Jackson Hole Underground

Gary Strieker is using new media to spotlight critical environmental issues.

Tonight the Jackson Hole Film Institute and Pursue Balance are sponsoring a free talk and screening of some of Strieker’s films from 7 to 9 p.m. at Teton Mountain Lodge. The filmmaker will be on hand to answer questions.

Strieker is a former award-winning international correspondent for CNN who went on to found the Environment News Trust, a nonprofit corporation dedicated to producing video news reports. His short films can be viewed at the Assignment Earth home page and via Yahoo! video, as well as on a new half-hour program on PBS.

Recently Strieker has worked with Jackson journalists Melinda Binks and Rebecca Huntington on stories such as coal-bed methane drilling in the Powder River Basin, delisting of bald eagles and depleted trout stocks in Idaho.

Binks, a videographer who owns Fall Creek Productions, and Huntington, the former ace environmental reporter for the News&Guide, also will show some of their work.

Strieker will screen “Mountains of Coal,” a feature about hilltop mining in West Virginia, and the short films “Mexican Wolves” and “Smuggling Apes.”

The bald eagle has landed.

Devious Dick is back in Jackson Hole for Fourth of July weekend, according to well-placed sources. He did not attend the parade this morning (where he might have faced a mob), but perhaps he’ll be ferried by chopper to the Music in the Hole concert, of which he and his wife are fans.

Since we’re such patriotic, freedom-loving Americans, we thought we’d celebrate this Independence Day with some ol’-fashioned Communist bashing.

Oops. Turns out the military trainers the U.S. government sent to Guantánamo Bay in 2002, under the direction of the Creep Veep, gave our soldiers a lesson in torture tactics pioneered by … the Communist Chinese during the Korean War.

The Chinese used these tactics — sleep deprivation, exposure to cold, standing for long periods of time — to “obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners,” the New York Times reports.

The trainers based their lesson on a chart the U.S. Air Force developed during the 1950s as it sought to train our soldiers to resist the very same techniques.

“The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: ‘Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance,’” the Times reports. Nice work, keystone commies.

[In case anyone is wondering whether waterboarding, another of the tactics implemented by the Bush administration, is, in fact, torture, a journalist we admire greatly, Christopher Hitchens, says there’s no doubt. Hitchens, bless him, subjected himself to waterboarding and wrote a piece about it for Vanity Fair.]

Happy July Fourth, Chairman Cheney!

When the filing period for the 2008 election closed last month, I was surprised to find no one challenging Mayor Mark Barron.

Fawning profiles in the local media nonwithstanding, there has been a lot of grumbling about Barron on barstools and coffee counters, owing mostly to the new parking garage and the rapidly changing face of downtown.

Another lawmaker ripe for a challenge is state Rep. Keith Gingery, a Republican who owes his election in 2004 to GOP gerrymandering. Gingery has rankled his constituency in Jackson by sponsoring abortion bills and his flip-flop on a secrecy bill that made correspondence between lawmakers and lobbyists off-limits to the public.

I wasn’t surprised to find him running unopposed because the Wyoming Legislature is an unpaid job that requires a lot of travel around the state and spending several weeks in Cheyenne each winter.

Should either of these pols be coasting to another term?

We who feel the issues merit more rigorous debate than a fill-in-the-blanks questionnaire from the local papers have another option: a write-in campaign.

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(Updated 6/27 with photos from the actual river trip, shot by passenger Paul Schnell)

I was back on the river yesterday, after a week’s layoff due to foul weather. The flow in Grand Teton National Park is surging, with the sudden arrival of sunshine finally triggering a melt-off in the high country.

Earlier I wrote about the experience of exploring the river in the park, and that’s the way spring has been: abundant wildlife, elk sightings nearly every trip, the uncertainty around each bend of not knowing just what you’ll encounter.

Last night, on the last of my three trips, I rowed into a small side channel. It’s quiet, and a good place to see wildlife up close, when animals happen to be there.

Within minutes I had spotted what looked like a large dirt clump on the side of the river. It was too large to be a beaver, but it wasn’t moving. We floated closer. A tourist asked me a question, and the brown shape slowly roused, turned around and looked at us with sad eyes.

“It’s a grizzly bear,” I said, and the tourists screamed.

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(Editor’s note: This post comes from Favio Snimp, just back from motorcycle racing across the Sahara and never afraid to be a contrarian.)

If you’re likeable, recently deceased and have been on TV a lot, you’ll get rave notices. Tim Russert certainly is getting his air time, right up there in Anna Nicole Smith territory. MSNBC seems to have instantly commissioned “Dirge for Tim for Lone Plaintive Horn” and repeats it often.

What, exactly, did Tim Russert offer to our needy nation? All the grim lamenters, on TV and in newspapers, agree. He was “the real deal.” He was “the ultimate dad.” An unending variety of accolades repeat the same sentiment: Russert was a regular guy who loved his family and remained faithful to the Buffalo Bills.

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