My first article for the Bullhorn — and maybe still one of my favorite pieces, and opening lines, that I penned for the newspaper — covered illegal poaching of elk in Estes Park, outside Rocky Mountain National Park, and the proliferation of elk in the region due to a lack of natural controls (read: wolves and predators).

Six years later, poaching remains a problem, wolf reintroduction and hunting in the national park remains controversial, and wildlife management remains a general enigma in the Estes Valley.

***

Sprawl of the Wild

As their population surges, elk in Estes Park become easy targets for poachers.
By Joshua Zaffos
Rocky Mountain Bullhorn, January 27, 2005

If ever an elk was a martyr, his name was Samson. A hulking 1,000-pound, eight-by-nine-point bull, Samson probably could have run for mayor of Estes Park in the mid ’90s he was so popular. Tourists and locals visited him at his hangout at the YMCA of the Rockies, south of town near Mary’s Lake, and just about everyone found joy in snapping his photo and feeding him treats.

“Samson would stop right in the road for you to give him an apple,” recalls Bryan Michener, a long-time resident and a member of the Estes Valley Improvement Association, a nonprofit valley citizens’ group. One time, a couple even tried to saddle their 2-year old on Samson’s shoulders for a Christmas photo.

“Like he was in Santa’s herd,” Michener says, as he sips coffee with some friends at the Notchtop Bakery and Café in Estes Park. Still, Samson was a (relatively) wild animal, and Michener says the handouts and human contact amounted to “a death warrant.”

On the night of November 11, 1995, Randal Francis, a resident of Lakewood, illegally killed Samson on the lawn of the YMCA with a crossbow. During Francis’ trial for the wildlife poaching crime, one YMCA staff worker told the court that the bull elk “was so trusting of people that [Francis] could have walked up to Samson and slit his throat. There was no sport in the killing.”

The incident brought nationwide attention to Estes Park and raised awareness of wildlife poaching to a new level. A Larimer County judge slapped Francis with a 90-day jail sentence, $8,300 in fines and court costs, and 360 hours of public service. Francis also temporarily lost his driving and hunting privileges and was prohibited from owning anything more dangerous than a kitchen knife. The punishment signaled a harsher stance on poaching in Colorado – in the name of Samson, who became the symbol for the state’s Operation Game Thief program, which rewards citizens who turn in poachers. In Estes Park, residents raised $15,000 to commission a larger-than-life bronze statue of the beloved elk.

But there’s a greater cause that Samson died for, one that is still unfulfilled. Elk in the Estes Valley are easy marks for poachers because of their habituation to humans, a direct result of them hanging around town instead of the meadows of Rocky Mountain National Park. The bulging herd of 3,000 elk has thrashed that landscape, spilled into Estes Park, taken up residence on lawns and golf courses and lost any instinctual fear of people. Now, federal and state wildlife managers are figuring out if and how they’re going to thin the herd – a move that could restore the park’s environment, reduce the elks’ presence in town and possibly slow down poachers.

Says Michener, “They need to start taking the bull by the horns.”

The Population Bombs
Elk lived in the region of Rocky Mountain National Park for thousands of years before people – white people – showed up, but they didn’t last too long after American pioneers settled in.

“In 1875, the elk came down from the mountains by the thousands,” wrote Abner Sprague, an early homesteader in Estes Park, “and were met by hunters with repeating rifles and four-horse teams. In 1876, few elk came down and, by 1877, very few were seen east of the Continental Divide.”

By the turn of the 20th Century, the settlers had exterminated the elk – along with the wolves and grizzly bears – of the valley and replaced them with cattle.

The cows trampled the meadows and overgrazed the native grasses and riverside willows. Locals like Milton Estes and Enos Mills resented the destruction and went to work protecting the area. The efforts succeeded with the creation of Rocky Mountain National Park in 1915 “for the preservation of the natural conditions and scenic beauties thereof.” Livestock grazing was phased out within the park over the next 45 years and relegated to a secondary industry in the valley. Tourism, based around the national park and the wildlife, became the valley’s economic engine.

Wildlife managers reintroduced 49 elk, transplants from Yellowstone National Park, in 1913 as part of Rocky Mountain’s environmental preservation. Within fifteen years, the restored herd had grown to 300, and Estes Park residents were so enamored with the elk that they fought off a proposed hunting season.

By 1942, the elk population swelled to 1,525 animals. Without any predators, the herd overwhelmed the land and spread inside and outside park boundaries. Native grasses disappeared, as they had from livestock grazing, and park managers determined the winter range was way beyond its carrying capacity. In 1944, the U.S. Department of the Interior, which oversees the national park system, authorized a population control program where rangers shot elk to reduce the herd size.

For the next two decades, rangers maintained the herd at about 600 elk and saw improvements in the ecological health of the landscape. But the sanctioned killing of wildlife in a national park was unpopular within the Park Service and among the public. A 1962 agreement between the national park and the Colorado Division of Wildlife opened an elk-hunting season outside the park and ended the population control program.

In search of a steady policy for elk management, the park initiated “natural regulation” in 1968. In theory, environmental factors – available forage, predators, the survival of the fittest – were supposed to limit and stabilize the number of elk in the region. But without wolves or park rangers actively culling the herd, the population exploded. According to a later Division of Wildlife report, the herd had multiplied to 3,000 head by 1983, about where it remains today.

That ungulate mob has decimated the winter range inside the park, where it’s nearly impossible to find a healthy aspen tree or any new shrubs. The decline in vegetation has hurt bighorn sheep, ptarmigan and beavers, too. “Natural regulation” has turned the national park into a wasteland.

As the herd grew, thousands of hungry elk pushed down the valley just as Estes Park was undergoing its own population explosion. New subdivisions, which restrict hunting in the area, now run right up to the national park boundary. Two-thirds of the elk herd winter in suburbia. In his 1993 book, Rocky Times in Rocky Mountain National Park, Karl Hess, Jr. called the park “an ecological relic in the midst of expanding urban sprawl.”

“When I was a kid there weren’t any elk in town,” says Skip Peck, who manages the Estes Park golf courses.

Now, as many as 300 elk devour the greens, mark the fairways with their hooves, spar with the flag-pins and defecate wherever they want. Peck says he’s even had to close a hole in the spring because protective cow elk have charged golfers who get too close to their calves.

Bryan Michener says that people thought the development in the valley would help cull the herd by eliminating the natural forage. Instead, he says, the residential lawns and landscaping have served as a free buffet for elk. The animals now crowd onto front yards, town parks and the grounds of the YMCA. They even began drinking out of a waste-grain container behind the Estes Park Brewery (a practice now prohibited through fencing), which inspired the best-selling Staggering Elk Lager.

Into this human environment, came Samson – and Gimpy, Socrates, Elvis, Horny and a slew of other half-ton town mascots with impressive racks and no fear of people. And that near-domestication of trophy elk turned them into appealing targets for poachers who started descending on the Estes Valley with increasing audacity.

Poachers’ Paradise
It’s easy to see why Samson was so popular: He was easy to see. Just as the high visibility of Samson and other elk of Estes Park have attracted overzealous amateur photographers and parents looking for that distinct Christmas card picture of Baby, poachers have also sought out the human-habituated elk.

The myth of poachers is that they hunt illegally because licenses are prohibitively expensive to salt-of-the-earth backwoodsmen who survive on the meat. In reality, most poachers are out for a trophy – the rack and head of a behemoth bull – to sell on the black market. Poachers sneak around town after-hours, slaughter a bull elk with an impressive rack – sometimes killing the animal from the driver’s seat of a pickup – then hack off its head and leave the body on the roadside. A trophy mount like Samson – with eight- or nine-point antlers – can bring in thousands of dollars.

The last national headline-grabbing case around Estes happened in September 2003, when Terry Ray Graves, a Tennessee man, illegally killed a bull elk just inside national park boundaries. Graves spotlighted the 800-pound bull near a busy intersection, just across the street from a gas station and a few restaurants, and then riddled him with crossbow bolts, a frequent weapon of choice with poachers since they make no noise.

Rick Spowart, the district wildlife manager for the Colorado Division of Wildlife, found a headless corpse in a puddle of blood the next morning, along with a skinning knife, camouflage gloves and a bolt. Park rangers found blood at the campsite Graves had just left, and citizens and surveillance cameras identified that his truck was in the area. When investigators went back to Graves’ home in Tennessee, they turned up an elk head – among other animal heads – and later matched the DNA to the carcass. Charges are expected from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the next month.

The CSI: Estes Park storyline sounds sexy but most poachers aren’t as sloppy as Graves. There’s only been one other high-profile poaching conviction inside Rocky Mountain in the last four years. But Steve Spanyer, law enforcement specialist for the national park, says “It would surprise me if we went a year without a poaching incident in the park.”

“All too often [poachers] get away,” agrees Spowart, as he walks behind the town police station where a poacher, still at large, killed an elk this past September. He says that four to six “gross violations” by trophy-elk poachers occur each year in the Estes Valley. Even when authorities have caught them, judges and district attorneys used to go easy on them since wildlife violations don’t seem to measure up to other crimes. Randal Francis, who killed Samson, could have received up to $100,000 in fines but the D.A. cut him “an awfully good plea bargain,” says Spowart.

The situation has improved in the aftermath of Samson’s death. The public around Estes has become actively aware about wildlife poaching: Spowart and Spanyer both stress that most convictions only happen with the help of conscientious citizens, who pass along tips through the state’s Operation Game Thief toll-free hotline (1-877-COLO-OGT). The case also turned up political pressure to make poaching a costly crime. Now, anyone who illegally kills a trophy elk, an animal with six or more points on one of its antlers, in Colorado is subject to the Samson surcharge, a mandatory, $10,000 misdemeanor fine, in addition to other state and federal charges.

“I think the Samson surcharge has worked,” says Spowart. “Before the Samson surcharge, we had more of a trophy elk poaching problem than we do now.”

This is good news. Bryan Michener says Estes Valley locals had gotten somewhat used to finding headless elk carcasses on their land in the 1980s and early ’90s. That almost never happens anymore, he says.

Still, the Estes Valley and Rocky Mountain National Park appear destined to remain a tempting spot for renegade poachers. “You’re going to have poaching no matter what the size of the herd is,” says Kyle Patterson, National Park Service spokeswoman. “The animals being used to humans is more of a problem.”

Trophy Elk or Trophy Homes?
Regardless of golfers playing through calving grounds and poachers shooting off crossbows next to restaurants, the neighborhood wildlife remains a huge tourist attraction for Estes Park. Samson is an afterlife celebrity. The town’s main street is Elkhorn Avenue. The annual Elk Fest during the rut includes a bugling contest and features a band called the Elktones.

But people recognize a growing problem. A 2001 report from the U.S. Geological Survey says the number of elk is projected to increase by nearly 50 percent before being “nutritionally limited” by lack of forage “suggesting that human-elk conflicts will likely increase in the absence of active management intervention.” So, the Park Service is leading an effort, in coordination with the Colorado Division of Wildlife, the Town of Estes Park and other federal, county and valley partners, to take control of the issue.

Starting in 1994, federal and university researchers went to work figuring out what this intervention will look like. More than ten years later, the Park Service is closing out the planning process. Last year, the agency held public meetings to solicit comments on population control measures for the elk. Now, officials are putting the finishing touches on an environmental impact statement for a 20-year management plan for the elk.

“Overwhelmingly, the public agrees something needs to be done,” says Carlie Ronca, a natural resource management specialist at the national park. “Something” could include extensive fencing, hazing and herding of elk from sensitive areas, more hunting outside the park, culling inside the park led by agency-guided sharpshooters, wolf reintroduction and elk birth control. Among the six management alternatives the national park is considering, the herd could be reduced to 1,200 head or left at its current numbers through a combination of these elements.

“Probably, something needs to be done besides hunting,” says Spowart of the Division of Wildlife. His agency issues more than 2,000 hunting licenses each year for the area and about 400 to 500 elk are usually harvested. Considering there are already eleven different elk-hunting seasons outside the park in the area, it might be hard to further step up the hunt. Spowart says culling of the herd by authorized marksmen inside the park could effectively reduce the herd, but he thinks any call to kill a wildlife in a national park will be a tough sell to the general public and Congress, which might have to authorize that decision.

Equally controversial is the return of wolves. Mark Peterson of the Fort Collins office of the National Parks Conservation Association says he “looks forward to the day when wolves re-colonize Rocky Mountain National Park.” As predators, wolves will cull the elk herd and make the national park “a more naturally functioning ecosystem,” Peterson says.

“Wolves aren’t just going to stay in the park,” argues Skip Peck, from inside his office at the eighteen-hole golf course. Like other locals, Peck believes wolves will follow elk outside the park and into town, leading to more human encounters with wildlife.

For that reason among others, Colorado has remained somewhat ambiguous on its stance on the topic. But even if the state fails to adopt a Wolf Management Plan, the national park as a federal entity could push forward with its own wolf recovery plan. Or animals from packs in Wyoming could migrate on their own into Colorado.

Then, there’s birth control for the elk.

“Years ago, when [the herd] wasn’t so big,” says Peck, “I said they should round up the bulls and put rubber bands around their balls.”

Potential plans by the national park would be a little more technical. Wildlife managers would trap cow elk – not especially difficult with the tamed animals – and then shoot them with leuprolide, a contraceptive drug that sterilizes them for one year. Most people philosophically support the idea, but it is invasive to the wildlife, expensive to implement and still untested.

What combination of these tactics will take control of the elk population and straighten out the ecosystem?

“We haven’t determined the determining factors yet,” admits Ronca, although the Park Service plans to do so by the summer, when its recommendations will be issued.

“If they did something in ten years,” says Peck, “I’d be amazed.”

His cynicism underscores the arduous process the Park Service and its partners are carrying out. The humongous and habituated herd isn’t going away, and difficult political decisions will have to be made to deal with it.

“None of these alternatives,” says Spowart, “are going to be very palatable.”

That’s why Paul Firnhaber, one of Bryan Michener’s friends at the Notchtop Bakery, considers all of the management alternatives “stop-gap measures.”

“I don’t think we are going to solve the elk problem in this valley,” says Firnhaber. “We know what we have to do, but that’s not going to happen.”

He’s referring to population control – not for the elk, but for the people of Estes Park, who continue to invade and restyle the elks’ territory.

For Firnhaber and Michener and others at the Notchtop, the trouble isn’t trophy elk but trophy homes. They think a sanctuary, similar to the 25,000-acre National Elk Refuge outside of Grand Teton National Park and Jackson Hole, Wyoming, is the solution for the displaced herd. That would necessitate some major land-use revision and a pause to development in the Estes Valley.

Meanwhile, the elk joust with clotheslines, knock over birdhouses and chew away the aspen trees on front lawns. They mow down the golf courses and even the island of rock and grass where the bronze statue of Samson looks over the town, waiting for his martyrdom to be fulfilled.

Tom Tancredo

Tancredo, a Republican presidential candidate in 2008, is running for governor on the American Constitution Party ticket, and his political career has demonstrated his impressive knack for walking away with few injuries from a number of seemingly dangerous and uncomfortable situations.

Among his outrageous claims and positions over the years: confounding undocumented workers’ entry into the US with Middle Eastern terrorists, calling President Obama “the greatest threat” to America, debunking evolution, threatening to bomb Mecca, and advocating for the legalization of pot. If he sounds extreme, his political stances and straight-shooter attitude apparently resound with a sizable corps of voters angry over immigration policy or otherwise inclined to his arch-conservative views. At the moment, Tancredo is polling as a close second for governor, to Democrat and current Denver mayor John Hickenlooper, and he is making state Republicans look foolish for sticking with Tea Party candidate, Dan Maes (not that he’s needed much help, with Maes vilifying bicyclists instead of immigrants and claiming that bike-sharing programs “threaten our personal freedoms”).

I interviewed Tancredo for a profile article in the Rocky Mountain Bullhorn in July 2005, back when he was still in the U.S. Congress and first threatening to run for president. Even though the bid and his suggested immigration fixes have fallen flat, Tancredo is still forcing people and politicians to talk about his issues and views. As he told me about his presidential run, “[P]robably, we’re going to get one or more people fighting to see who can out-Tom-Tancredo each other, and so that would be good.”

Good, or alarming, depending on your political perspective, Tom Tancredo rides on.

***

From the Border to the Oval Office

Tom Tancredo drops the bomb—that he’s testing the waters for a run at the White House.
By Joshua Zaffos
Rocky Mountain Bullhorn, July 28, 2005

Tom Tancredo is running for president.

No, that’s not a promise…it’s a threat.

The four-term Republican congressman from Colorado’s Sixth District is traveling the country talking about locking down our national borders and kicking out the 11 million undocumented immigrants already here. And if other would-be 2008 presidential candidates don’t start following his lead, he’s ready to carry the anti-immigration banner on his own run for the White House.

“I want to see what they’ll promise to do to control the border, what they’ll promise to do to enforce the law internally in the United States against [businesses] who are hiring people who are here illegally,” says Tancredo, who lives in Littleton. “My purpose is to instigate that kind of discussion.”

The congressman certainly knows how to instigate. Most recently, his comments on a Florida talk-radio show on July 15 that an “ultimate response” to a terrorist nuclear attack on the United States could include bombing Mecca and other Islamic holy sites invoked worldwide scorn. In Colorado, 150 people gathered at the State Capitol on July 26 to say they’re embarrassed Tancredo represents the state.

He isn’t apologizing. Instead, Tancredo’s unabashedly touring the nation to ensure the “ultimate immigration reform guy”—perhaps himself—gets heard during the next presidential election. His explosive presence will be hard for contenders for the Oval Office to dodge.

In February and June, Tancredo stopped by New Hampshire, which holds the earliest state primary each presidential election. In mid-July, he swung through Iowa, home of the first party caucus, to meet with Christian Coalition members who gave him a rock-star reception. He’s also visited South Carolina, another early primary state, and will return in August.

“I commend him for what he’s doing,” says Fred Elbel, director of the Colorado Alliance for Immigration Reform and a Tancredo supporter. “The immigration problem is a symptom that our government is no longer responsible to our people and the rule of law.”

Pundits say there’s a good reason most politicians don’t talk about immigration.

“It’s another one of the hot-button issues that people feel passionately about on both sides,” says John Straayer, a Colorado State University political science professor.

In other words, most candidates treat immigration, like abortion, as a topic that will cost them votes instead of winning them support. As Tancredo beats the drum for immigration control, Straayer believes he’s effectively pressuring colleagues to talk about the subject and take a stance.

“From a citizen standpoint, it’s never a bad thing to elevate a critical issue,” adds Straayer.

From a party standpoint, it’s another thing. President Bush has introduced a guest-worker plan that would grant amnesty to undocumented immigrants already working in the U.S.— as long as they leave after five years and then reapply for legal entry. Tancredo’s own guest-worker proposal would make every illegal immigrant a felon and boost law enforcement along the borders. He says Bush’s legislation is among the spoils for corporations who contribute big money to the GOP and rely on low-cost immigrant labor.

“When you try to equivocate on [immigration policy] because you think you’ve got big donors who are going to get mad at you,” says Tancredo, “you take a hit, and it’s both a political and moral failing.”

Statements like this win standing ovations and teary hugs from “values” voters in New Hampshire, Iowa and South Carolina who appreciate his combination of John McCain-style honesty and Pat Buchanan-style conservatism. But those words also bring rebukes from Republican heavyweights at the national level.

In 2002, Bush’s political guru Karl Rove called Tancredo a “traitor” who was “never again to darken the door of the White House.” That ominous caveat came after the congressman told the Washington Times, “Unless we do something significant to control our borders, we’re going to have another event with someone waltzing across the borders. Then the blood of the people killed will be on this administration and this Congress.”

Last year, during the primary season, Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay told Tancredo he was “kaput.”

“You cannot think of making a career in this place [Congress],” DeLay warned.

Tancredo earned that scolding after his Team America political action committee—which he co-founded with Bay Buchanan, Pat’s sister—gave money to party candidates running against incumbent GOP colleagues with pro-immigration voting records.

Ongoing scandals over the ethics of both Rove and DeLay now make Tancredo look squeaky-clean and righteous in these exchanges, which is why he believes Republicans—and Democrats—won’t be able to duck the issue in 2008.

“I think the smart political money is on the side that takes up this issue, Republican or Democrat,” says Tancredo. “Why do you think you see people like Hillary Clinton addressing it? I mean it isn’t because she believes it. It’s because she figures she’s got to win some of those red-state votes.”

Gabriela Flora agrees with Tom Tancredo that “the immigration system is broken.” But the regional organizer in Colorado for the national social justice group American Friends Service Committee is not convinced that Tancredo’s plan—to line the borders with soldiers and deport every single undocumented worker in the U.S.—is the solution. She says an increase in border troops since the 1990s has led to more deaths among immigrants sneaking into the country but failed to decrease immigration rates.

Tancredo argues that securing the borders isn’t just a matter of restricting the entry of undocumented workers from Mexico and Latin America, but also one of homeland security.

“I think that those are both legitimate issues that revolve around the whole immigration debate,” says Tancredo. “Last fiscal year, we interdicted almost 30,000 people from what we call ‘countries of interest.’ So, you say to yourself, ‘Who would be being smuggled in here for somewhere up to $50,000 a head?’ It’s not someone who’s just going to work for 7-Eleven. So, there’s got to be another reason that they’re coming in, and it’s probably not a very good one.”

Responds Flora, “I think the war on terror is a very convenient way to conflate the issue. We need to talk about [immigration], not from a place of fear, but from a place of freedom and liberty.”

Tancredo clearly wants to do both. Even before he began “throwing out some ideas” about bombing Mecca, he warned a crowd in New Hampshire this June that illegal immigrants are  “coming here to kill you and you and me and my grandchildren.”

“If it gets to the point that his commentary is so continuous and explosive,” says Straayer, the political science professor, “his side suffers.”

But as long as immigration is being discussed, Tancredo acts like he’s winning—even if it triggers a political chasm within the Republican Party or a backlash against the U.S.

“I think, frankly, I won’t have to run for president,” says Tancredo.

Politicians are “almost as afraid now of running away [from the immigration issue] as they were in the past of embracing it,” he continues. “So, probably, we’re going to get one or more people fighting to see who can out-Tom-Tancredo each other, and so that would be good.”

If that’s what Americans end up voting on in 2008, will anybody be able to out-Tom-Tancredo the man himself?

Wardrobe Malfunction

By Joshua Zaffos

It can hardly be considered a coincidence that West Nile virus swarmed America, and then the insect-repellent garment industry had a breakthrough. Just imagine a group of investors, outdoorsmen, scientists and fashionistas assembled in the late ’90s to outfit the “swat team,” as Colorado health officials have dubbed citizens wary of disease-bearing mosquitoes. In 2001, a limited liability company formed in Greensboro, North Carolina, to manufacture and sell BUZZ OFF Insect Shield apparel.

Asian tiger mosquito, a vector of West Nile virus (photo via US CDC)

Now, L.L. Bean, Orvis and Ex Officio offer shirts, shorts, hats, pants and socks “impregnated” with bug-repelling, patent-pending technology. Fort Collins residents can buy BUZZ OFF clothes at Jax and REI.

This sounds like a godsend for Coloradans and all Americans. West Nile virus landed in the U.S. in 1999 and arrived in Colorado two summers ago. That year, 2,947 people in Colorado reported West Nile symptoms and 63 died. In Larimer and Weld counties, 948 citizens were diagnosed with the virus and fifteen of them died. Last Wednesday, the counties confirmed the first two cases of West Nile for the year statewide.

Mosquitoes spread West Nile by biting infected birds and picking up the disease. Then, one little vampire flies off, sinks her proboscis into a fleshy elbow, penetrates a blood vessel and leaves behind the virus. Symptoms include fever and body aches, but can progress to convulsions, encephalitis or meningitis—which both involve inflammation of parts of the brain—and even death.

The stats and symptoms escalate that buzzing by your ear from annoying to perilous. Sweat, induced by the heat and fear, increases your chance of infection since mosquitoes are attracted by scent. The burning sting on the back of your neck becomes exacerbated by an itchy paranoia over imminent brain swelling.

Why wouldn’t a person run out and buy BUZZ OFF clothing? A wardrobe that wards off mosquitoes bearing West Nile virus and ticks with Lyme Disease could save humanity. “How does it work?” you wonder, as you stand in line at the register of your favorite outdoor clothing store. According to the tags, “BUZZ OFF Insect Shield builds into your clothes a manmade version of a centuries-old insect repellent made from chrysanthemums.”

That kinda sounds like the campy ’70s commercial when the Asian laundry man credits an “ancient Chinese secret” for getting clothes clean, but it turns out to be the detergent additive Calgon.

Chrysanthemums do produce a natural chemical called pyrethrin. You can make it at home by crushing the dried flowers. But BUZZ OFF uses a synthetic pyrethroid called permethrin, which was engineered to be much more toxic than flower power.

Permethrin is a neurotoxin that’s applied as an industrial crop pesticide—and has been sprayed over Fort Collins in previous summers. The United States Environmental Protection Agency recognizes the chemical as a possible cancer-causing agent, which is why BUZZ OFF is the first line of clothing ever registered with the government agency. Studies reviewed by the World Health Organization show an increase in lung and liver tumors in mice exposed to permethrin. Further, some experts believe permethrin is an endocrine disruptor, meaning it can monkey around with the hormones that cue our growth and development.

An alarming example could be the 30,000 cases of Gulf War Syndrome among soldiers who fought in Iraq the first time around. The illness causes chronic muscle and joint pain, memory loss and general neurological damage. Research from Duke University suggests that Gulf War Syndrome may be linked to the use of permethrin-impregnated clothing in combination with anti-nerve gas drugs and DEET, the most popular toxic bug spray.

“Ancient Chinese secret, huh?”

None of these health risks is on the labels for BUZZ OFF. The tags sewn on the neurotoxin-laden clothing don’t even mention permethrin. The manufacturers do, however, tell consumers to wash BUZZ OFF clothing separate from the rest of the laundry and that its repellent powers wear off after 25 washings. Field data already prove that permethrin from agricultural use builds up in rivers where it’s lethal to the fish and critters that live in the waters.

Government health departments concede that West Nile virus is rare, and most infected people won’t even know they have it. Officials say the peak in transmission occurs the second year after the virus shows up, meaning Colorado and most of the country has already seen the worst of it. Last year, there were fewer than 300 cases and only four deaths in the entire state. Our counties had just 25 cases; everyone survived.

There are plenty of truly natural insect repellents, including citronella, lemongrass and tea tree oil. Public health and consumer groups are pushing for the clothing tags on BUZZ OFF to fully disclose the dangers of permethrin. But as with so many other toxic chemicals, this is probably another experiment where we’ll learn the results the hard way.

And that’s enough to sting us with a really painful dose of paranoia.
Staff reporter Joshua Zaffos uses a combo of lemongrass and B.O. to ward off the skeeters.

Pressing On

A Dispatch from the Frontlines and the Headlines
By Joshua Zaffos

“I am an exile from newspapers because of the most grievous sin of all—I have lost my belief. I no longer believe that the front page, the business page, the sports page, the arts page can tell a story that matters.”
— Charles Bowden, Blood Orchid

“Remember what I told you a long time ago?” my grandmother asked me over the phone. My ears perked, thinking she was on the verge of revealing some sage advice that she earned through her long years. “There’s no future in the papers.”

Grandma Sue’s hint of ancient wisdom was actually a warning, a taunt of sorts, that she likes to repeat to me quite regularly when I see her in person back East or occasionally when we talk over the phone: Newspapers are a dead end for a smart fellow like her youngest grandson.

My grandmother wasn’t disclosing some lesson gained from a career as an editor at the Washington Post or a beat reporter for Newsweek. I presume her shared insight was something she picked up watching Fox News.

“They’re giving it away for free here,” Grandma told me, “here” being New York City and “it” being the city’s tabloid dailies, including Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. “And there’s nothing in there. It’s all crap. People, they’ve got the intercom now.”

I love my grandma, even if she sometimes confuses an in-house communication system with the World Wide Web. And I don’t argue with her over the phone. What’s the point? I’m glad I still have regular conversations with her, and, besides, her diagnosis of the press is only partly skewed. The New York Post is filled with crap, and publishers are facing a crisis. That’s why dailies are dumping free copies on potential readers, and, more critically, slashing bureaus, beats and staff and even closing their doors.

It’s happening up and down the print-media food chain, and I am a minor witness to the carnage. My own (mis) adventures working for local, independent newspapers—far cries from the Post and most other New York City media—have both ended with abrupt closures and tears in beers.

How rough has grown the jungle of print media?

It’s nearly impossible to post an accurate account of the industry’s well being, if only because the casualties keep rolling in. Writing on the topic requires constant dismal revisions. Not that the prognosis has really changed from my grandmother’s conclusion. After weighing the consequences of job cuts and profit-based management at our country’s newspapers, media critics determined 2008 to be a disastrous landmark for the press: Worst. Year. Ever.

In February, the New York Times cut 100 jobs, the paper’s first staff layoff ever. Later in the year, the newspaper revealed that its stock value had plummeted 15 percent in a single month. To stave off a more severe disaster in December, the company borrowed $225 million against the value of its Manhattan headquarters to augment its dwindling cash flow.

The Los Angeles Times cut 150 newsroom jobs (17 percent of the department) and 100 additional staff; the Chicago Tribune lopped off 80 positions. Both major dailies are part of the Tribune Company, which has made similarly deep cuts to daily newspapers in Baltimore, Orlando and elsewhere. The corporation declared bankruptcy in December, citing $13 billion in debts.

In June, McClatchy Co., the third-largest newspaper publisher in the US, disclosed it would eliminate 1,400 jobs, roughly 10 percent of its workforce, among its 30 dailies across the country. For those that survived the purge, there is a locked-in yearlong pay freeze.

E.W. Scripps, which owns newspapers in 15 states, including the Rocky Mountain News, announced in the summer that the value of its print holdings had dropped by $874 million. Before the end of the year, Scripps put the Rocky up for sale, claiming it would likely close down the 150-year-old newspaper if a buyer didn’t emerge in early 2009.

Gannett, the country’s largest print publisher, declared a loss of $2.4 billion in the value of its 84 daily and nearly 900 non-daily newspapers, including the USA Today. A first round of August layoffs chopped 1,000 jobs, which was followed by another cut of 3,000 positions in October, totaling more than 10 percent of the company’s staff. Perversely, but not surprisingly, Gannett’s summer staff reduction caused its stock to jump on Wall Street.

We are watching the equivalent of media climate change, to use everyone’s favorite disaster parlance of late, and this is the tip of the iceberg that has started to melt away in the twenty-first century. Unfortunately, due to consolidation of media ownership and other financial forces, companies are getting rewarded for dedicating fewer and fewer resources to journalism and writing.

Where are the media corporations investing their dollars? In September, Gannett spent $135 million to purchase a controlling stake in CareerBuilder, the online job board, which is co-owned by Tribune and McClatchy. And while media corporations are facing plummeting stock earnings and disappearing advertising revenue, the bosses aren’t exactly starving. For the third quarter of 2008, Gannett actually exceeded analysts’ revenue projections and earned $158 million in net income. The company’s CEO Craig Dubow, who pledged to take a 17 percent pay cut in “a show of solidarity” with his newspapers’ rank-and-file, made about $7.5 million in 2008, including salary, stock options and a bonus.

It obviously costs millions to run these corporations, and the largest media empires have the most to lose in this topsy-turvy moment. Regardless of where we live, shrinking resources at institutional newspapers, like the New York Times and Chicago Tribune, are a major loss to our national community as a whole. But independent and alternative papers must also tread the rising waters and sinking ad revenue, although they’re much more likely to drown.

Smaller daily and community weekly papers are cutting staff, closing bureaus abroad and in state capitals. Independent papers, like alternative newsweeklies, which distribute for free and rely entirely on ad dollars, are faced with corporate buyouts or shutting down. The pressures have led to somewhat troubling trends among altweeklies, which pride themselves on their independence.

Village Voice Media now owns 15 alternative newsweeklies, in New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Denver and several other major cities. Creative Loafing runs six altweeklies, including ones in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta. Both companies have instituted staff cuts at several papers, and other independently owned altweeklies have expressed reservations over the direction of these decidedly corporate ventures.

When I first accepted a job as a staff writer at the Rocky Mountain Bullhorn, an alternative newsweekly in Fort Collins, Colorado, in late 2004, a mentoring friend let out a devilish hoot upon hearing my decision. “Have you ever worked at a weekly?” she asked. I had not, and she explained to me that writing at a weekly publication somehow combines the manic rush of filing stories at a daily newspaper with the more exhaustive demands that come with a monthly magazine, where articles are expected to develop from extensive reporting and offer much more than the five W’s.

A weekly doesn’t have someone on a deadline everyday, yet something is always due. The production doesn’t give many breaths or breaks, and the pace is constantly frenetic, which induces a sort of crash-and-burn atmosphere.

“And you and everyone you work with will always be going crazy,” my friend told me.

She was right.

Almost everybody at an independent weekly newspaper is overworked and underpaid, and at the darkest hours we feel alone in that capacity. That’s not true, at a newspaper or in the surrounding universe; there are many more and equally as taxing jobs in the world. But when you are spending 60-plus hours a week working and then sometimes sleeping under a desk, it’s way too easy to find moments to feel both sorry about yourself and for yourself.

The staff is typically a small band of creative-neurotic types. I’ve seen coworkers starve themselves, drop shots of whiskey for breakfast, suffer panic attacks requiring EMT attention, and, literally, chew off their fingers. In the middle of an intense story or a chaotic week, I would sometimes wake up with a compulsion to violently dry heave before getting into the day. Working at a small altweekly makes smoking cigarettes seem like a healthy lifestyle choice (I do not wish to count the number of former coworkers who started or resumed smoking while employed at a paper).

At a small weekly newspaper, everybody is always going crazy.

Sound like hell? It’s actually great. There is a euphoria that sometimes rises like a vapor from this mayhem, a byproduct of collaborating on something creative and essential.

That might sound a little arrogant, but this intense feeling, channeling the heaves and highs, is what good writing—good storytelling—is for me. And, to be direct, most writers are at least a little arrogant.

The intense feeling is what I think of when someone asks if I am a member of the press (I haven’t seen a newspaper printing press since I went on a second-grade field trip). To me, the press is the sleeplessness and self-immolation, the euphoria and drunkenness that come with telling stories with a balance of detail and urgency. The press is that unbearable feeling that what we are doing has meaning to our society, whether as information, influence, or entertainment.

It is a great and humbling responsibility reporting and writing for a community, and it is something I am grateful to be paid to do. I love the crush of an idea or a person that I have discovered or been introduced to, and the snap in my brain that this would be an amazing or beautiful or entertaining story. Then comes the compulsion that people should read (or hear or see) about this and feel the spark that I do.

This is the press that is in trouble, more so than print media as an industry. It’s the thing that feeds and connects writers, producers and broadcasters of news in all its forms. We report and write because we want to make a difference. We want to deliver meaning.

These days, as print media cannibalizes itself, we are losing that urgency to make sure what we report and write is meaningful. Some writers recognize it as morale loss or viral fear. Middle managers spin it as doing More With Less. Readers of daily newspapers get shallow stories with glancing insight from publications that are purposely streamlined. Reporters rarely get to develop relationships with sources and communities. When people complain to me about the Gannett-owned daily newspaper in our city, they often say that the paper fails to connect the dots.

This is supposed to be the great advantage to working at an independent publication, particularly an altweekly: the freedom to dig deeper and write stories that matter. It’s partly what led me to abandon a modest freelance writing lifestyle for a job that made me wake up nauseous. The trick, I learned, is staying in business.

The Worst Year Ever for newspapers certainly proved challenging to my journalistic career. In May 2008, I was a part of an independent altweekly, the Rocky Mountain Chronicle, which shut down a few months ahead of the curve in terms of the year’s media trauma. It was an experience I was repeating for the second time in just twenty-seven months.

After twelve roller-coaster months at the Bullhorn, the five-year-old weekly newspaper suddenly went out of business in early 2006, while we were finishing an issue that would never go to print.

I was heartbroken, along with everyone I worked with, but there was also a strange sense of relief. Amid the chaos that we constantly worked in, it was hard to ignore the financial pressures that the organization was facing. That we were shutting down wasn’t a total surprise, but the timing was a shock.

The same heartbreak strikes when bureaus, beats and jobs are cut at daily newspapers, when TV stations consolidate their newsrooms. On journalism list-serves that I read, prize-winning reporters have shared their decisions to accept voluntary layoffs, rather than continuing to work under the shadow of job losses, redundancy orders, merged beats and pay freezes.

Just seven months after the Bullhorn closed, a good friend announced that she wanted to launch the Chronicle as a new altweekly newspaper in Fort Collins. Born and raised in the city, she recognized the value of an independent newspaper pursuing narrative stories about the people and culture of our region. Our readership grew steadily, but even more impressive to me, as the news editor, were the number of sources and untold stories that emerged.

The Chronicle started in October 2006. We engaged in investigative and in-depth stories, critical music and arts writing, and general quirk. Among editors, we had a lot of passionate debates over the significance and mission of our publication and writing, and the meaning of words like “investigative,” “alternative” and “edgy.” Those discussions may have bordered on the pretentious and the precise, but we were genuine in our desire to write meaningful stories.

When our publisher consulted with other altweekly bosses, they told her she was crazy. Flush some money down a toilet instead, they said. Since altweeklies rely almost exclusively on ad revenue for income, the sub-industry has taken a particularly harsh hit due to free online advertising through venues like Craigslist and the overall sagging economy, which has left local businesses with fewer dollars to spend on advertising.

The experienced altweekly publishers were apparently right about the high odds of getting a startup paper up and running; something we really already knew from the last experience. After a not particularly lengthy existence of just 20 months, the Chronicle announced it would cease printing amid daunting prospects for financial viability.

If you’ve never worked at a small business that shuts down because it cannot sustain itself, I can tell you this: It catches you like a bad breakup to a good relationship and leaves a lot of unanswered questions. At first, a measure of sadness is cushioned in a daze. Grief quickly gives way to anger. At a homegrown newspaper, there is this feeling: Our work is not yet done. There are stories still to be told.

The week after we learned of the closure, I received a hand-written letter from a woman with claims of police brutality and political corruption, begging our paper to look into her leads. She may have been a crackpot—sorting through print-worthy sources and stories is one way to dive into the press—but she had chosen to write our paper, and not others in the city, for a reason. I left the letter pinned to a corkboard after I had cleaned out my office.

We are living through the somewhat predictable circumstances of corporate control and consolidated ownership of media. The current bleak state of journalism has been a slow train coming. The recession is a stretch of poorly maintained rails and the Internet is a behemoth beast standing on the tracks.

Grandma Sue isn’t totally off base in her assessment about the Internet replacing print media. More people now get their news online than by reading a paper. The New York Times estimates that it has ten Web readers for every one who turns through the print edition. The Web has competed, more than complemented, print publications.

From an operational point of view, the catch is that people expect to read for free on the Internet, and businesses expect to pay less to advertise online. From an informational angle, the trend is leading to shorter and more glancing articles and coverage, even if it opens opportunities for multimedia work. We have taken the act of reading and begun transforming it into another way of staring at an electronic screen.

There are some inspiring digital manifestations (among a range of examples, there is the Center for Investigative Reporting and MediaStorm). But corporate-chain media barons are also trying to conquer a new medium and return to the salad days of ludicrous profits and booming stocks. For example, Gannett has kicked up the visibility of its online reporting and resources, as part of its corporate restructuring. The company now calls reporters “mojos,” or mobile journalists. The transition smacks of re-branding, a marketing strategy to perhaps show that Gannett’s newspapers are hip with blogging and the Web, rather than a meaningful new model of journalism.

I do not blame Gannett or Craigslist for the failure of the independent papers where I worked. I do not blame the competition from other local newspapers or blogs for our end. But I lament that we have created an environment (and, yes, We The People are responsible for the current media landscape) that is so prohibitive to running a newspaper that delivers stories that matter, where the press flows for writers and readers—and publishers, too.

We are losing the venues we have developed to tell stories. And we are giving a jaded set of choices to writers and readers. So, now we must learn how to tell stories all over again. We must learn how to tell stories on a computer screen. We have to keep learning how to tell stories on TV, so most of those resources don’t go into entrapping sexual predators at anonymous houses. And we must learn how to keep telling stories on paper.

The pangs of the press kept a few Chronicle staff members searching for life after print. We had told readers we would explore options. We looked at online formats and spoke with people behind nonprofit journalism ventures, where funding comes from charitable foundations and community members—kind of like public radio and television.

The Chronicle did find signs of support and encouragement for continuing as an online publication, possibly with a monthly print issue. But we also recognized that we would be constantly scrambling for operating funds. The nonprofit model was a way to get around the void of advertising dollars as revenue, but grant funding is a tricky avenue to travel during a slow economy.

To be honest and with apologies to our community, I think we were burnt out. I was burnt out. The task felt monumental and, after three months of meetings, I felt pretty emotionless when our remaining crew decided we would give up our revival attempt. When it came time to pen an announcement about the decision to officially end our efforts, I made it as brief as possible. The 100-word-missive was more memo than eulogy.

People still approach me—including souls I have never met before—and ask what’s up with the Chronicle, when will it restart, or when a new publication might arrive in its place. A friend of mine can’t accept that we have exhausted all of our options. A woman at the bar refuses to accept my answers about the closure. A barista from one of the downtown coffee shops listens to my explanations and then says, with a pout, “Well, you left us with nothing to read.”

When my grandmother or anyone else tells me newspapers and the narrative forms of writing that we associate with print media are dead, I think of the book-versus-film debate. So many more people see the film but never read the book. The film makes more money than the book; it’s more successful in those terms. But people that read the book and see the movie, almost always say the book is better. Perhaps for the effort and time it requires; perhaps because of what reading asks of our imagination.

There is a future in the papers, but it’s not going to look like the past. Hopefully, it won’t resemble the present too much either. My guess is that most daily newspapers will become online enterprises. The loss of the morning paper on our front step might be the cost of allowing stock values to steer the media industry.

As for the outlook of independent and meaningful journalism, it will be in the ventures that tap into the Web and all that it has to offer while also pursuing more traditional forms of reporting and storytelling. If that sounds vague, it’s because it’s meant to: If I had a proper bead on the future, I suspect I would still have a job at an independent newspaper in Northern Colorado.

In July 2008, a subscriber to the Raleigh News & Observer took action in a most American way. He announced plans to sue the daily paper for cutting the size of its news section and firing 70 staff members. The reader claimed the newspaper had broken its contract with subscribed readers.

The lawsuit borders on frivolous, but it’s a reminder that newspapers and the media—regardless of or, at least, in addition to their responsibility to stockholders—have a pulsing obligation to the communities they serve. To tell stories that matter and stoke the press.