• HYUNYOUNG KIM

Andrew Matson was just walking in the dark in a park when…

After twenty paces—BANG! It felt like the back of my head had been punched with scissors.

I looked for a branch that could have thwacked me. Or a teenager with a pellet gun? Or a ghost?

"Hey, is anyone in here?" I said weakly.

No response.

So I started walking again. Twenty more paces and then BANG!—straight to the back of my head, the same punch/snip. I took off running. It was something in the air, something overhead, something flying. I instinctively knew I would not be able to outrun it, so I needed to protect my head somehow while getting the hell out of the park. I had a reusable shopping bag with me, so I waved it over my head as I ran. Are you picturing this? Me, terrified out of my skull, running through the dark, waving a bag over my head…

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• Ernie Piper
• At the tip of the Olympic Peninsula, the entire country is behind you in the most literal way possible.

Yeah, yeah, it sucks out there right now. But what are you gonna do the second the weather turns? Like two Sundays ago—remember that? Next day we have like that, where you gonna drive to/camp/drink/roast bacon on sticks? Intrepid Stranger correspondent Ernie Piper just did a whole bunch of driving and ferry-riding and semi-legal camping and abandoned-military-bunkers-exploring and wine-drinking and roasting bacon on sticks, and he has all these stories to prove it.

It begins:

My dad spent many years of his youth hitchhiking, train hopping, and sleeping in open fields. He would occasionally impart travel advice. "Boys," he said, "when I was traveling, there were a number of bad situations where I got out of it by hitting someone very hard in the head."

"Really?" my brother asked. "How often?"

"Maybe 18 percent. Twenty."

"Jesus."

"Yeah, one time we were sleeping on a beach with some other hoboes, and this guy was hassling my friend Pete, so I hit him in the neck with a piece of driftwood."

As you can imagine, I always daydreamed about a life in which I'd have adventure stories to rival my dad's.

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Or at least that's what my peripheral vision saw.

Superintendent of Mt. Rainier National Park Randy King is preparing the park for a bottled water ban, according to a March 25 press release. The International Bottled Water Association, meanwhile, supports "freedom of choice" on the issue of selling bottled water at park concession stands.

Mount Rainier Park is installing more stations where visitors can refill water bottles and working with concessions and guest services partners to sell low-cost reusable bottles. Such bottles cost as little as $1.99 at the Grand Canyon and the 14 other national parks that have already banned the sale of bottled water.

Yesterday, the IBWA came out with a statement against such a ban, since they say 63 percent of consumers will choose sugary drinks if bottled water isn't available. (This seems likelier for consumers at a middle school than folks climbing a fucking mountain, but it appears they don't make that distinction.)

The IBWA also claims to be concerned about a possible decline in recycling in the park, since sugary drink bottles are recycled less frequently than bottles of water. IBWA has an optimist outlook on the water bottle recycling rate, reporting, "The national recycling rate for single-serve PET plastic bottled water containers is now at 38.6 percent. "

Park superintendent Randy King emphasizes in his statement that the National Parks Service is all about the Three R's, and Mt. Rainier is focusing on reducing consumption in order to promote sustainability. The ban should also go a long way toward preventing the other three-fifths of those plastic bottles, which are not being recycled, from winding up strewn about mountaintop trails.

For Care Bear:

The African population in Anchorage, according to Peter Igwacho, a psychologist by training also originally from Cameroon, is now likely somewhere between 3,000-5,000 people, though no formal count has been made. Growth has been driven both by refugee resettlement, which has brought Sudanese and Somali communities to the city, as well as migrants seeking economic opportunity and a quiet place to raise a family, Igwacho said. They often come from cities in the Lower 48 to join family members already living in Alaska.

Many don't regard their stay in Alaska as temporary, Atu-Tetuh said.

"We are here to make Alaska our home."

See what he found over here.

There is a blooming winter honeysuckle on Melrose at Republican. (It looks like this.) If you bend to smell it, it will change your day for the better. Don't be scared inside by this weather. There are winter plants to be loved out there.

Seattle Times is all over it:

Avalanches less than an hour apart claimed four lives at two separate resorts Sunday — one burying three skiers at Stevens Pass ski resort and another sweeping a snowboarder off a cliff near The Summit at Snoqualmie.

They were in out-of-bounds areas, but they are reported to be experienced skiers who had avalanche gear. Times reporter Brian M. Rosenthal is tweeting reports from Stevens Pass. His latest:

The Bull's Tooth, the bar at Stevens Pass, is full of men with swollen eyes and trembling faces. "We're shocked," said Matt Wainhouse, 23.

Let your speculation run wild.

There's footage of both of them in the early '80s in this post. Plus links to recently unearthed VHS-converted footage of a early-'80s Seattle rock and punk bands. Fun!

Posted by news intern Paul Holmes

Here's what Scooter looked like back on August 25, when he could fit into your shirt pocket:

And here's what he looks like today:

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• Me

In Granted this week, I posit that beats—or more specifically hip hop and most electronic music—do not work in the woods. Join the discussion, already featuring this comment from Forgotton2011:

HEY NOW, really, try to tell that beats in the woods are wrong to the multitudes of forest ravers and faeries - not all of our parties are out in the desert !!! Check out : http://photosynthesisfestival.com/ ; or perhaps , http://www.faerieworlds.com/home.html would be more your cup of tea? I know, lost cause - as most people just don't 'get it'

Read it here.

This makes so much damn sense it's amazing that it's such a new program: Veterans back from military service get the opportunity to decompress—while still serving our country—by doing work in small units inside our National Parks.

Win. Win. Win. Win. Win.

Among the many good outcomes the New York Times noticed when one of its reporters recently dropped in on a group of veterans helping out in California's Sequoia National Park:

The veterans benefit from having work (albeit at $8 an hour) and from being in a familiar situation: part of a small group in a far-off location with a little-understood job to do.

“This reminds me of Fallujah, being in a remote area with a tight family,” said Aaron Hernandez, a former Marine who served as a diesel mechanic in the Iraqi city during a bloody assault in 2004. “There were 10 mechanics, and we all lived together, we all ate together, we all worked together. That was what kept us going.”

Only about 300 veterans have been a part of this program so far, but it's easy to imagine many more joining up if the government—ahem, Senator Patty Murray, Chair of the Committee on Veterans' Affairs—made a point of encouraging them to do so on a larger scale.

"You’re out here in the middle of nowhere,” a 26-year-old veteran told the Times. “It gives you time to reflect. You don’t have to deal with all the chaos in society."

Mental space, money, and a comforting kind of regimentation and camaraderie for the veterans. Better trails and improved park safety for civilians. Very little cost to anyone involved. More like this, please, America.

Posted by news intern Paul Holmes

A friend, who knows I'm a crazy squirrel person, dropped it off yesterday after finding it on the street, motherless and with a bloody nose. We're feeding it Esbilac puppy formula in an itty bitty syringe, since the small bottles and nipples used to nurse kittens and puppies are too large. Thankfully, the little guy seems to be doing okay, and now has quite the appetite. Once he's recovered, we'll send him (her? It's kinda hard to tell...) to a squirrel sanctuary in Redmond.