Dance & Fitness Classes 8 a.m. Dancers’ Workshop, $10.00 - $16.00, 307-733-6398

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REAL ESTATE

EMPLOYMENT

10 minutes S. of Jackson. 3bd/3ba home, 5 fenced acres. $988,000. Agents welcome. FSBO, 690-0418

The Moving Company is hiring for full-time movers. Must be hardworking & personable. Experience preferred but not necessary. Ditch the gym membership and get your workout for free. No lunks here! Call (307) 733-6683 or email themovingcompanyjh@gmail.com.

Afton - New, furnished, 1 bdrm apts with W/D. ALL util incl, Fiber Optic paid. $750 pm with flex lease. Avail. 10/1 Call/ text 801-3803165 for info/showing. No Smoking, No Pets. For Sale By Owner! 5 acres with irrigation and 3 bed, 2 bath home. Thayne, Wyoming. $285,000. (307) 413-7602

Part-time Delivery Drivers Wanted: Planet Jackson Hole is currently hiring for part-time delivery drivers. 2 days/week, Must have own vehicle • Clean driving record • Hourly wage + mileage. (307) 732.0299 or jen@planetjh.com

MISC Psychic reader restores love, luck, happiness, finances. Call today for a better tomorrow. (209)244-2125.

EMAIL LISTINGS TO SALES@PLANETJH.COM

SEPTEMBER 27, 2017 | 17

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 29

n Summer Grilling Series 11 a.m. Jackson Whole Grocer, $5.00, 307-733-0450 n Raptor Encounters 2 p.m. Teton Raptor Center, $15.00 - $18.00, 307-203-2551 n Docent Led Tours 2:30 p.m. Murie Ranch of Teton Science Schools, Free, 307-7392246 n Read to Rover 3:30 p.m. Valley of the Tetons Library, n FREE Friday Tasting 4 p.m. Jackson Whole Grocer & Cafe, Free, 307-733-0450 n Friday Tastings 4 p.m. The Liquor Store, Free, 307-733-4466 n Game Night 4 p.m. Valley of the Tetons Library, n JACKSON HOLE WILDFEST: BEST OF THE JACKSON HOLE FILM FESTIVAL 4 p.m. Center for the Arts, Free, (307) 733-7016 n Covered Wagon Cookout 4:30 p.m. Bar T 5, $38.00 $46.00, 307-739-5386 n Bar J Chuckwagon 5:30 p.m. Bar J Ranch, $25.00 $35.00, 307-733-3370 n Covered Wagon Cookout 5:30 p.m. Bar T 5, $38.00 $46.00, 307-733-5386 n Spirit of Wyoming: Raffle Drawing & Celebration 6 p.m. Art Association of Jackson Hole, 307-733-6379 n The Unsinkable Molly Brown 6:30 p.m. The Jackson Hole Playhouse, $37.10 - $68.90, 307-733-6994 n Yom Kippur/ Kol Nidre 7 p.m. St.John’s Episcopal Church, Free, 3077341999 n JACKSON HOLE WILDFEST: BEST OF THE JACKSON HOLE FILM FESTIVAL 7 p.m. Center for the Arts, Free, (307) 733-7016 n Jonathan Warren & the Billy Goats 7:30 p.m. Silver Dollar Showroom, Free, 307-732-3939 n Free Public Stargazing Programs 9 p.m. Rendezvous Park, Free, 1-844-996-7827 n Friday Night DJs 10 p.m. The Rose, Free, 307733-1500 n MICHAEL SCOTT Million Dollar Cowboy Bar,

| PLANET JACKSON HOLE |

SEE CALENDAR PAGE 20

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 28

n Dance & Fitness Classes 8 a.m. Dancers’ Workshop, $10.00 - $16.00, 307-733-6398 n Fables, Feathers & Fur 10:30 a.m. National Museum of Wildlife Art, Free, 307--733-5771 n National Women’s Health and Fitness Day 11:30 a.m. Teton County/Jackson Recreation Center, Free, 307-739-9025 n Teton Literacy Center Volunteer Training 12 p.m. Teton Literacy Center, Free, 307-733-9242 n Tech Time 1 p.m. Valley of the Tetons Library, Free, 208-787-2201 n Raptor Encounters 2 p.m. Teton Raptor Center, $15.00 - $18.00, 307-203-2551 n Docent Led Tours 2:30 p.m. Murie Ranch of Teton Science Schools, Free, 307-7392246 n Read to Rover 3 p.m. Valley of the Tetons Library, Free, 208-787-2201 n Bob Greenspan “Down in the Roots” 4 p.m. Moe’s BBQ, Free, n Covered Wagon Cookout 4:30 p.m. Bar T 5, $38.00 $46.00, 307-739-5386 n Bar J Chuckwagon 5:30 p.m. Bar J Ranch, $25.00 $35.00, 307-733-3370 n Covered Wagon Cookout 5:30 p.m. Bar T 5, $38.00 $46.00, 307-733-5386 n Open Studio Modeling: Figure Model 6 p.m. Art Association of Jackson Hole, $10.00, 307-733-6379 n The Unsinkable Molly Brown 6:30 p.m. The Jackson Hole Playhouse, $37.10 - $68.90, 307-733-6994 n Forgiveness: The Secret of Peace 6:30 p.m. Center for the Arts, $15.00, n Oktoberfest with Chanman Polka Band 7 p.m. Silver Dollar Showroom, Free, 307-732-3939 n KHOL Presents: Vinyl Night 8 p.m. The Rose, Free, 307-7331500 n Karaoke Night 9 p.m. The Virginian Saloon, 307-733-2792 n MICHAEL SCOTT Million Dollar Cowboy Bar,

| PLANET JACKSON HOLE |

18 | SEPTEMBER 27, 2017

MUSIC BOX

Future Islands

Show Us the Shows Looking for something to tickle your fancy this week in Jackson? Well, have we got the shows for you.

KHOL Vinyl Night So, KHOL’s Vinyl Night at The Rose is unlike your typical vinyl night, which is precisely why it’s on this list. Most vinyl nights go a little something like this: DJ spins his choice of vinyls, and sometimes they’re great. Other times, not so much. In this case, though, you have the opportunity to make sure every vinyl that graces the record player is a very good one, as it’s customary to bring your own vinyl—or BYOV, as we like to call it—to The Rose on these nights. What better way to spend a Wednesday night? Perhaps with some sweet cocktail deals? Yep—what we forgot to mention above is that in conjunction with those tunes, The Rose also hands out some sweet, sweet $8 vintage cocktails during KHOL’s Vinyl Night, making a night of old waxy tunes that much better. Records, cocktails and more records. Do you really need any more reasons to go? KHOL’s Vinyl Night is Wednesday, September 27 at The Rose in Jackson. The vinyl spinnin’ is free and starts at 8 p.m.

Future Islands

Known for wicked performances and some, well, pretty sweet dad dance moves, synthpop titans Future Islands arguably “made it” pretty darn big after an awkward and unforgettable performance on The Late Show with David Letterman in 2014 went viral. But even if you haven’t had the opportunity or luck to stumble across the YouTube video of Future Islands’ performance on Letterman, you might want to make an effort to head out to Pink Garter on Thursday night to catch front man Samuel T. Herring in living color. However objectively good or bad Herring’s dance moves are, they have helped the band carve a niche into the hearts of many Letterman watchers and music junkies alike, and if you catch Thursday night’s show, you’re in for a real treat. This is the first time Herring and his Future Islands cohorts—the brilliant guitar and bassist William Cashion and sweet, sweet keyboardist Gerrit Welmers—will be taking the Teton stage, and it’s something you won’t want to miss. Jackson is by far the smallest town on the Baltimore trio’s current tour, which celebrates the release of their newest album “The Far Field,” stopping in cities like Los Angeles and Dallas, just to name a few. Future Islands will be at Pink Garter, 50 W. Broadway Ave., Jackson on Thursday, September 28. Tickets start at $20. Show starts at 9 p.m.

PLANET PICKS WEDNESDAY

Bob Greenspan “Down in the Roots” (Moe’s BBQ)

THURSDAY

Future Islands (Pink Garter)

FRIDAY

Chas Collins Band (Million Dollar Cowboy)

SATURDAY

Jonathan Warren & The Billy Goats

Chas Collins

TUESDAY

Stagecoach Band Don’t side-eye us at the mention of Wilson; it’s by no means too far of a trek to catch the world-famous Stagecoach Band, and you don’t even have to cross the pass to do it. If you’re unfamiliar with Stagecoach Band, it’s time to familiarize yourselves, stat. These folks have been a staple at Stagecoach for decades, busting out a blend of rowdy country music every Sunday night—better known as Sunday Church to those in the know— that’s just perfect for dustin’ off your dancin’ shoes — err, boots. The five-member band has graced the stage more than 2,500 nights during the past 44 years, which means they have spent plenty of time perfecting the art of luring you onto the dancefloor, two-leftfeet or otherwise. Stagecoach Band takes the stage at Stagecoach, 5800 West Highway 22, Wilson on Sunday, October 1. The show is free and starts at 6 p.m.

Todd Freeman & Bullet Proof (Million Dollar Cowboy)

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SEPTEMBER 27, 2017 | 19

With a name like “Jonathan Warren & The Billy Goats,” things could either go really, really well or really, really bad. Luckily for you, in this case, it’s the former. Self-described as a hybrid of “progressive psychobilly folk grass,” these Boisebred boys know how to make some noise onstage. They’re rowdy, cause a racous and at times can be quite endearing, but

MONDAY

Jackson Hole Hootenanny (Dornan’s)

| PLANET JACKSON HOLE |

Jonathan Warren & The Billy Goats

SUNDAY

Jackson Hole Hootenanny (Dornan’s)

If you’ve somehow managed to miss Chas Collins at Million Dollar Cowboy Bar, it’s time to remedy that. We’d be pretty darn surprised, though, if you have managed to miss him, since this New Orleans-hailing cowboy stands a whopping 6’6, making him a huge presence both onstage and off. What we’re here to talk about today though, is Collins’ presence onstage, which is a pretty great presence indeed. Collins is known for high-energy shows—yes, such a thing exists in country music—and has been raved about from one stage to the next. Cowboy Collins and his band have earned over the years a pretty impressive resume as openers for some of the biggest national acts in country music: think Luke Bryan, Collin Raye, Bucky Covington, David Ball and Daryl Singletary, among others. It’s only a matter of time, though, before Chas and Co. break out on their own as headliners, so catch them at Million Dollar Cowboy while you can. It may be a long time—and much crummier seats— before you can do it again. Chas Collins plays Million Dollar Cowboy Bar, 25 N. Cache St., Jackson on Friday, September 29. The show is free.

Jonathan Warren & The Billy Goats (Silver Dollar Showroom)

no matter what side they’re showing, you can guarantee one thing: It’s a side you should see. The three-man band really knows how to put on a show, and you can be sure that if you head up to the Silver Dollar Showroom on Saturday night, you’ll be treated to the best mix of harmonica, violin, and rowdiness you’ve seen in a long, long time. Jonathan Warren & The Billy Goats play at the Silver Dollar Showroom, 50 N. Glenwood St., Jackson on Saturday, September 30. The show is free and starts at 7:30 p.m.

n REFIT® 9 a.m. Dancers’ Workshop, $10.00 - $20.00, 307-733-6398 n Wildlife Friendlier Fence Project 9 a.m. Elk Ranch Flats, Free, 307-739-0968 n Yom Kippur Services 9:30 a.m. St. John’s Episcopal Church, Free, 3077341999 n National Public Lands Day in Grand Teton National Park 10 a.m. Grand Teton National Park, Free, (307)739-3379 n JACKSON HOLE WILDFEST: BEST OF THE JACKSON HOLE FILM FESTIVAL 2 p.m. Center for the Arts, Free, (307) 733-7016 n JACKSON HOLE WILDFEST: BEST OF THE JACKSON HOLE FILM FESTIVAL 4 p.m. Center for the Arts, Free, (307) 733-7016 n Covered Wagon Cookout 4:30 p.m. Bar T 5, $38.00 - $46.00, 307-7395386

SEE CALENDAR PAGE 22

Come check out your favorite NFL/College team on our 10 HD tvs! •••••••••••

HAPPY HOUR

1/2 Off Drinks Daily 5-7pm

••••••••••• Monday-Saturday 11am, Sunday 10:30am 832 W. Broadway (inside Plaza Liquors)•733-7901

JOE RIIS

| PLANET JACKSON HOLE |

20 | SEPTEMBER 27, 2017

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30

CULTURE KLASH

A Perilous Journey to Jackson Joe Riis to chat about his new book, “Yellowstone Migrations,” Oct. 5 BY KELSEY DAYTON @Kelsey_Dayton

he migration from upper Green River Valley to Jackson is a perilous journey of more than 120 miles, one that requires dodging cars on highways, navigating energy development and subdivisions, fording rivers and climbing over mountains. Still, each year, about 400 pronghorn make the trek, despite the clear dangers that await. Their journey first captivated photographer Joe Riis a decade ago, when he was a wildlife biology student at the University of Wyoming. “Migration is fundamental for a wild animal,” Riis said. “It’s the freedom

(Above) Cover of Joe Riis’ new book, “Yellowstone Migrations.” (Inset) Joe Riis

to roam. It’s the idea of renewal and reassurance that the winter is going to end and turn to spring. It’s also the passing of knowledge from the old to the young.” But when Riis initially searched for images of the pronghorn migration online, he couldn’t find any. So he decided to take his own. A decade later, Riis, now a National Geographic Photography Fellow, is known for his migration photography. His work photographing migrating pronghorn, was followed by documenting the recently discovered longest mule deer migration from the Red Desert to Hoback Basin and then following elk across the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. He’s compiled more than 100 of those images into a new book “Yellowstone Migrations,” which he’ll be on hand in Jackson to chat about in October. Riis grew up in South Dakota in the central flyway, where waterfowl that migrates from the north to the Gulf of Mexico stop during their journey. He’d stand outside his house and watch the thousands of ducks and geese that arrived each year and wonder where

they came from and where they were going. When Riis first learned about the pronghorn migration, he’d already discovered he was more interested in communicating science to the public than performing research. The pronghorn presented a story he wanted to tell and that people would understand. The animals summer in the Tetons, a place people know and then they move out for the winter, crossing the mountains, but also private property and land managed by various agencies. “It’s quite a journey that they take,” Riis said. “While it’s only 400 animals, that band of pronghorn really give us an idea of what the wild planet has to do to eat and reproduce.” There was a reason Riis couldn’t find images of the pronghorn migration online a decade ago. No one had mastered how to photograph the animals without influencing their movements. Pictures of pronghorn on the migration route always showed them running away from the camera. Riis devised a system using digital cameras triggered by motion to remotely document the animals. The process

High Holidays Schedule of Events

5778

Services led by Rabbi Mike Comins, Josh Kleyman & Chazzan Judd Grossman. St. John’s Episcopal Church 170 N. Glenwood | Jackson, WY

Yom Kippur/Kol Nidre Friday, September 29 Led by Rabbi Mike Comins, Josh Kleyman and Chazzan Judd Grossman Prelude music begins at 7:00 p.m. Services will begin at 7:30 p.m. (Childcare provided)

Yom Kippur Saturday, September 30 9:30 a.m. Children’s Service 10:00 a.m. Shacharit, Morning Service (Childcare begins at 10:00 a.m.)

3:45 p.m. Yizkor 4:45 p.m. Mincha/Torah Reading 5:45 p.m. Break 6:00 p.m. Rabbi’s Discussion 6:30 p.m. Ne’ila 7:00 p.m. Potluck community Break Fast in Hansen Hall. Please bring a savory main dish or hearty side dish/salad. Bagels, cream cheese, dessert and drinks provided.

No tickets required.

In search of the elk summering grounds; backcountry guide Wes Livingston, elk researcher Arthur Middleton, and photographer Joe Riis and their horses/mules navigate a small pond in the headwaters region of the Yellowstone River.

SEPTEMBER 27, 2017 | 21

have created the iconic picture. The book is a compilation of a variety of images that tell the story of the three animal migrations. “I’m less interested in one specific migration and more interested in helping share the story of the process that is fundamental for the wild planet to survive,” he said. The story of migration in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is about more than just animals crossing an unforgiving natural landscape, though. It’s also about the people and agencies who have come together to ensure the natural process can continue, he said. It’s not by chance these migrations still occur despite development, Riis said. It’s because people fought to keep routes intact. “People often ask me ‘How can we help (the animals migrating)?’” Riis said. “They don’t need our help, but they need to be allowed to continue doing what they’ve been doing for thousands of years. We just need to give them time and space.” Riis will sign copies and talk about his work from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Oct. 5 at Valley Bookstore in Jackson. PJH

| PLANET JACKSON HOLE |

was labor intensive. First Riis needed to identify the exact migration path the animals traveled. Then, after securing permits and permissions from land owners and managers, he needed to select areas he thought would best capture images of passing animals. It was trial-and-error. An animal could bump a camera and change the framing. Water or snow could accumulate on the lens. Sometimes he’d check a camera and find it hadn’t documented anything he could use. Other times he’d discover images, such as the one of a doe with her leg caught in a fence that illustrated the perils of the journey. “Some of my best pictures are pictures I could never have imagined,” he said. The cover image of “Yellowstone Migrations” is one such photograph. It shows a group of pronghorn crossing the Green River in 2009. Riis said he never could never have planned for the doe looking toward the camera, its shadow illuminated on a nearby rock. Should Riis have set the camera just inches to another side, he wouldn’t

JOE RIIS

Jackson Hole Jewish Community 307-734-1999 • info@jhjewishcommunity.org

n Bar J Chuckwagon 5:30 p.m. Bar J Ranch, $25 - $35, 307-733-3370 n Covered Wagon Cookout 5:30 p.m. Bar T 5, $38 - $46, 307-733-5386 n 79th Annual Black Tie Blue Jeans Ski Ball 5:30 p.m. Top of Gondola at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, $125 - $200, 307-733-6433 n The Unsinkable Molly Brown 6:30 p.m. The Jackson Hole Playhouse, $37.10 $68.90, 307-733-6994 n Spiritual Practice in Difficult Times: Phakchok Rinpoche 7 p.m. Pink Garter Theatre, $20.00, n JACKSON HOLE WILDFEST: BEST OF THE JACKSON HOLE FILM FESTIVAL 7 p.m. Center for the Arts, Free, (307) 733-7016 n Jonathan Warren & the Billy Goats 7:30 p.m. Silver Dollar Showroom, Free, 307732-3939 n Free Entrance Day GTNP & Yellowstone, Free, 307-739-3300 n MICHAEL SCOTT Million Dollar Cowboy Bar,

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 1

n First Sundays 11 a.m. National Museum of Wildlife Art, Free, 307-733-5771 n Jackson Hole WILDFest: Best of the Jackson Hole Film Festival 4 p.m. Center for the Arts, Free, (307) 733-7016 n Stagecoach Band 6 p.m. Stagecoach, Free, 307-733-4407 n JACKSON HOLE WILDFEST: BEST OF THE JACKSON HOLE FILM FESTIVAL 7 p.m. Center for the Arts, Free, (307) 733-7016 n Hospitality Night 8 p.m. The Rose, Free, 307-733-1500

MONDAY, OCTOBER 2

n Dance & Fitness Classes 8 a.m. Dancers’ Workshop, $10.00 - $16.00, 307-733-6398 n Docent Led Tours 2:30 p.m. Murie Ranch of Teton Science Schools, Free, 307-739-2246 n Maker 3 p.m. Valley of the Tetons Library, n Hootenanny 6 p.m. Dornan’s, Free, 307-733-2415 n Master Workshop: Design with Light with Laura K. Ellis 6 p.m. Art Association of Jackson Hole Multi-Purpose Studio, $215 - $258, 307-733-6379 n TODD FREEMAN & BULLET PROOF www. toddfreemanandbulletproof.com Million Dollar Cowboy Bar,

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 3

n Dance & Fitness Classes 8 a.m. Dancers’ Workshop, $10.00 - $16.00, 307-733-6398 n REFIT® 8:30 a.m. Dancers’ Workshop, $10.00 - $20.00, 307-733-6398

SEE CALENDAR PAGE 23

FOX SEARCHLIGHT FILMS

| PLANET JACKSON HOLE |

22 | SEPTEMBER 27, 2017

CINEMA

Mixed Double Battle of the Sexes captures the stop-start frustration of social progress. BY MARYANN JOHANSON @MaryAnnJohanson

here’s that saying: Two steps forward, one step back. With feminism, it’s more like: Half a baby step forward, a dozen steps back. That’s how it’s possible that the 1973 “battle of the sexes” tennis match—meant to settle the question of whether female athletes were the equals of their male counterparts—did no such thing. Does anyone who was too young, or not yet

Emma Stone and Steve Carell in Battle of the Sexes

alive at the time to have watched, even know about it? The match was an enormous cultural event that transcended sports. And yet it seems to have been all but forgotten in the popular consciousness. Certainly the “question” of women’s athletic prowess continues to be posed, most recently in the “debate” over whether Serena Williams is the best tennis player ever or merely the best female tennis player. So, as usual, there’s a necessity to a movie like Battle of the Sexes, an urgency that it should be seen, that goes beyond its enormous sheer entertainment value. Somehow, the directing team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine) has captured the amusement value of retro-kitsch without their film being actually kitschy. They’ve managed to make a film that quietly debunks the spurious notion that feminism can’t be fun by

itself being fun, full of cheery bashes at outrageous sexism and an aura of sporting—in all senses of the word— can-do spirit. “I’m gonna put the ‘show’ back in ‘chauvinism,’” larger-than-life Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell)—55 years old and a former champion—announces at a televised press conference once Billie Jean King (Emma Stone)—the 29-year-old number-2-ranked woman in the world—has finally accepted his challenge to play him in an exhibition match. Everyone laughs, including King. But while he may be entertaining, he’s an entertaining asshole, and entirely representative of attitudes she has been battling for years. She is under no illusions about how vital it is to win this game. That’s at the end of the film, though. The movie opens with King—Stone is wonderful in the role, all quiet

TRY THESE Little Miss Sunshine (2006) Greg Kinnear Alan Arkin R

Slumdog Millionaire (1979) (2008) Dev Patel Freida Pinto R

Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011) Steve Carell Emma Stone PG-13

Suffragette (2015) Carey Mulligan Helena Bonham Carter PG-13

n Toddler Time 10:05 a.m. Teton County Library Youth Auditorium, Free, 307-733-2164 n Toddler Time 10:35 a.m. Teton County Library, Free, 307-7332164 n Toddler Time 11:05 a.m. Teton County Library, Free, 307-7336379 n Docent Led Tours 2:30 p.m. Murie Ranch of Teton Science Schools, Free, 307-739-2246 n Tech Time 4 p.m. Valley of the Tetons Library, n REFIT® 5:15 p.m. First Baptist Church, Free, 307-690-6539 n Light the Town Pink for Breast Cancer Awareness 5:30 p.m. Town Square, Free, (307) 733-3636 n Beer Making and Brewing at Snake River Brewing 6 p.m. CWC-Jackson, $40.00, (307) 733-7425 n TODD FREEMAN & BULLET PROOF www. toddfreemanandbulletproof.com Million Dollar Cowboy Bar,

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 4

BBB.5.5 Steve Carell Emma Stone Andrea Riseborough PG-13

FOR COMPLETE EVENT DETAILS VISIT PJHCALENDAR.COM

Marvel’s Inhumans fails where The Gifted shines; Curb Your Enthusiasm returns!

ot much was expected of Marvel’s Inhumans (series debut, Friday, Sept. 29, ABC), and the two-hour pilot doesn’t … not? … deliver on that lowered bar. Like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. with more ridiculous outfits, or dollar-store X-Men, Inhumans Black Bolt (Anson Mount), Medusa (Serinda Swan), Gorgon (Eme Ikwuakor), Triton (Mike Moh), Karnak (Ken Leung), Crystal (Isabelle Cornish), Maximus (Iwan Rheon) and supersized teleporting dog Lockjaw are a royal family of don’t-call-them-mutants who flee the moon for Hawaii to establish a persecuted superheroes-as-Dreamers narrative. An underwritten, obscure Marvel property dumped on Friday night doesn’t really need to perform, but it should do … something. Craig Robinson and Adam Scott in a paranormal comedy? Sounds like Adult Swim material, but Ghosted (series debut, Sunday, Oct. 1, Fox) fits nicely into Sundaynight broadcast between The Simpsons and Family Guy, maybe even better than The Last Man on Earth (which also returns tonight, Tandy fans). Cop-turned-mallsecurity-guard Leroy (Robinson) and professor-turned-bookstore-clerk Max (Scott) are recruited into a secret government agency to find a missing agent and track alien/supernatural activity on Los Angeles because why not? Ghosted is ridiculous, and Robinson and Scott go all-in (as does Ally Walker as their hard-ass boss). A rare bright spot in Fall TV 2017. Remember last season, when there were several new shows about philanthropic tech billionaires with troubled pasts buying and operating hospitals, police departments and waffle houses for the greater good? (I made one of those up; good luck guessing which one.) Wisdom of the Crowd (series debut, Sunday, Oct. 1, CBS), starring Jeremy Piven as a Silicon Valley heavy rallying millions to use the info-sharing app he created to—wait for it—solve his daughter’s murder, is just another CBS procedural with pretty

techies, just with bonus constitutional and privacy concerns. Even with Piven in vintage Ari Gold/Entourage mode, Wisdom of the Crowd is innocuous enough to skate by on CBS for years. When we last saw Larry (Larry David) six years ago, he’d split the country for France with Leon (J.B. Smoove) to avoid spending any time with sick children— totally understandable. Curb Your Enthusiasm (Season 9 premiere, Sunday, Oct. 1, HBO) doesn’t need gimmicks like “character development” and “change,” only Larry! Larry! Larry! (Thanks, Leon.) In addition to Smoove, Curb regulars Jeff Garlin, Cheryl Hines and Richard Lewis are back, and the S9 guest list includes Carrie Brownstein, Elizabeth Banks, Bryan Cranston and Lauren Graham, among others. Awkward Larry moments to look forward to: “Larry offends Jeff’s barber” and “Larry bribes a funeral usher.” Curb always delivers good blurb. Attention Marvel’s Inhumans: This is how you do a not-really-but-totally-XMen series. Also, The Gifted (series debut, Monday, Oct. 2, Fox) is nowhere near as bizarre as FX’s Legion, so relax. Suburban couple Reed (Steven Moyer) and Caitlin Strucker (Amy Acker) learn that their teen kids possess mutant abilities, go on the run from the mutie-hating government and hook with an underground mutant network; action and/or adventure ensue. In the hands of X-Men vet Bryan Singer and X-Men fan Matt Nix, The Gifted nails both splashy superheroics and emotional undertones (because, you know, teens), and is easily the best new show of the new fall season. Which is saying little, but watch, anyway. In sitcom The Mayor (series debut, Tuesday, Oct. 3, ABC), a young rapper (Brandon Michael Hall) runs for the mayoral office of his city as a publicity stunt to bolster his flailing career—guess what happens? The title probably gave it away. Later, in one-hour dramedy Kevin (Probably) Saves the World (series debut, Tuesday, Oct. 3, ABC), miserable Texan Kevin (Jason Ritter) is drafted into a mission to save humanity by a “guardian angel.” Neither of these series are cheesedick Throwback Tuesday gags from Fox circa 1987; they’re premiering right damn now on current-season ABC. And these aren’t even the lamest shows of the Worst Broadcast Fall Season in recent memory—2017, you may just kill me yet. PJH

SEPTEMBER 27, 2017 | 23

BATTLE OF THE SEXES

X-Meh

@bill_frost

| PLANET JACKSON HOLE |

n Dance & Fitness Classes 8 a.m. Dancers’ Workshop, $10.00 - $16.00, 307733-6398 n Fables, Feathers & Fur 10:30 a.m. National Museum of Wildlife Art, Free, 307--733-5771 n Tech Time 1 p.m. Valley of the Tetons Library, Free, 208-7872201 n Docent Led Tours 2:30 p.m. Murie Ranch of Teton Science Schools, Free, 307-739-2246 n Read to Rover 3 p.m. Valley of the Tetons Library, Free, 208-7872201 n Bob Greenspan “Down in the Roots” 4 p.m. Moe’s BBQ, Free, n Survivors of Suicide Loss Support Group 6 p.m. Eagle classroom at St. John’s Medical Center, Free, 307-732-1161 n Open Studio Modeling: Figure Model 6 p.m. Art Association of Jackson Hole, $10.00, 307-733-6379 n KHOL Presents: Vinyl Night 8 p.m. The Rose, Free, 307-733-1500 n Karaoke Night 9 p.m. The Virginian Saloon, 307-733-2792 n TODD FREEMAN & BULLET PROOF www. toddfreemanandbulletproof.com Million Dollar Cowboy Bar,

BY BILL FROST

determination and ambition—pulling out of the tennis federation run by Jack Kramer (Bill Pullman) over his refusal to pay women the same prize money men receive; the women, after all, sell as many tickets as the men do. The likes of Kramer, a respected authority figure, are the real problem and the most insidious misogynists, not clowns like Riggs. (Carell is an absolute hoot in the role. Ghastly, but a hoot nevertheless.) King doesn’t just pull out of Kramer’s organization: She leads other women players in boycotting his tourneys and setting up their own league. Screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire) finds a lot of sly humor in how the women’s tournament grows and succeeds, stuff that wouldn’t have caused anyone at the time to bat an eye but seems amusingly ironic today, such as the fact that it’s tobacco company Philip Morris sponsoring what is billed as “the Virginia Slims Tour.” Our eye today cannot help but pick out appalling condescension and casual abuse that was passing unnoticed in 1973, including how Battle of the Sexes commentator Howard Cosell—a legend of sports journalism and another authority figure—has no compunction about delivering his blow-by-blow with his arm draped possessively around the shoulders of his co-commentator, King colleague and fellow tennis player Rosemary Casals (Natalie Morales, very convincingly CGI’d into the original Cosell footage). It’s so … ugh. Perhaps the more trenchant history lesson, though, that Battle of the Sexes has to offer is this one: Behind every victory, even a short-lived one, is another campaign for dignity and respect waiting to be started. Battle does a lovely job of depicting the absolute necessity of King keeping her homosexuality a secret; this movie is as much a sweet and gentle romance between King and new girlfriend Marilyn (Andrea Riseborough) as it is a story about a push for fairness in professional sports across gender lines. But that relationship had to be conducted outside the public eye, lest it taint the ongoing fight for equal pay and equal esteem. Battle of the Sexes is a bittersweet reminder that not all battles can be fought at once, and that that battle hasn’t yet been won. PJH

TRUE TV

Ferret Town How black-footed ferrets became Wyoming’s greatest conservation story BY SHANNON SOLLIT @ShannonSollit

wanted poster and a resurrection—that’s how the story begins. It was 1981 on a ranch in the middle of Wyoming, and a ranch dog came home with a carcass in his mouth. The ranchers had never seen such an animal before—because the animal, or rather, the group of animals, was believed to have been dead for years. It was a black-footed ferret, an animal that had been believed to be extinct since the late ‘70s. The ranchers didn’t recognize it, but the taxidermist did, because a small handful of optimists still hung “wanted” posters looking or the animal. This body was the proof they needed—it was still alive, right here in Wyoming. The story was everything wildlife filmmaker Virginia Moore needed for her next project: A charismatic character (because ferrets are adorable, google “ferrets in packing peanuts” and

The Content Lab

KIMBERLY FRASER, USFWS

| PLANET JACKSON HOLE |

24 | SEPTEMBER 27, 2017

DON’T MISS

try to disagree) and an animal (Left) The two captive-bred baby ferrets at the National Black-Footed Ferret Conservation Center in Colorado. (Right) Wanted poster from Ferret Town, playing this weekend during the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival. brought back from the dead, a second chance. It’s one of the “The last remaining population of find common ground and work togeth“greatest conservation stories in the U.S,” Moore said. And it all started ferrets was right here in Wyoming,” er in a collaborative way.” Moore compares the ferret to Jurassic Moore said. “We got a second chance in Wyoming. Moore is offering a sneak peak of her to try and keep this animal from going Park’s dinosaurs: They went extinct in a different era. When they came back to film Ferret Town, which doesn’t actu- extinct.” People rally easily behind big ani- life, the landscape they now needed to ally release until the spring, at JH Wild festival this weekend. Clips of the film mals like cats and condors, Moore said. survive in looked drastically different. The ferrets, like the fictional resurwill be accompanied by Q&A sessions But despite their cult-like following— with conservation specialists, and a live owners of domestic ferrets sometimes rected dinosaurs, will need to learn to ambassador from Colorado—yes, a real self-identify as “ferret people”—the adapt to their new environment. Also, because it’s worth mentioning: black-footed ferret’s survival is still live ferret. “There are so few of them in the wild, gaining traction in larger conversa- ferrets dance. PJH got a sneak-sneakthey’re so hard to find. It’s a really great tions about conservation. Even though peek at one of the film’s scenes, simply opportunity to meet an endangered fer- domestic ferrets are more closely relat- titled “ferret dance.” It’s exactly what it ed to the European pole cat, they’re all sounds like: one unsuspecting ferret, ret in person,” Moore said. This year is Jackson Hole Wildlife part of the same family. Moore is trying leaping, twisting, and boogying in front of a night-vision camera (ferrets are Film Festival’s second public offering to tap into the “ferret people’ market. “There’s this whole subculture of fer- nocturnal, as are most party animals). of some of the festival’s best films. The real festival, complete with seminars, ret pet owners that are kind of obsessed It’s even better than ferrets playing in galas and field workshops, is going on with their ferrets,” she said. Don’t they packing peanuts. Moore is especially all week at Jackson Lake Lodge in Grand want to know more about their pets’ excited to let that scene go viral. “It’s awesome,” Moore said. Teton National Park—for a minimum of wild cousin? We agree. Beyond their domestic pet-owning $250 a day, or $25 a film. Ferret Town sneak peak is part of WILD also brings a selection of those audience, the black-footed ferret’s story films to the Center for the Arts for free. offers conservationists a crucial lesson WILD fest’s “Science Fest” (so many fests) Sunday, October 1, from 11 am-4 The subjects of the feature films are in animal re-population, Moore said. “We’re talking about re-wilding an pm. The concluding day of WILD big and global—big cats were the focus animal that was extricated,” she said. includes over 30 interactive booths for of this year’s summit. The subjects of Ferret Town, mean- “How did we only get down to 18 [the audiences of all ages. PJH while, are small and scarce, but their population in 1986], and how can the JH WILD kicks off Friday at 4 pm. All story is local. They came to life right in federal government, state, and locals work together on endangered species events and film screenings are free. For a our backyard. issues to not only save the species but full line-up, visit JHWIld.org.

Featuring dining destinations from buffets and rooms with a view to mom and pop joints, chic cuisine and some of our dining critic’s faves!

ASIAN & CHINESE TETON THAI

Serving the world’s most exciting cuisine. Teton Thai offers a splendid array of flavors: sweet, hot, sour, salt and bitter. All balanced and blended perfectly, satisfying the most discriminating palate. Open daily. 7432 Granite Loop Road in Teton Village, (307) 733-0022 and in Driggs, (208) 787-8424, tetonthai.com.

THAI ME UP

Home of Melvin Brewing Co. Freshly remodeled offering modern Thai cuisine in a relaxed setting. New tap system with 20 craft beers. New $8 wine list and extensive bottled beer menu. Open daily for dinner at 5pm. Downtown at 75 East Pearl Street. View our tap list at thaijh.com/brews. 307-733-0005.

CONTINENTAL ALPENHOF

THE BLUE LION

A Jackson Hole favorite for 39 years. Join us in the charming atmosphere of a historic home. Serving fresh fish, elk, poultry, steaks, and vegetarian entrées. Ask a local about our rack of lamb. Live acoustic guitar music most nights. Open nightly at 5:30 p.m. Early Bird Special: 20% off entire bill between 5:30 & 6 p.m Must mention ad. Reservations recommended, walkins welcome. 160 N. Millward, (307) 733-3912, bluelionrestaurant.com

PICNIC

ELEANOR’S

Enjoy all the perks of fine dining, minus the dress code at Eleanor’s, serving rich, saucy dishes in a warm and friendly setting. Its bar alone is an attraction, thanks to reasonably priced drinks and a loyal crowd. Come get a belly-full of our two-time gold medal wings. Open at 11 a.m. daily. 832 W. Broadway, (307) 733-7901.

LOCAL

Local, a modern American steakhouse and bar, is located on Jackson’s historic town square. Our menu features both classic and specialty cuts of locally-ranched meats and wild game alongside fresh seafood, shellfish, house-ground burgers, and seasonallyinspired food. We offer an extensive wine list and an abundance of locally-sourced products. Offering a casual and vibrant bar atmosphere with 12 beers on tap as well as a relaxed dining room, Local is the perfect spot to grab a burger for lunch or to have drinks and dinner with friends. Lunch Mon-Sat 11:30am. Dinner Nightly 5:30pm. 55 North Cache, (307) 201-1717, localjh.com.

LOTUS ORGANIC RESTAURANT

Serving organic, freshly-made world cuisine while catering to all eating styles. Endless organic and natural meat, vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free choices. Offering super smoothies, fresh extracted juices, espresso and tea. Full bar and house-infused botanical spirits. Serving breakfast, lunch & dinner starting at 8am daily. 140 N. Cache, (307) 7340882, theorganiclotus.com.

MANGY MOOSE

Mangy Moose Restaurant, with locally sourced, seasonally fresh food at reasonable prices, is a always a fun place to go with family or friends for a unique dining experience. The personable staff will make you feel right at home and the funky western decor will keep you entertained throughout your entire visit. Teton Village, (307) 733-4913, mangymoose.com.

Large Specialty Pizza ADD: Wings (8 pc)

$ 13 99

Medium Pizza (1 topping) Stuffed Cheesy Bread

for an extra $5.99/each

(307) 733-0330 520 S. Hwy. 89 • Jackson, WY

FAMILY FRIENDLY ENVIRONMENT PIZZAS, PASTAS & MORE HOUSEMADE BREAD & DESSERTS FRESH, LOCALLY SOURCED OFFERINGS TAKE OUT AVAILABLE Dining room and bar open nightly at 5:00pm (307) 733-2460 • 2560 Moose Wilson Road • Wilson, WY

A Jackson Hole favorite since 1965

LOCAL & DOMESTIC STEAKS SUSTAINABLE SEAFOOD OPEN 7 DAYS A WEEK @ 5:30 TILL 10 JHCOWBOYSTEAKHOUSE.COM 307-733-4790

ELY U Q I N U PEAN EURO

F O H ‘ E TH

R DINNEAGE I H LUNCTETON VILL I T S IN FA BREAKE ALPENHOF AT TH

AT THE

MOE’S BBQ

Opened in Jackson Hole by Tom Fay and David

CONTINUED ON PAGE 27

Reservations at (307) 733-4913 3295 Village Drive • Teton Village, WY

www.mangymoose.com

307.733.3242

EARLY BIRD SPECIAL

20%OFF ENTIRE BILL

Good between 5:30-6pm • Open nightly at 5:30pm Must mention ad for discount.

733-3912 160 N. Millward

Make your reservation online at bluelionrestaurant.com

1110 MAPLE WAY JACKSON, WY 307.264.2956 picnicjh.com Free Coffee with Pastry Purchase Every Day from 3 to 5pm

SEPTEMBER 27, 2017 | 25

Mangy Moose Restaurant, with locally sourced, seasonally FRESH FOOD at reasonable prices, is a always a FUN PLACE to go with family or friends for a unique dining experience. The personable staff will make you feel RIGHT AT HOME and the funky western decor will keep you entertained throughout your entire visit.

| PLANET JACKSON HOLE |

Our mission is simple: offer good food, made fresh, all day, every day. We know everyone’s busy, so we cater to on-the-go lifestyles with

Serving authentic Swiss cuisine, the Alpenhof features European style breakfast entrées and alpine lunch fare. Dine in the Bistro for a casual meal or join us in the Alpenrose dining room for a relaxed dinner experience. Breakfast 7:30am-10am. Coffee & pastry 10am-11:30am. Lunch 11:30am-3pm. Aprés 3pm-5:30pm. Dinner 6pm-9pm. For reservations at the Bistro or Alpenrose, call 307-733-3242.

quick, tasty options for breakfast and lunch, including pastries and treats from our sister restaurant Persephone. Also offering coffee and espresso drinks plus wine and cocktails. Open Mon-Fri 7am-5pm, Wknds 7am-3pm 1110 Maple Way in West Jackson 307-2642956www.picnicjh.com

| PLANET JACKSON HOLE |

26 | SEPTEMBER 27, 2017

BEER, WINE & SPIRITS

Riesling Roundup There’s a Riesling to fit almost any occasion. BY TED SCHEFFLER

bout a decade ago, I was enjoying a superb meal at Taillevent restaurant in Paris—a restaurant that has, at times, been considered the world’s best. It’s my favorite restaurant, bar none. Anyway, I got into a conversation with Taillevent’s friendly and knowledgeable sommelier, first, wanting to know about his favorite Champagne (Salon, it turned out), and second, wanting to know what he and his wife drank during a typical meal at home. The answer surprised me: Riesling. I’d expected this very French sommelier in a very French restaurant to name a very French wine as his favorite. Nope. In a pinch, he turns to Riesling, which is very German, although the French in Alsace (essentially Germany) do a good job with it, too. I’d expected to hear that French Burgundy—red or white—or perhaps Bordeaux or Chablis was the sommelier’s go-to wine. But I’ll never forget what he said: “There are very few foods that can’t be improved with a glass of good Riesling.” Go figure. What this man emphasized was Riesling’s versatility. It’s an excellent wine for pairing with a range of foods because it comes in a variety of styles, from bone

dry to cloyingly sweet. I’ve written in the past about the various types of Riesling, so I won’t rehash that topic here. Instead, I’d like to provide some tasting notes and food-pairing suggestions for a handful of interesting Rieslings that I’ve recently encountered. You can find expensive Riesling to spend your money on, but it’s unnecessary; good Riesling can be had very economically, which is one of its key selling points. Lovers of Riesling appreciate the fact that there are many different varieties and styles to choose from in Utah’s State Wine Stores, which are almost overrun with Riesling. This is essentially a random sampling of Riesling from producers I’d never tried before, most under $20. If you’re looking for a dry, austere Riesling to take you through dinner, Flip Flop “Left Coast” Riesling ($7.99) is not it. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have appeal. There’s a scale on the back of Flip Flop bottles indicating level of residual sugar, from

IMBIBE “dry” to “sweet.” Truth in advertising: Flip Flop rates its Riesling between medium-sweet and sweet, which is precisely

what it is. The wine’s moderate sweetness, combined with tropical-fruit notes, makes it a good candidate for sipping as an aperitif, or to pair with spicy pork tacos or fiery Asian and Indian fare. Up a few notches in dryness from Flip Flop is Columbia Winery 2009 Cellarmaster’s Riesling ($11.99), from Washington’s Columbia Valley. There are subtle pear and cantaloupe aromas along with apricot and honeydew flavors here—not exactly the crisp, green-apple tang you’d expect from Riesling, but a wine with enough acidity to work with veal or chicken piccata. For a more austere, crisp Riesling, I suggest Chateau Ste. Michelle “Eroica” 2010 ($20.99), which is made just down the road from Columbia Winery. Snake River Riesling 2010 ($8.99)—made in Idaho and owned by Solitude Resort’s Scott DeSeelhorst—garnered a gold medal at the 2011 Idaho Wine Competition for its aromas of peaches and honey and semi-sweet style. For a more food-friendly Riesling, try Spy Valley 2009 ($12.99), from Marlborough, New Zealand. It’s terrific with herb-roasted chicken. New to our state is my favorite of this bunch: Bastgen Blauschiefer Riesling 2009 ($16.99). This is much more in the classic, green-apple-flavored Riesling style from the Mosel—bright, crisp, zesty with mineral undertones. It’s the bomb with choucroute garni. PJH

Fogg, Moe’s Original Bar B Que features a Southern Soul Food Revival through its award-winning Alabama-style pulled pork, ribs, wings, turkey and chicken smoked over hardwood served with two unique sauces in addition to Catfish and a Shrimp Moe-Boy sandwich. A daily rotation of traditional Southern sides and tasty desserts are served fresh daily. Moe’s BBQ stays open late and features a menu for any budget. While the setting is familyfriendly, a full premium bar offers a lively scene with HDTVs for sports fans, music, shuffle board and other games upstairs. Large party takeout orders and full service catering with delivery is also available.

MILLION DOLLAR COWBOY STEAKHOUSE

Jackson’s first Speakeasy Steakhouse. The Million Dollar Cowboy Steakhouse is a hidden gem located below the world famous Million Dollar Cowboy Bar. Our menu offers guests the best in American steakhouse cuisine. Top quality chops and steaks sourced from local farms, imported Japanese Wagyu beef, and house-cured meats and sausages. Accentuated with a variety of thoughtful side dishes, innovative appetizers, creative vegetarian items, and decadent desserts, a meal at this landmark location is sure to be a memorable one. Reservations are highly recommended.

SNAKE RIVER BREWERY & RESTAURANT

ITALIAN CALICO

A Jackson Hole favorite since 1965, the Calico continues to be one of the most popular restaurants in the Valley. The Calico offers the right combination of really good food, (much of which is grown in our own gardens in the summer), friendly staff; a reasonably priced menu and a large

FAVORITE PIZZA 2012-2016 •••••••••

MEXICAN

EL ABUELITO

Serving authentic Mexican cuisine and appetizers in a unique Mexican atmosphere. Home of the original Jumbo Margarita. Featuring a full bar with a large selection of authentic Mexican beers. Lunch served weekdays 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Nightly dinner specials. Open seven days, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. 385 W. Broadway, (307) 733-1207.

$5 Shot & Tall Boy

LUNCH

SPECIAL Slice, salad & soda

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••

TV Sports Packages and 7 Screens

Under the Pink Garter Theatre (307) 734-PINK • www.pinkygs.com

PIZZA DOMINO’S PIZZA

Hot and delicious delivered to your door. Handtossed, deep dish, crunchy thin, Brooklyn style and artisan pizzas; bread bowl pastas, and oven baked sandwiches; chicken wings, cheesy breads and desserts. Delivery. 520 S. Hwy. 89 in Kmart Plaza, (307) 733-0330.

PINKY G’S

The locals favorite! Voted Best Pizza in Jackson Hole 2012-2016. Seek out this hidden gem under the Pink Garter Theatre for NY pizza by the slice, salads, strombolis, calzones and many appetizers to choose from. Try the $7 ‘Triple S’ lunch special. Happy hours 10 p.m. - 12 a.m. Sun.- Thu. Text PINK to 71441 for discounts. Delivery and take-out. Open daily 11a.m. to 2 a.m. 50 W. Broadway, (307) 734-PINK.

PIZZERIA CALDERA

Jackson Hole’s only dedicated stone-hearth oven pizzeria, serving Napolitana-style pies using the

freshest ingredients in traditional and creative combinations. Five local micro-brews on tap, a great selection of red and white wines by the glass and bottle, and one of the best views of the Town Square from our upstairs deck. Daily lunch special includes slice, salad or soup, any two for $8. Happy hour: half off drinks by the glass from 4 - 6 daily. Dine in or carry out. Or order online at PizzeriaCaldera.com, or download our app for iOS or Android. Open from 11am - 9:30pm daily at 20 West Broadway. 307-201-1472.

Lunch special Slice + Side Salad = $8 Happy Hour 4-6 PM DAILY

20 W. Broadway 307.207.1472 pizzeriacaldera.com OPEN DAILY 11AM-9:30PM

HAPPY HOUR Daily 4-6:00pm

307.201.1717 | LOCALJH.COM ON THE TOWN SQUARE

SEPTEMBER 27, 2017 | 27

Lunch 11:30am Monday-Saturday Dinner 5:30pm Nightly

| PLANET JACKSON HOLE |

Local is a modern American steakhouse and bar located on Jackson’s historic town square. Serving locally raised beef and, regional game, fresh seafood and seasonally inspired food, Local offers the perfect setting for lunch, drinks or dinner.

America’s most award-winning microbrewery is serving lunch and dinner. Take in the atmosphere while enjoying wood-fired pizzas, pastas, burgers, sandwiches, soups, salads and desserts. $9 lunch menu. Happy hour 4 to 6 p.m., including tasty hot wings. The freshest beer in the valley, right from the source! Free WiFi. Open 11:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. 265 S. Millward. (307) 739-2337, snakeriverbrewing. com.

THE LOCALS

selection of wine. Our bar scene is eclectic with a welcoming vibe. Open nightly at 5 p.m. 2560 Moose Wilson Rd., (307) 733-2460.

| PLANET JACKSON HOLE |

28 | SEPTEMBER 27, 2017

SUDOKU

Complete the grid so that each row, column, diagonal and 3x3 square contain all of the numbers 1 to 9. No math is involved. The grid has numbers, but nothing has to add up to anything else. Solve the puzzle with reasoning and logic. Solving time is typically 10 to 30 minutes, depending on your skill and experience.

L.A.TIMES “DISPIRITED AWAY” By GAIL GRABOWSKI

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2017

ACROSS 1

Financial smartphone download 7 Vague feeling 11 Shot spot 14 Take up or let out 19 More profound 20 Attention-getting type: Abbr. 21 Gunk 22 Russian bread 23 Crooner Vic 24 Software update strategies? 27 Urban view obscurer 28 Action-filled 30 Get by succession 31 Stand in a loft 33 Title absentee 35 Bridge installer’s deg. 36 Counsel offered by Carlo Rossi? 42 Map in a map 45 Ristorante suffix 46 Pursued 47 State secrets? 48 Container with slats 52 Recommend 54 Dream about childbirth? 57 What alibis may be 58 Series of rings 60 Ultra-secret org. 61 Like yoga devotees 62 Naval strength 65 Co-host Shapiro of “All Things Considered” 66 Celeb’s freebie 67 Views about poetry? 71 “That film is awful” 75 ’60s-’80s Brit. sports car 76 Frozen fruit-flavored snack 81 Soda purchases 82 1999 Moviefone acquirer 83 Fluency 85 Normal beginning? 86 Reminded guests that certain casual attire is required?

Baseless accusation, to an alleged perp 91 Yoga pose 92 Pic for a doc 93 “Dig in!” 96 When Le Havre heats up 97 Run through a reader 99 Uncompromising boss? 101 Break down 104 Mar. parade honoree 106 Shake awake 107 Taking in a sunrise, say 110 Crowd control weapons 114 Headquarters 118 Mastering a basic golf lesson? 120 Golfer’s starting point 122 Salon dye 123 Scepter top, perhaps 124 Salon, for one 125 Not leave to chance 126 Concepts 127 They’re often grad students 128 Wraps (up) 129 Went bad

DOWN

1 Throws into the mix 2 Group with lineups 3 Exec’s reminder 4 Orbital high point 5 Writer 6 Put the squeeze on 7 “The Four Seasons” composer 8 It might follow a bullet 9 Zinger 10 “Frozen” princess 11 Disco phrase 12 Pal of Harry 13 Summon silently 14 St. Louis landmark 15 Renaissance instrument 16 1954 Ford debut 17 Legendary Spanish hero 18 Intervals of inactivity 25 “Picnic” playwright

26 29 32 34 36 37 38 39 40

Queen’s subjects Princess from Alderaan Spy-fi figs. Grammy-winning singer Krall Medical containers Common film festival entry Skin lotion brand Menlo Park middle name Justice Gorsuch who replaced Antonin 41 DJ’s stack 43 8/21/2017 celestial event 44 Vagabond 47 Violinist’s need 49 Quartet named for its members 50 They’re usually seen with sandals 51 Miscalculates 53 Connection method: Abbr. 55 Cross inscription 56 Spark producer 58 Apt to mouth off 59 Critical care ctrs. 63 Supervised 64 Houdini’s family name 65 BOLO equivalent 66 Popular __ 68 Expressive online image 69 Take in the wrong way? 70 Apple mobile platform 71 Rick calls her “kid” 72 Google successes 73 Quattro competitor 74 Cold weather word 77 Turntable letters 78 Took a little off 79 Give a keynote, say 80 Morning read 82 TV spot seller 83 U.S. dept. with a windmill on its seal

84 87 88 89 90 94

Wine city near Turin Unimproved property In-flight fig. Railing feature Western natives Earl with a three-finger banjo-picking style named for him 95 Berkshire boarding school 98 Castaway’s home 99 Foment, with “up” 100 If all goes right 101 Rolls with rice 102 Withdrew, with “out” 103 “Moneyball” baseball exec Billy 105 Mettlesome mounts 108 Paquin of “True Blood” 109 Pioneering TVs 111 Column on the right 112 Smartphone display 113 Nibble 115 Be flush with 116 Ill-tempered 117 Struck (out) 119 Period that may be named for a president 121 “Lux” composer Brian

Hurricanes, Earthquakes, Generosity of Spirit “All things are connected - whatever befalls the Earth, befalls the children of the Earth” - Chief Seattle

The Physical Connection

Human thoughts and feelings are another form of instantly transmitted energy along the planet’s living “internet.” There have been scientific experiments showing our bodies and psyches react to the positive and negative thoughts of other people, even across long distances, and even when those people are strangers. Therefore, in the aftermath of the hurricanes and the quakes, we are invisibly receiving the energies from cries for help, waves of grief, ongoing despair, pain, and fear. This is another reason you may be feeling uncharacteristically down, agitated adrift, or exhausted. (Note: If you know or suspect other reasons for any current physical or emotional unease, please consult a health care professional.)

Antidote: The Heart Connection Here’s a most important, cost-free contribution we can all make to stabilize, recalibrate and also upgrade the living matrix. When we direct kind, loving, compassionate thoughts, feelings and prayers to the people and to the natural world suffering right now, those positive energies are instantly transmitted via the living matrix to wherever and whomever they are intended. These high frequency energies are proven to uplift, boost morale and accelerate healing. Remember that we can also direct love, compassion, kindness and forgiveness to our own bodies, minds and spirit every day and any time we need a boost. Our individual and collective thoughts and feelings are that powerful.

Generosity of Spirit: Good Times and Bad

Carol Mann is a longtime Jackson resident, radio personality, former Grand Targhee Resort owner, author, and clairvoyant. Got a Cosmic Question? Email carol@yourcosmiccafe.com

SEPTEMBER 27, 2017 | 29

The ability to give, to serve, to help, to practice random acts of kindness without any expectation or ulterior motive happens automatically when we come from the inherent goodness in every heart and soul. We excel at this when tragedy opens our hearts. Imagine a heart connected world in which we offer spontaneous support and inspiration to each other in good times, as well. Generosity of spirit in good times and in bad, opens the possibility to 10x our collective human potential. PJH

| PLANET JACKSON HOLE |

On the purely physical level, the jolts from strong earthquakes cause changes in the magnetic field of the entire planet. Hurricanes disrupt the earth’s four “spheres” of our planet: the lithosphere (land), hydrosphere (water), biosphere (living things) and atmosphere (air). Our bodies and psyches are sensitive to all those disruptions, and therefore it’s not surprising that after a big quake or massive hurricanes people in parts of the world not directly affected report feeling unusually tired or blue, having headaches for no apparent reason and/ or having trouble sleeping. This is not the same as being ill; these are symptoms of disruption to our biological systems from the earthquakes and hurricanes, and we are so resilient.

The Emotional Connection

ur planet is an interconnected, interactive living matrix. Whenever there are dramatic shifts in and on the Earth, and no matter where in the world those events occur, we are all exposed to the energies of disruption, stress and distress. Right now we are living in the energetic fallout from the extensive fatalities and injuries to people and to nature from the combined devastation of the current spate of mega hurricanes in the U.S and the Caribbean and the earthquakes in Mexico. That fallout includes massive emotional distress, sorrow, fear, helplessness and disorientation Because we are all members of the planetary “internet” of life, we are absorbing those energies, and simultaneously our bodies and psyches are automatically helping the recalibration to the new “normal.”

Think about how challenging the simple one-hour change from daylight savings to standard time can be on our daily biorythms. Now be in awe of how our amazing bodies are so gracefully recalibrating from the huge global disruptions of these hurricanes and earthquakes.

WELLNESS COMMUNITY

Your one-stop resource for access to Jackson Hole’s premier health and wellness providers.

DEEP TISSUE • SPORTS MASSAGE • THAI MASSAGE MYOFASCIAL RELEASE CUPPING

Oliver Tripp, NCTM MASSAGE THERAPIST NATIONALLY CERTIFIED

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No physician referral required. (307) 733-5577•1090 S Hwy 89

180 N Center St, Unit 8 abhyasamassage.com

| PLANET JACKSON HOLE |

30 | SEPTEMBER 27, 2017

Professional and Individualized Treatments • Sports/Ortho Rehab • Neck and Back Rehab • Rehabilitative Pilates • Incontinence Training • Pelvic Pain Rehab • Lymphedema Treatments Norene Christensen PT, DSc, OCS, CLT Rebekah Donley PT, DPT, CPI Mark Schultheis PT, CSCS Kim Armington PTA, CPI

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

HALF OFF BLAST OFF!

BY ROB BREZSNY

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22) Be realistic, Libra: Demand the impossible; expect inspiration; visualize yourself being able to express yourself more completely and vividly than you ever have before. Believe me when I tell you that you now have extra power to develop your sleeping potentials, and are capable of accomplishing feats that might seem like miracles. You are braver than you know, as sexy as you need to be, and wiser than you were two months ago. I am not exaggerating, nor am I flattering you. It’s time for you to start making your move to the next level. SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21) In accordance with the astrological omens, I invite you to take extra good care of yourself during the next three weeks. Do whatever it takes to feel safe and protected and resilient. Ask for the support you need, and if the people whose help you solicit can’t or won’t give it to you, seek elsewhere. Provide your body with more than the usual amount of healthy food, deep sleep, tender touch, and enlivening movement. Go see a counselor or good listener every single day if you want. And don’t you dare apologize or feel guilty for being such a connoisseur of self-respect and self-healing.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19) You’re approaching a rendezvous with prime time. Any minute now you could receive an invitation to live up to your hype or fulfill your promises to yourself—or both. This test is likely to involve an edgy challenge that is both fun and daunting, both liberating and exacting. It will have the potential to either steal a bit of your soul or else heal an ache in your soul. To ensure the healing occurs rather than the stealing, do your best to understand why the difficulty and the pleasure are both essential.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20) There are enough authorities, experts, and know-it-alls out there trying to tell you what to think and do. In accordance with current astrological factors, I urge you to utterly ignore them during the next two weeks. Do it gleefully, not angrily. Exult in the power that this declaration of independence gives you to trust your own assessments and heed your own intuitions. Regard your rebellion as good practice for dealing with the little voices in your head that speak for those authorities, experts, and knowit-alls. Rise up and reject their shaming and criticism, too. Shield yourself from their fearful fantasies.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20) It’s high time to allow your yearnings to overflow …to surrender to the vitalizing pleasures of nonrational joy… to grant love the permission to bless you and confound you with its unruly truths. For inspiration, read this excerpt of a poem by Caitlyn Siehl. “My love is honey tongue. Thirsty love. My love is peach juice dripping down the neck. Too much sugar love. Sticky sweet, sticky sweat love. My love can’t ride a bike. My love walks everywhere. Wanders through the river. Feeds the fish, skips the stones. Barefoot love. My love stretches itself out on the grass, kisses a nectarine. My love is never waiting. My love is a traveler.” CANCER (June 21-July 22) One of the oldest houses in Northern Europe is the Knap of Howar. Built out of stone around 3,600 B.C., it faces the wild sea on Papa Westray, an island off the northern coast of Scotland. Although no one has lived there for 5,000 years, some of its stone furniture remains intact. Places like this will have a symbolic power in the coming weeks, Cancerian. They’ll tease your imagination and provoke fantasies. Why? Because the past will be calling to you more than usual. The old days and old ways will have secrets to reveal and stories to teach. Listen with alert discernment. LEO (July 23-Aug. 22) The United States has a bizarre system for electing its president. There’s nothing like it in any other democratic nation on earth. Every four years, the winning candidate needs only to win the electoral college, not the popular vote. So it’s possible to garner just 23 percent of all votes cast, and still ascend to the most powerful political position in the world. For example, in two of the last five elections, the new chief of state has received significantly fewer votes than his main competitor. I suspect that you may soon benefit from a comparable anomaly, Leo. You’ll be able to claim victory. .on a technicality. Your effort

may be “ugly,” yet good enough to succeed. VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22)

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ied the melodies that emanated from its flowing current. Then he moved around some of the underwater rocks,

Go to RealAstrology.com for Rob Brezsny’s expanded weekly audio horoscopes and daily text-message horoscopes. Audio horoscopes also available by phone at 877-873-4888 or 900-950-7700.

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SEPTEMBER 27, 2017 | 31

I found this advertisement for a workshop: “You will learn to do the INCREDIBLE! Smash bricks with your bare hands! Walk on fiery coals unscathed! Leap safely off a roof! No broken bones! No cuts! No pain! Accomplish the impossible first! Then everything else will be a breeze!” I bring this to your attention, Virgo, not because I think you should sign up for this class or anything like it. I hope you don’t. In fact, a very different approach is preferable for you: I recommend that you start with safe, manageable tasks. Master the ARIES (March 21-April 19) Conceptual artist Jonathon Keats likes to play along with simple details and practical actions. Work on achievthe music of nature. On one occasion he collaborated ing easy, low-risk victories. In this way, you’ll prepare with Mandeville Creek in Montana. He listened and stud- yourself for more epic efforts in the future.

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| PLANET JACKSON HOLE |

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18) In 1901, physician Duncan MacDougall carried out experiments that led him to conclude that the average human soul weighs 21 grams. Does his claim have any merit? That question is beyond my level of expertise. But if he was right, then I’m pretty sure your soul has bulked up to at least 42 grams in the past few weeks. The work you’ve been doing to refine and cultivate your inner state has been heroic. It’s like you’ve been ingesting a healthy version of soul-building steroids. Congrats!

TAURUS (April 20-May 20) Some newspapers publish regular rectifications of the mistakes they’ve made in past editions. For example, the editors of the UK publication The Guardian once apologized to readers for a mistaken statement about Richard Wagner. They said that when the 19th-century German composer had trysts with his chambermaid, he did not in fact ask her to wear purple underpants, as previously reported. They were pink underpants. I tell you this, Taurus, as encouragement to engage in corrective meditations yourself. Before bedtime on the next ten nights, scan the day’s events and identify any actions you might have done differently—perhaps with more integrity or focus or creativity. This will have a deeply tonic effect. You are in a phase of your astrological cycle when you’ll flourish as you make amendments and revisions.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21) A queen bee may keep mating until she gathers 70 million sp erm from many different drones. When composing my horoscopes, I aim to cultivate a metaphorically comparable receptivity. Long ago I realized that all of creation is speaking to me all the time; I recognized that everyone I encounter is potentially a muse or teacher. If I hope to rustle up the oracles that are precisely suitable for your needs, I have to be alert to the possibility that they may arrive from unexpected directions and surprising sources. Can you handle being that open to influence, Sagittarius? Now is a favorable time to expand your capacity to be fertilized.

subtly changing the creek’s song. Your assignment, Aries, is to experiment with equally imaginative and exotic collaborations. The coming weeks will be a time when you can make beautiful music together with anyone or anything that tickles your imagination.

32 | SEPTEMBER 27, 2017