JACKSON HOLE’S ALTERNATIVE VOICE | PLANETJH.COM | NOVEMBER 25-DECEMBER 1, 2015

LETTERSTO THE

FUTUREThe Paris Climate Project

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Adopt a family this holiday season. Contact CRC to be matched with a family in need.

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Call (307) 739-4500 to learn more and get involved

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Help a family have a magical holiday

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PUBLISHERCopperfield Publishing, John SaltasGENERAL MANAGER Andy Sutcliffe / asutcliffe@planetjh.com EDITOR Robyn Vincent / editor@planetjh.comART DIRECTOR Cait Lee / art@planetjh.comSALES DIRECTOR Jen Tillotson / jen@planetjh.com

SALES EXTRAORDINAIRECaroline Zieleniewski / caroline@planetjh.comCOPY EDITOR Molly AbsolonCONTRIBUTORS Mike Bressler, Rob Brezsny, Ryan Burke, Aaron Davis, Kelsey Dayton, Elizabeth Koutrelakos, Carol Mann, Andrew Munz, Jake Nichols, Scott Renshaw, Ted Scheffler, Chuck Shepherd, Tom Tomorrow, Jim Woodmencey

JACKSON HOLE'S ALTERNATIVE VOICE

VOLUME 13 | ISSUE 46 | NOVEMBER 25-DECEMBER 1, 2015

567 W. BROADWAY | P.O. BOX 3249 | JACKSON, WYOMING 83001307-732-0299 | WWW.PLANETJH.COM

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THE PLANET TEAM

COVER STORY9

November 25, 2015By Meteorologist Jim Woodmencey

This Thanksgiving we have a lot to be thankful for, weather-wise. There is snow on the ground, ski areas are

open, and temperatures are cold enough to make snow too. Before the arrival of snow in November, the weather was kind to us with a relatively nice October. We also had a relatively cool and wet summer, which led to a low or non-existent fire season around Jackson Hole. Other parts of the Western U.S. weren’t so lucky.

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We got below zero in Jackson for the first time this fall on Saturday, November 21st; it was minus seven degrees. Last November, we got colder than that, earlier than that, with 11 below zero on November 12th. It also dropped to 22 below zero on November 16th, 2014. The record coldest temperature this week in town is 29 below zero, which hap-pened on November 30th, 2004. So please, no whining about seven below zero being cold.

Fifty-eight degrees is the warmest we have ever been in Jackson around Thanksgiving time, and that record warmth happened way back on November 25th, 1949. It has not been that warm around Thanksgiving since. Compare that to the high temperature on November 25th, 2010, which was only 5-degrees. Yes, that was the high tempera-ture that day! So, you see, even though it may be a “cool” Thanksgiving this year, it is not as cold as it could be. Be thankful for that.

JH ALMANAC

Jim has been forecasting the weather here for more than 20 years. You can find more Jackson Hole Weather

information at www.mountainweather.com

SPONSORED BY GRAND TETON FLOOR & WINDOW COVERINGS

NORMAL HIGHNORMAL LOWRECORD HIGH IN 1949RECORD LOW IN 2004

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WHAT’S COOL WHAT’S HOT

LETTERS TO THE FUTUREScientists, authors and activists predict the outcome of the upcoming U.N. climate talks in Paris.

Cover photo illustration by Don Button

6 THE BUZZ

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22 COSMIC CAFE

30 REDNECK PERSPECTIVE

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AVERAGE SNOWFALL: 9.3 inches

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The Will for Moose-WilsonPark is setting a good pace to protect corridor, now the public must guide it to the finish line.BY CRAIG BENJAMIN

The Moose-Wilson corridor in Grand Teton National Park will always hold a special place in my heart. I’ll never

forget the summer night I spent camping on the Death Canyon shelf with my little brother as we hiked the Teton Crest Trail. The beauty and serenity of the spring-fed pools bubbling up from the limestone left us awestruck. I’ll always remember that a backpacking trip from the top of the tram and out of Granite Canyon convinced my wife Stacy to plant roots in Jackson Hole 13 years ago.

I also remember using the Moose-Wilson road as a way to get where I needed to go. More than a decade ago while I worked as a banquet bartender for Snake River Lodge in Teton Village, we hosted “horse-whisperer” dinners at Diamond Cross Ranch in Buffalo Valley. I got to set up a hay-bale bar in a giant barn with picture-window views of the Tetons, watch a horse-whisperer show and hang out with a pile of festive people, all while being generously compensated for my time. It rocked. On top of that, we would rally down the Moose-Wilson Road to and from the event, having way too much fun going as fast as we could while trying to avoid the sus-pension-smashing potholes. Arriving long after us on its way from town was the truck carrying our provisions.

Here’s the thing, it is not the purpose of the Moose-Wilson corridor to serve as a transportation corridor for people trying to drive across Teton County. It’s a unique and special place to visit in Grand Teton National Park with rich wildlife habitat and remark-able recreational opportunities.

Recently, my experiences in the corridor have been memorable for the wrong rea-sons. One summer day in particular comes to mind, when Stacy and I decided to take the Moose-Wilson Road home after hiking in the park with the kids. We wanted to show them this special corner of the park and hopefully see a bear. Crawling down the clogged road behind a creeping chain of cars, we weari-ly weaved around potholes, not seeing any wildlife, while Stacy and the kids became carsick.

How did things get this bad? Over the past decade, significant private develop-ment south of the corridor has contributed

to increased vehicular traffic on the Moose-Wilson Road. As my family experienced that day (and I bet you’ve experienced too), this increased congestion degrades the visitor experience, harms wildlife, and makes it dangerous for people to bike or walk on the road.

It’s not like we didn’t see this problem coming. In 2007, the Park completed a major transportation planning effort. A section of this plan identified strategies for decreasing vehicular traffic, protecting wildlife, mak-ing it safer to walk and bike, and enhancing the visitor experience on the Moose-Wilson Road. A few years ago, the Park proposed implementing one of the strategies to reduce traffic congestion identified in this plan, and some people in our community went bonkers.

Partly because of this political explosion, but mostly because of two key changes in the corridor over the past decade – the arrival of grizzlies and the opening of the Laurance S. Rockefeller Preserve – the Park launched a process to develop a comprehensive man-agement plan. The goal is to determine how best to provide appropriate opportunities for visitors to use, experience, and enjoy the Moose-Wilson corridor while protecting Park resources.

Over the past two years, the Park has engaged in a transparent, science-based, and participatory National Environmental Policy Act process resulting in the recent release of the draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) for the management of the corridor. We should all respect this process and help protect the Park from political meddling.

Since the Moose-Wilson corridor is a spe-cial place to visit in a national park, not a transportation corridor, the Moose-Wilson Comprehensive Corridor Management Plan should focus on protecting wildlife and hab-itat. It should also focus on making it easy and safe for people to visit the area on foot, bicycle, or via public transit. You should not need a private motor vehicle to safely visit the Moose-Wilson corridor. It’s 2015, not 1955.

The preferred alternative attempts to strike a compromise and takes a few steps in the right direction – such as limiting the number of cars in the corridor to 200 at any

one time, reducing the speed limit to 20 mph, and improving the road surface. However, it could more effectively protect Park natural and cultural resources while allowing oppor-tunities for visitors to experience and enjoy the area.

Since increasing vehicular traffic on the road is by far the biggest issue impacting the corridor, the Park should take more aggres-sive measures within the existing developed footprint to reduce traffic, while also protect-ing natural resources and making it a safer and a more pleasant place to visit.

Specifically, the Park should improve the preferred alternative. Here’s how: by engi-neering the road with speed bumps or sim-ilar measures to physically slow down cars (making it safer for everyone, as research indicates that shared, slow-speed streets are some of the safest places for people to walk, bike, and drive). Analyzing options for corri-dor-appropriate transit (like shuttles) would also be effective, along with shrinking the size of some parking lots. Other ways to enhance the preferred alternative include maintaining vegetation along the road, and looking at creative options for balancing the impact to cultural resources with the need to realign the road away from the beaver ponds at the northern end.

Please join hundreds of your friends and neighbors, and thousands of people from across America, in commenting on the Moose-Wilson Corridor DEIS by January 15, 2016. Let Park officials know you appreciate their transparent, science-based, and par-ticipatory planning process, and the steps they have taken to discourage the use of the road as a transportation corridor. Tell them they can go further toward protecting wildlife and habitat in the corridor, while making it easy and safe for people to visit the area on foot, bicycle, or corridor-appropriate public transit. Please visit parkplanning.nps.gov/MooseWilson to submit your comments today.

Craig Benjamin is the executive director of the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance.

Send your comments to editor@planetjh.com. PJH

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Moose-Wilson Road HogsPlans for contentious corridor are being placed under the microscope.BY JAKE NICHOLS

The Park Service did its homework. Of that, most are in agreement. In preparing the colossal 694-page Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on the Moose-

Wilson Corridor, NPS officials left no stone unturned. Dozens of government agencies, 23 Native American Indian tribes, and 118 organizations and businesses were consulted in the process of revamping the 10,300 acres of riparian habi-tat along the 7-mile long, 4-mile wide connector road from Moose to Teton Village.

Federal managers looked at everything – from obvious impacts to wildlife and public safety to obscure details such as how climate change and night sky pollution could be affected. The report even included a 1/3 octave, 24-hour spectrogram, which measured ambient noise 100 feet from the road on a typical summer day (July 1, 2013).

Franz Camenzend, a noted wildlife biologist and environmental activist who has lately been heading an ad hoc watch-dog called Friends of the Moose-Wilson Corridor, said it was the most compre-hensive EIS he’s seen in 40 years in the business.

The next step is another public com-ment period, scheduled to run through the end of the year, but NPS officials agreed to extend that until January 15, 2016, after hearing feedback that too many people are busy with the holiday season. The Park Service laid out four courses of action for the Moose-Wilson Road. Its preferred alternative highlighted by a quota system that would cap the total number of vehicles on the 7.1-mile stretch of road to 200 maximum at any given time. It would be one-out, one-in at both the north and south entrances to the road when that cap was in effect.

The process has been relatively quick – it began with a public scoping period in December 2013 – and fairly trans-parent. That transparency was threatened, however, when confusion over a secretive meeting slated for Monday was closed to the public.

The Planet managed to infiltrate the meeting via phone conference in an effort to keep its readers ever informed.

Meeting Highlights Governor Matt Mead opened the meeting by acknowl-

edging there had been some confusion over whether the charrette was open to the public. He did note “a reporter had driven there all the way from Jackson.”

Jerimiah L. Rieman, the governor’s natural resource pol-icy director, voluntarily threw himself under the bus on that note, saying, “It was my idea to call the meeting. I apologize for no one knowing what the meeting agenda was. It created a situation that doesn’t need to exist. I’ll take that on my shoulders.”

Both Mead and Rieman said the purpose of the meeting was to review the process, not necessarily any problems the governor’s office had with the preferred alternative proposed

by the Park Service, though they did have some issues with it.“At the end of the day we may agree or disagree with your

decision, but we understand it’s you guys [NPS] who are going to decide what is the right way to go about this,” Mead said. “Listening to all these various agencies involved and making sure everyone is heard is some heavy lifting, and everyone has different points of view, but you get one chance to get it right.”

Mead thanked the Park Service for the open and coopera-tive way they have handled the process thus far.

Rieman said the governor’s office was a bit frustrated, though, when the Park Service met in December 2014 with local government agencies in Jackson, sharing public feed-back and eventually proposing its preferred Alternative C plan in January. “We weren’t given that information until July,” Rieman complained.

Rieman stressed that the state and other cooperatives wanted a chance to get in the Park Service’s ear after the latest round of public comment but before the ink dried on a final draft headed for Washington.

“I do think we can do better. All of us,” Rieman said. “We understand that the federal agency was ultimate responsibil-ity for making the final decision. We do not hold it over any-one’s head or are trying to tell you what to do. But additional engagement from all of us hopefully provides for an oppor-tunity to support the final decision, but at the very least, to understand how you got there if we don’t.”

GTNP superintendent Dave Vela said he greatly appreci-ated all the input his agency received, especially that from Teton County commissioners. He said he’s received more

than 3,000 public comments so far and agreed to extend the current public com-ment period for an additional 17 days to mid-January.

“I know in Teton County and in the community of Jackson, they take a great interest in this as does the rest of the country and the world,” Mead said. “Truly the process is working whether we like or dislike the end result.”

Commissioner Paul Vogelheim said his board has applied some pressure on

the Park Service to keep things moving. “We are anxious to see the process come to a conclusion,” he said.

Special interest groups were represented solely by Jerry Blann, who made the trip to speak on behalf of the Teton Village Association. Blann said his organization was omitted from the input process as an official cooperator. “We are in close proximity and have more to gain and stand more to lose, as well as have more to offer in terms of some of the solutions,” he said.

“We think transit can pay a critical role,” Blann noted, referring to Alternative C’s nixing of a bike path or allowance for mass transit. “Two primary issues are access and safety. We are also very concerned about the 200 number. Honestly, we would like to understand better how that number was derived. There is a better way to protect the resource and not turning people back to drive 60 miles around. And I’ll stick my neck out here and offer private sources in Teton Village that I think will step up to protect that kind of scenario. We would be more than happy to pitch in.”

Teton County engineer Sean O’Malley offered some advice on integrating his department in the process. “As an engineer, I’m used to solving problems,” he said.

“And politicians like to create them,” Mead joked in reply.“Yes, well, Alternative C could use some improving,”

O’Malley said.Mayor Sara Flitner and councilman Jim Stanford spoke

only long enough to thank everyone on their openness and cooperative efforts, as did commissioner Barb Allen.

Town of Jackson administrator Bob McLaurin introduced

himself via phone conference to which Mead replied, “Every time I see you I resist the urge to ask about the slide.”

“It’s still moving, Governor,” McLaurin responded.Mead closed the meeting by saying, “If we are dropping

the ball, you know where we live. We are open to suggestions coming our way. And, Jerry, we know how important this is to you. You’ve made it clear to anyone within earshot of you. Supervisor Vela, we will pledge from this office to be a mean-ingful cooperator.” PJH

THE BUZZ

NPS

Public safety has not been an issue on the heavily-used stretch of Park road. Only 3.8 vehicular accidents, on average, are

recorded annually. Cyclist accidents are also rare.

Quick GlanceThe Moose-Wilson corridor covers about 10,300 acres

in a strip 7 miles long and 4 miles wide. The majority is paved (5.7 miles), with an unpaved dirt/gravel portion (1.4 miles).

The narrow, winding road provides “back door” access to the south end of Grand Teton National Park and a rustic, slow-driving experience for visitors looking for exceptional scenery and wildlife viewing opportunities. Some residents and visitors also use the road as a shortcut between Wyoming Route 390 and destinations within and beyond the park.

AVERAGE DAILY VEHICLE USE

Change 2006 2007 2008 2013 % July 1,668 1,740 1,870 2,094 +26% August 1,616 1,695 1,770 2,102 +30% September 1,110 1,267 1,355 1,772 +60%

Estimated wait times under Alternative C during approximately 25 heaviest use summer days range from a few minutes to 20 minutes. Average wait time based on July 6, 2013 usage was estimated at 9 minutes and 26 seconds.

“[W]e are very concerned about the

200 number.”

- Jerry Blann

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Dark day aheadIt’s not too early for some stargazers to

begin planning for the first total solar eclipse in the United States since the late 1970s, and the first to travel the entire country since 1918. Wyoming is expected to get a front-row seat to the action, especially Jackson Hole.

The trajectory of the event will take the sun’s path directly over Jackson Hole on August 21, 2017 at 12:37 p.m. The event is expected to last for 2 minutes and 20 seconds, according to NASA’s Fred Espenak.

Photographer alert: The centerline should pass through Grand Teton National Park, past the north end of the runway of Jackson Hole Airport, and virtually right over the Grand Teton itself.

Viewers of the event will need to be in the direct trajectory to see the totality of the eclipse. In Wyoming, that means Jackson Hole, Glendo, Guernsey, and Casper. Casper city officials are ahead of the curve, scheduling a four-day Eclipse Fest from Aug. 18-21, 2017. Jackson Hole Central Reservations is encouraging visitors to make their reserva-tions early.

Universally affordableUniversity of Wyoming is the most affordable four-year college in the nation for

in-state students. A report issued by the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. showed that UW topped the nationwide list while Central Wyoming College ranked 8th in lowest tuition in the country.

Low tuition comes at a price, however. The same study ranked Wyoming as having the second-highest levels of state funding compared to the rest of the U.S. Uncertainty over expected budget cuts due to poor coal revenue has delayed a decision by Wyoming Community College Commission on whether to increase tuition for the next school year. That determination is usually made in October.

The story was reported in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle.

El Nono?Is Jackson Hole too far north to squeeze the best out of El Nino? The positive precip-

itation effects of the system are expected to bring higher than normal snowfall to the southwestern U.S. – Southern California, Arizona, and New Mexico should get blasted – but northwest Wyoming is considered just out of the geographic pattern.

National Weather Service meteorologist Chris Jones told the Casper Tribune that skiers and snowboarders should not worry. “Wyoming’s northwest corner should still receive plenty of snow, just maybe not as much as other years,” Jones said.

Equality State?Suzan M. Pritchett’s guest column for WyoFile last week-

end was interesting. Following the terrorist attacks on Paris, Gov. Matt Mead predictably joined governors from across the nation in asking President Obama to halt the refugee process and declared Wyoming would not accept Syrian refugees.

The announcement seemed little more than political posturing – how many Syrian refugees are actually looking to relocate to the Cowboy State? – and Pritchett would likely agree. She wrote: “Wyoming was the only state in the United States that did not participate in the federal refugee reset-

tlement program.” Indeed, Wyoming has been and continues to be the only state in the nation that does not directly receive refugees who have been identified and vetted by the United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees.

The state that once resorted to drastic measures, like giving women the right to vote, in order to increase population is turning a cold shoulder to foreigners from global ter-rorism hotspots.

And they’re off…againHorse racing terminals are back online after 50 days

of downtime. Regulating agency Wyoming Pari-Mutuel Commission pulled the plug on the machines October 4 after a warning from the State Attorney General’s Office that betting on historical horse races was still betting and there-fore illegal under state statute.

A work-around has been achieved which requires every terminal’s software to be verified and then certified with a sticker. PJH

By JAKE NICHOLS

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The Patient Will See You NowProfessional patients now help train would-be doctors, especially in the most delicate and dread-ed of exams (gynecologi-cal and prostate), where a becalming technique improves outcomes. One “teaching associate” of Eastern Virginia Medical School told The Washington Post in September that the helpers act as “enthusiastic surgical dummies” to 65 medical colleges, guiding rookie fingers through the trainer’s own private parts. The prostate associate might helpfully caution, “No need for speed here,” especially since he will be bending over for as many as nine probings a day. A gyne-cological teaching associate, mentoring the nervous speculum-wielder, might wittily congratulate pupils on having a front-row sight line the “GTA” will never witness: an up-close view of her own cervix.

Latest Religious MessagesAmerican Sharia: 1. U.S. parents have a right to home-school their kids, but are subject to varying degrees of regulation, with Texas the most lax, and one El Paso family will have a day before the Texas Supreme Court after one of its kids was reported declining to study because education was useless since he was waiting to be “raptured” (as described in the Bible’s Book of Revelation). 2. U.S. courts increasingly allow customers to sign away state and federal rights by agreeing to contracts providing private arbitration for disputes rather than access to courts—even if the contract explicitly requires only religious resolutions rather than secular, constitutional ones. A November New York Times inves-tigation examined contracts ranging from Scientology’s requirement that fraud claims by members be resolved only by Scientologists—to various consumer issues from home repairs to real estate sales limited to dockets of Christian clerics.

Leading Economic IndicatorsFirst-World Spending: According to estimates released by the National Retail Federation in September, 157 million Americans “planned to celebrate” Halloween, spending a total of $6.9 billion, of which $2.5 billion would be on costumes, including $350 million dressing up family pets.

n At a ceremony in Kabul in November, prominent Afghan developer Khalilullah Frozi signed a $95 mil-lion contract to build an 8,800-unit township and was, according to a New York Times dispatch, toasted for his role in the country’s economic rebirth. However, at nightfall, Frozi headed back to prison to resume his 15-year sentence for defrauding Kabul Bank of nearly $1 billion in depositors’ money. Because he remains one of Afghanistan’s elite, arrangements were made for him to work days but spend his nights in prison (in comfortable quarters). Said one Western official, laconically, “(I)f you have stolen enough money, you can get away with it.”

Cultural DiversityBefore the terrorist murders gripped Paris, President Francois Hollande and Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani had been trying to arrange a formal dinner during Rouhani’s planned visit to the city to celebrate the two countries’ role in the recent accord limiting Iran’s nuclear development. France’s RTL radio news reported that “din-ner” is apparently more vexing than “nuclear weaponry”—as Rouhani demanded an alcohol-free meal, which was nixed by Hollande, who insisted that the French never dine without wine.

Compelling ExplanationsSkeptics feared it was just a matter of time, anyway, until the “political correctness” movement turned its attention to dignity for thieves. San Francisco’s SFGate.com reported in November on a discussion in an upscale

neighborhood about whether someone committing petty, nonviolent theft should be referred to by the “offensive” term “criminal” (rather than as, for example, “the person who stole my bicycle,” since “criminal” implies a harsher level of evil and fails to acknowledge factors that might have caused momentary desper-

ation by a person in severe need).

n Reginald Gildersleeve, 55 and free on bond with an extensive rap sheet, was waving a gun as he threatened a clerk and tried to rob a store in Chicago on Halloween night—until a customer (licensed to carry) drew his own gun and, with multiple shots, killed Gildersleeve. Closer inspection revealed Gildersleeve’s weapon to be merely a paintball gun, leading the deceased man’s stepson to complain later that “Some people (the licensed shooter) don’t actually know how to use guns. They go to firing ranges, but it’s not the same … as a bullet going into flesh. … Someone’s got to answer for that.”

The Continuing CrisisU.S. and European entrepreneurs offer extreme “games” in which liability-waiving “players” volunteer for hours of kidnapping, pain and death threats, but the cult-like, under-the-radar “McKamey Manor” in Southern California (said to have a waiting list of 27,000) is notable for the starkness of its threats of brutality—and the absence of any “safe word” with which a suddenly reluc-tant player can beg off. (Only Russ McKamey himself decides if a player has had enough.) The “product” is “100 percent fear,” he said. “We’re good at it,” he told London’s The Guardian in an October dispatch from San Diego (whose reporter overheard one of McKamey’s thugs promise, “I’m going to tear that girl (player) apart” and “No one is leaving with eyebrows today”).

n In October, the student newspaper of Toronto’s Ryerson University reported a mighty scandal that upset the student body: The school’s executive offic-es’ restrooms routinely supply two-ply toilet paper while most other campus buildings offer only one-ply. Following up on the hard-hitting Ryerson Eyeopener’s expose, The Canadian Press noted that the universities of Guelph, Ottawa and Toronto comfort all toilet-users’ bottoms the same. Ryerson officials defensively noted that older plumbing in many of their buildings cannot handle two-ply paper.

Least Competent CriminalsNicholas Allegretto, 23, was convicted of shoplifting in Cambridge, England, in October (in absentia, because he is still at large). The prosecutor knows Allegretto is his man because, shortly after the February theft, police released a surveillance photo of Allegretto leaving the store with the unpaid-for item, and Allegretto had come to a police station to complain that the suddenly public picture made him look guilty. In fact, he claimed, he intended to pay for the item but had gotten distracted (and besides, he added, his body language often looks somewhat “dodgy,” anyway).

Thanks This Week to Eric Wainwright, and to the News of the Weird Board Senior Advisors (Jenny T. Beatty, Paul Di Filippo, Ginger Katz, Joe Littrell, Matt Mirapaul, Paul Music, Karl Olson, and Jim Sweeney) and Board of Editorial Advisors (Tom Barker, Paul Blumstein, Harry Farkas, Sam Gaines, Herb Jue, Emory Kimbrough, Scott Langill, Bob McCabe, Steve Miller, Christopher Nalty, Mark Neunder, Sandy Pearlman, Bob Pert, Larry Ellis Reed, Peter Smagorinsky, Rob Snyder, Stephen Taylor, Bruce Townley, and Jerry Whittle).

By CHUCK SHEPHERD

NEWS OF THE

WEIRD

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Looking for flexible hours, the freedom to work independently and the opportunity to be an important voice in the community?

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Scientists, authors and activists predict the outcome of the upcoming U.N. climate talks in Paris.

Send your comments to editor@planetjh.com.

Letters to the Future

A collaboration between The Planet, the Association of Alternative Newsmedia and the Media Consortium

Brief OpportunitiesDear Great-Great-Granddaughter,

Do you remember your grandmother, Veronica? I am writing to you on the very day that your grandmother, Veronica, turned 7 months old—she is my first grandchild. That is how quickly time passes and people are born, grow up, and pass on. When I was your age—now 20 (Veronica was my age, 65, when you were born), I did not realize how brief our opportunities are to change the direction of the world we live in. The world you live in grew out of the world I live in, and I want to tell you a little bit about the major difficulties of my world and how they have affected your world.

On the day I am writing this letter, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives quit his job because his party—called “the Republicans”—refused absolutely to work with or compromise with the other party—now defunct—called “the Democrats.” The refusal of the Republicans to work with the Democrats was what led to the government collapse in 2025, and the breakup of what to you is the former United States. The states that refused to ac-knowledge climate change or, indeed, science, became the Republic of America, and the other states became West America and East America. I lived in West America. You probably live in East America, because West America became unlivable owing to climate change in 2050.

That the world was getting hotter and dryer, that weather was getting more chaotic, and that humans were getting too numerous for the ecosystem to support was evident to most Americans by the time I was 45, the age your mother is now. At first, it did seem as though all Americans were willing to do something about it, but then the oil companies (with names like Exxon and Mobil and Shell) realized that their profits were at risk, and they dug in their heels. They underwrote all sorts of government corruption in order to deny climate change and transfer as much carbon dioxide out of the ground and into the air as they could. The worse the weather and the climate became, the more they refused to budge, and Americans, but also the citizens of other countries, kept using coal, diesel fuel, and gasoline. Transportation was the hardest thing to give up, much harder than giving up the future, and so we did not give it up, and so there you are, stuck in the slender strip of East America that is overpopulated, but livable. I am sure you are a vegan, because there is no room for cattle, hogs, or chickens, which Americans used to eat.

West America was once a beautiful place—not the parched desert landscape that it is now. Our mountains were green with oaks and pines, mountain lions and coyotes and deer roamed in the shadows, and there were beautiful flowers nestled in the grass. It was sometimes hot, but often cool. Where you see abandoned, flooded cities, we saw smooth beaches and easy waves.

What is the greatest loss we have bequeathed you? I think it is the debris—the junk, the rotting bits of clothing, equipment, vehicles, buildings, etc.—that you see everywhere and must avoid. Where we went for walks, you always have to keep an eye out. We have left you a mess. But I know that it is dangerous for you to go for walks—the human body wasn’t built to tolerate lows of 90 degrees F and highs of 140. When I was alive, I thought I was trying to save you, but I didn’t try hard enough, or at least, I didn’t try to save you as hard as my oppo-nents tried to destroy you. I don’t know why they did that. I could never figure that out.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992 for her novel A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley has composed nu-merous novels and works of nonfiction.

Jane Smiley

Despite the fresh tragedy of the Paris terrorist attacks, the French government remains committed to hosting the U.N. Climate Change Conference (known as COP21) scheduled in Paris from Nov. 30 to Dec. 11. As such, world leaders from more than 190

countries (President Obama is slated to attend) will convene in Paris to consider passage of a binding global treaty aimed at reducing the most dangerous impacts of global warming. While some speculate that the attacks actually have improved the odds of a successful outcome, others fear that efforts to achieve a global climate pact could stall.

Letters to the Future, a national project involving more than 40 alternative weeklies across the United States, set out to find authors, artists, scientists and others willing to get creative and draft letters to future generations of their own families, predicting the success or failure of the Paris talks—and what came after.

Some participants were optimistic about what is to come—some not so much. We hereby present some of their visions of the future. Read even more letters (and add one of your own) at LettersToTheFuture.org.

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19 8 8Prominent scientists

testify for the first time

before U.S. Congress about

dangers of global

warming. Intergovern-mental Panel on Climate

Change (IPCC) formed to gather and

assess evidence.

2006Congress stalls on

the climate, leaving state

governments to lead the charge. California passes

the Global Warming

Solutions Act and soon leads the

nation in energy efficiency

standards and regulation of emissions.

19 9 2In Rio de

Janeiro, IPCC agrees a United

Nations framework is

needed to stabilize

greenhouse gas concentrations

in the atmosphere.

19 97DEC EMB E R

The worldÊs governments

gather in Kyoto, Japan, to

negotiate a treaty to curb

global warming. The United States never ratifies the treaty. A developing

nation, China, was never

bound by the treaty.

F E B RUARY

2 0 01The Third IPCC reports that

global warming will likely cause unprecedented sea level rise,

extreme weather events and grave consequences for humanity. A few months into the next year comes

a dramatic collapse of the Larsen B Ice

Shelf in Antarctica.

AUGU S T

2 0 0 5Hurricane

Katrina hits the Gulf Coast. This

and other severe weather

events spur debate over impact of

global warming. U.N. parties continue

negotiations toward global

carbon reductions.

2 0 0 6An Inconvenient Truth, the film

version of former Vice President Al GoreÊs lectures on climate change, is

released and eventually wins multiple Oscars. Climate science

enters into popular

consciousness but political

polarization mounts.

MAY

2 0 07China overtakes

America as worldÊs largest greenhouse gas emitter. NASA finds Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and Arctic Ocean

sea-ice cover shrinking faster than expected.

Fourth IPCC report warns of more evidence of

warming. Gore and the IPCC win joint Nobel Peace Prize for climate work.

2 0 0 9Many experts warn that global warming

is arriving at a faster, more

dangerous pace than expected. Meanwhile, the United Nations

Framework Climate Change Conference

talks in Copenhagen, held in the midst of global recession, fail to negotiate binding

emissions agreements.

2 011UNFCCC meets in

Durban, South Africa, and

parties agree to work on a new and universal agreement involving all

countries, not just wealthy ones, to join in combating global warming. This accord is to be negotiated in

Paris.

2 013 Mean global

temperature at warmest in

thousands of years; concentration of carbon in the

atmosphere reaches 397 parts per

million, highest it's been in millennia.

Scientists and politicians become

bolder in connecting increased extreme

weather events and climate change

2 014Global rallies are held in

2,000 locations across

the world demanding

urgent action on climate change.

Hundreds of thousands of people gather and continue a call for action.

S E P T EM B E R

2 014In an unexpected

political breakthrough, China and the United States, which together produce nearly half of global carbon dioxide

emissions, jointly announce future reduction plans.

NOV EMB E R

2 015Pope Francis

releases unprecedented papal encyclical wherein he calls for urgent action

on climate change. Two more

populous countries·Brazil and India·make

pre-Paris commitments to

decrease emissions.

MAY

2 015The worldÊs

governments convene in

Paris to attempt

negotiation of a unified,

global accord and to put

architecture in place to save

humanity from the worst

outcomes of climate change.

DECEMBER

Source: UNFCCC, IPCC, New York Times

Sorry About ThatDear Rats of the Future:

Congratulations on your bipedalism: it’s always nice to be able to stand tall when you need it, no? And great on losing that tail, too (just as we lost ours). No need for that awkward (and let’s face it: ugly) kind of balancing tool when you walk upright, plus it makes fitting into your blue jeans a whole lot easier. Do you wear blue jeans—or their equivalent? No need, really, I suppose, since you’ve no doubt retained your body hair. Well, good for you.

Sorry about the plastics. And the radiation. And the pesticides. I really regret that you won’t be hearing any bird song anytime soon, either, but at least you’ve got that wonderful musical cawing of the crows to keep your mornings bright. And, of course, I do expect that as you’ve grown in stature and brainpower you’ve learned to deal with the feral cats, your one-time nemesis, but at best occupying a kind of ratty niche in your era of ascendancy. As for the big cats—the really scary ones, tiger, lion, leopard, jaguar—they must be as re-mote to you as the mammoths were to us. It goes without saying that with the extinction of the bears (polar bears: they were a pretty silly development anyway, and of no use to any-body beyond maybe trophy hunters) and any other large carnivores, there’s nothing much left to threaten you as you feed and breed and find your place as the dominant mammals on earth. (I do expect that the hyenas would have been something of a nasty holdout, but as you developed weapons, I’m sure you would have dispatched them eventually).

Apologies, too, about the oceans, and I know this must have been particularly hard on you since you’ve always been a seafaring race, but since you’re primarily vegetarian, I don’t imagine that the extinction of fish would have much affected you. And if, out of some nostalgia for the sea that can’t be fully satisfied by whatever hardtack may have survived us, try jellyfish. They’ll be about the only thing out there now, but I’m told they can be quite palatable, if not exactly mouth-watering, when prepared with sage and onions. Do you have sage and onions? But forgive me: of course you do. You’re an agrarian tribe at heart, though in our day, we certainly did introduce you to city life, didn’t we? Bright lights, big city, right? At least you don’t have to worry about abattoirs, piggeries, feed lots, bovine intestinal gases and the like—or, for that matter, the ozone layer, which would have been long gone by the time you started walking on two legs. Does that bother you? The UV rays, I mean? But no, you’re a nocturnal tribe anyway, right?

Anyway, I just want to wish you all the best in your endeavors on this big blind rock hurtling through space. My advice? Stay out of the laboratory. Live simply. And, whatever you do, please—I beg you—don’t start up a stock exchange.

With best wishes,T.C. BoyleP.S. In writing you this missive, I am, I suppose, being guardedly optimistic that you will have figured out how to de-

code this ape language I’m employing here—especially given the vast libraries we left you when the last of us breathed his last.

A novelist and short story writer, T.C. Boyle has published 14 novels and more than 100 short stories.

T.C. Boyle

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19 8 8Prominent scientists

testify for the first time

before U.S. Congress about

dangers of global

warming. Intergovern-mental Panel on Climate

Change (IPCC) formed to gather and

assess evidence.

2006Congress stalls on

the climate, leaving state

governments to lead the charge. California passes

the Global Warming

Solutions Act and soon leads the

nation in energy efficiency

standards and regulation of emissions.

19 9 2In Rio de

Janeiro, IPCC agrees a United

Nations framework is

needed to stabilize

greenhouse gas concentrations

in the atmosphere.

19 97DEC EMB E R

The worldÊs governments

gather in Kyoto, Japan, to

negotiate a treaty to curb

global warming. The United States never ratifies the treaty. A developing

nation, China, was never

bound by the treaty.

F E B RUARY

2 0 01The Third IPCC reports that

global warming will likely cause unprecedented sea level rise,

extreme weather events and grave consequences for humanity. A few months into the next year comes

a dramatic collapse of the Larsen B Ice

Shelf in Antarctica.

AUGU S T

2 0 0 5Hurricane

Katrina hits the Gulf Coast. This

and other severe weather

events spur debate over impact of

global warming. U.N. parties continue

negotiations toward global

carbon reductions.

2 0 0 6An Inconvenient Truth, the film

version of former Vice President Al GoreÊs lectures on climate change, is

released and eventually wins multiple Oscars. Climate science

enters into popular

consciousness but political

polarization mounts.

MAY

2 0 07China overtakes

America as worldÊs largest greenhouse gas emitter. NASA

finds Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and Arctic Ocean

sea-ice cover shrinking faster than expected.

Fourth IPCC report warns of more evidence of

warming. Gore and the IPCC win joint Nobel Peace Prize for climate work.

2 0 0 9Many experts warn that global warming

is arriving at a faster, more

dangerous pace than expected. Meanwhile, the United Nations

Framework Climate Change Conference

talks in Copenhagen, held in the midst of global recession, fail to negotiate binding

emissions agreements.

2 011UNFCCC meets in

Durban, South Africa, and

parties agree to work on a new and universal agreement involving all

countries, not just wealthy ones, to join in combating global warming. This accord is to be negotiated in

Paris.

2 013 Mean global

temperature at warmest in

thousands of years; concentration of carbon in the

atmosphere reaches 397 parts per

million, highest it's been in millennia.

Scientists and politicians become

bolder in connecting increased extreme

weather events and climate change

2 014Global rallies are held in

2,000 locations across

the world demanding

urgent action on climate change.

Hundreds of thousands of people gather and continue a call for action.

S E P T EM B E R

2 014In an unexpected

political breakthrough, China and the United States, which together produce nearly half of global carbon dioxide

emissions, jointly announce future reduction plans.

NOV EMB E R

2 015Pope Francis

releases unprecedented papal encyclical wherein he calls for urgent action

on climate change. Two more

populous countries·Brazil and India·make

pre-Paris commitments to

decrease emissions.

MAY

2 015The worldÊs

governments convene in

Paris to attempt

negotiation of a unified,

global accord and to put

architecture in place to save

humanity from the worst

outcomes of climate change.

DECEMBER

Source: UNFCCC, IPCC, New York Times

Political BoneheadsHello? People of the future … Anyone there?

It’s your forebears checking in with you from generations ago. We were the stewards of the Earth in 2015—a dicey time for the planet, humankind, and life itself. And … well, how’d we do? Anyone still there? Hello.

A gutsy, innovative, and tenacious environmental movement arose around the globe back then to try lifting common sense to the highest levels of industry and government. We had made great progress in devel-oping a grass-roots consciousness about the suicidal consequences for us (as well as those of you future earthlings) if we didn’t act pronto to stop the

reckless industrial pollution that was causing climate change. Our mes-sage was straightforward: When you realize you’ve dug yourself into a hole,

the very first thing to do is stop digging.Unfortunately, our grass-roots majority was confronted by an elite alliance of

narcissistic corporate greedheads and political boneheads. They were determined to deny environmental reality in order to grab more short-term wealth and power for

themselves. Centuries before this, some American Indian cultures adopted a wise ethos of deciding to take a particular action only after contemplating its impact on the seventh generation of their descendants. In 2015, however, the ethos of the dominant powers was to look no further into the future than the three-month forecast of corporate profits.

As I write this letter to the future, delegations from the nations of our world are gath-ering to consider a global agreement on steps we can finally take to rein in the loom-ing disaster of global warming. But at this convocation and beyond, will we have the courage for boldness, for choosing people and the planet over short-term profits for the few? The people’s movement is urging the delegates in advance to remember that the opposite of courage is not cowardice, it’s conformity—just going along with the flow. After all, even a dead fish can go with the flow, and if the delegates don’t dare to swim against the corporate current, we’re all dead.

So did we have the courage to start doing what has to be done? Hello … anyone there?

A national radio commentator, writer and pub-lic speaker, Jim Hightower is also a New York Times best-selling author.

Seize the MomentDear Descendants,

The first thing to say is, sorry. We were the last generation to know the world before full-on climate change made it a treacherous place. That we didn’t get sooner to work slowing it down is our great shame, and you live with the unavoidable consequences.

That said, I hope that we made at least some difference. There were many milestones in the fight—Rio, Kyoto, the debacle at Copenhagen. By the time the great Paris climate confer-ence of 2015 rolled around, many of us were inclined to cynicism.

And our cynicism was well-taken. The delegates to that convention, representing governments that were still unwill-ing to take more than baby steps, didn’t really grasp the nettle. They looked for easy, around-the-edges fixes, ones that wouldn’t unduly alarm their patrons in the fossil-fuel industry.

But so many others seized the moment that Paris offered to do the truly important thing: Organize. There were meetings and marches, disruptions and disobedience. And we came out of it more committed than ever to taking on the real power that be.

The real changes flowed in the months and years past Par-is, when people made sure that their institutions pulled money from oil and coal stocks, and when they literally sat down in the way of the coal trains and the oil pipelines. People did the work governments wouldn’t—and as they weakened the fossil-fuel industry, political leaders grew ever so slowly bolder.

We learned a lot that year about where power lay: less in the words of weak treaties than in the zeitgeist we could create with our passion, our spirit and our creativity. Would that we had done it sooner!

An author, educator and environmentalist, Bill McKibben co-found-ed 350.org, a planet-wide grass-roots climate-change movement. He has written more than a dozen books.

Bill McKibben

Jim Hightower

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Shift the Food SystemDear Future Family,

I know you will not read this note until the turn of the century, but I want to explain what things were like back in 2015, before we figured out how to roll back climate change. As a civilization, we were still locked into a zero-sum idea of our relationship with the natural world, in which we assumed that for us to get whatever we needed, whether it was food or energy or entertainment, nature had to be diminished. But that was never necessarily the case.

In our time, the U.S. Department of Agriculture still handed out subsidies to farmers for every bushel of corn or wheat or rice they could grow. This promoted a form of agriculture that was extremely pro-ductive and extremely destructive—of the climate, among other things.

Approximately one-third of the carbon then in the atmosphere had formerly been sequestered in soils in the form of organic matter, but since we began plowing and deforesting, we’d been releasing huge quantities of this carbon into the atmosphere. At that time, the food system as a whole—that includes agriculture, food processing and food transportation—contributed somewhere between 20 percent to 30 percent of the greenhouse gases produced by civilization—more than any other sector except energy. Fertilizer was always one of the biggest culprits for two reasons: It’s made from fossil fuels, and when you spread it on fields and it gets wet, it turns into nitrous oxide, which is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Slowly, we convinced the policy makers to instead give subsidies to farmers for every increment of carbon they sequestered in the soil.

Over time, we began to organize our agriculture so that it could heal the planet, feed us and tackle climate change. This began with shifting our food system from its reliance on oil, which is the central fact of industrial agriculture (not just machinery, but pesticides and fertilizers are all oil-based tech-nologies), back to a reliance on solar energy: photosynthesis.

Carbon farming was one of the most hopeful things going on at that time in climate change re-search. We discovered that plants secrete sugars into the soil to feed the microbes they depend on, in the process putting carbon into the soil. This process of sequestering carbon at the same time improved the fertility and water-holding capacity of the soil. We began relying on the sun—on photo-synthesis—rather than on fossil fuels to feed ourselves. We learned that there are non-zero-sum ways we could feed ourselves and heal the earth. That was just one of the big changes we made toward the sustainable food system you are lucky enough to take for granted.

A teacher, author and speaker on the environment, agriculture, the food industry, society and nutrition, Michael Pol-lan’s letter is adapted from an interview in Vice Magazine.

Michael Pollan

You Deserve a ChanceAs a young boy growing up in Searchlight, the unique beauty of the Nevada desert was my home.

Our family didn’t travel or take vacations, but we were able to visit Fort Piute Springs which was just 15 miles from our home. Fort Piute Springs was a starkly beautiful place. From the gushing ponds of water to the beautiful lily pads and cattails, Fort Piute’s beauty was magical. Decades later, I returned to visit Fort Piute Springs and found the magical place of my childhood in ruins. I remember thinking how sad it was that my descendants would never get to appreciate the stark beauty of the desert I cher-ished as a child. It was in that moment that I decided to fight to protect our environment.

Throughout my career, I fought to protect my home and my country from the permanent damage of climate change. I thought about the world you would live in, the burdens you would face and the health issues that could one day challenge your very existence. You deserve a chance to experience the beautiful world that I grew up in. We all need clean air, clean water and natural resources to lead healthy lives. The idea that our actions could jeopardize your future was simply unbearable.

The only way to solve this problem was if we all worked together to save the planet for you and future generations. During my lifetime, the overwhelming majority of scientists across the world concluded that pollution from burning fossil fuels was beginning to raise temperatures and alter our climate. These sci-entists predicted that if countries failed to work together to replace fossil fuels with cleaner energy sources, the world would face uncontrollable rising temperatures and sea levels, water shortages, climate-fueled migration crises, and landscape-altering wildfire, drought, and extreme weather.

At the close of 2015, the world finally did something about it. Everybody knew we needed to address climate change and that a failure to lead could destroy the progress we fought so hard to achieve and endanger your future. In the face of this reality, the United States pressed on and led a historic global agreement to change the course of climate change worldwide. We had already done so many things to make Nevada a cleaner, greener place—but now the entire world was ready to join us.

I’m proud of the work we did to protect our environment for you. I hope, by now, you can run just about everything on renewable energy, and you no longer have to worry about if your children will suffer from asthma because of smog.

Today, you may face a number of issues I could have never imagined. My hope has always been that the United States’ efforts to combat climate change would create a cleaner future for my descendants and future Nevadans. I hope that you are no longer burdened with the issue of climate change and can enjoy more of the Nevada I have always known. But if you face similar challenges, draw strength from my experiences and continue to fight for a cleaner environment.

A U.S. Senator from Nevada, Harry Reid is a longtime member of the Democratic Party and served a lengthy term as Senate majority leader.

U.S. Sen. Harry Reid

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This Abundant LifeI just flushed my toilet with drinking water. I know: you don’t believe

me: “Nobody could ever have been that stupid, that wasteful.” But we are. We use air conditioners all the time, even in mild climates where they aren’t a bit necessary. We cool our homes so we need to wear sweat-ers indoors in summer, and heat them so we have to wear T-shirts in mid-winter. We let one person drive around all alone in a huge thing called an SUV. We make perfectly good things—plates, cups, knives—then we use them just once, and throw them away. They’re still there, in your time. Dig them up. They’ll still be usable.

Maybe you have dug them up. Maybe you’re making use of them now. Maybe you’re frugal and ingenious in ways we in the wealthy world have not yet chosen to be. There’s an old teaching from a rabbi called Nachman who lived in a town called Bratslav centuries ago: “If you be-lieve it is possible to destroy, believe it is possible to repair.” Some of us believe that. We’re trying to spread the message.

Friends are working on genetic editing that will bring back the heath hen, a bird that went extinct almost 80 years ago. The last member of the species died in the woods just a few miles from my home. Did we succeed? Do you have heath hens, booming their mating calls across the sand plains that sustain them? If you do, it means that this idea of repair caught on in time, and that their habitat was restored, instead of being sold for yet more beachside mansions. It means that enough great minds turned away from the easy temptations of a career moving mon-ey from one rich person’s account to another’s, and instead became en-gineers and scientists dedicated to repairing and preserving this small blue marble, spinning in the velvet void.

We send out probes, looking for signs of life on other worlds. A pos-sible spec of mold is exciting—press conference! News flash! Imagine if they found, say, a sparrow. President addresses the nation! And yet we fail to take note of the beauty of sparrows, their subtle hues and swift grace. We’re profligate and reckless with all this abundant life, teeming and viv-id, that sustains and inspires us.

We destroyed. You believed it was possible to repair.

Geraldine Brooks is an Australian-American journalist and author, Her 2005 novel, March, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She became a U.S. citizen in 2002.

Rock, Ice, Air and WaterDear Future Inhabitants of the Earth,

I was speaking with an environ-mental scientist friend of mine not too long ago, and he said he felt ex-tremely grim about the fate of the Earth in the 100-year frame but quite optimistic about it in the 500-hun-dred year frame. “There won’t be many people left,” he said, “but the ones who are here will have learned a lot.” I have been taking comfort, since then, in his words.

If you are reading this letter, you are one of the learners, and I am grateful to you in advance. And I’m sorry. For my generation. For our ig-norance, our shortsightedness, our capacity for denial, our unwilling-ness or inability to stand up to the oil & gas companies who have bought our wilderness, our airwaves, our governments. It must seem to you that we were dense beyond compre-hension, but some of us knew, for de-cades, that our carbon-driven period would be looked back on as the most

barbaric, the most irresponsible age in history. Part of me wishes there was a way for me to know what the Earth is

like in your time, and part of me is afraid to know how far down we took this magnificent sphere, this miracle of rock and ice and air and water.

Should I tell you about the polar bears, great white creatures that hunt-ed seals among the icebergs; should I tell you about the orcas? To be in a kayak, with a pod of orcas coming toward you, to see the big male’s fin rise in its impossible geometry, 6 feet high and black as night, to hear the blast of whale breath, to smell its fishy tang—I tell you, it was enough to make a person believe she had lead a satisfying life.

I know it is too much to wish for you: polar bears and orcas. But may-be you still have elk bugling at dawn on a September morning, and red tail hawks crying to their mates from the tops of ponderosa pines.

Whatever wonders you have, you will owe to those about to gather in Paris to talk about ways we might re-imagine ourselves as one strand in the fabric that is this biosphere, rather than its mindless devourer.

E.O. Wilson says as long as there are microbes, the Earth can recover—another small measure of comfort. Even now, evidence of the Earth’s ability to heal herself is all around us—a daily astonishment. What a joy it would be to live in a time when the healing was allowed to outrun the destruction. More than anything else that is what I wish for you.

Author of short stories, novels and essays, Pam Houston wrote the acclaimed Cowboys Are My Weakness, winner of the 1993 Western States Book Award.

Geraldine Brooks

Pam Houston AD

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Let Me Tell You a StoryWell, My Great Ones,

The Europeans finally tried to do something after all this time. We told them over and over again; we showed them how to sustain and live within the capacity of their environment; but for hundreds of years they continued to rape and destroy our mother, Earth. What they didn’t understand was that it was too late. You will never get to see or hear the thousands of species of frogs sing their songs, and you will never get to see countless varieties of bees, butterflies and birds take flight or hear their wings flutter by you as you marvel at their bright and beautiful hues. I assure you that these creatures existed in great diversity, helping the world to stay in balance.

Right now in California, we are in a drought and have been for several years. No one listened when the rain stopped coming. People continued to use water for green grass in their front yards because they wanted to prove they could afford to waste more than anyone else, never thinking to appre-ciate water and save it to quench their thirst. Some people saved water by painting their grass green. Who would have ever thought people would paint grass? If they would just plant indigenous drought-resistant plants with heal-ing properties, we could save water and make our own medicine. But that would put the big corporations who make the drugs that we have become addicted to go out of business.

My Precious Ones, I am so sad to say that those in power strayed so far from what is important, caring for each other and for our planet; that it left you and the continued existence of our sovereign tribal nations in jeopardy. I wonder, did they ever learn that we are interdependent, not independent? Everything that is done to the Earth, impacts us, and our survival.

My Dear Ones, let me tell you a story … there once was a time when the rivers were full of many types of fish and the water flowed clean, clear and bright be-cause the rain came for many months throughout the year. There was plen-ty of food for everyone, and we lived with the understanding that we are all interconnected. What happens next is up to you to remember what was and make what is, different. The power has always been yours. We, your ancestors, are waiting.

Tamara Cheshire is an indigenous adjunct professor of anthropology and Native Amer-ican studies in Sacramento, Calif.

Tamara Cheshire

To read more letters or to write a letter of your own, please visit LettersToTheFuture.org. This is a collaborative effort between this news-paper, the Association of Alternative Newsmedia and the Media Consor-tium. You can also like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/LettersTo-TheFuture.ParisClimateProject.

My Endless SkyDear Future Robinsons,

Back around the turn of the century, flying to space was a rare human privilege, a dream come true, the stuff of movies (look it up), and an almost im-possible ambition for children the world around.

But I was one of those for-tunates. And what I saw from the cold, thick, protective win-dows of the Space Shuttle is something that, despite my 40 years of dreaming (I was never a young astronaut), I never re-motely imagined.

Not that I was new to imag-ining things. As you may know, I was somehow born with a passion for the sky, for flight, and for the mysteries of the atmosphere. I built and flew death-defying gliders, learned to fly properly, earned universi-

ty degrees in the science of flight and then spent the rest of my life exploring Earth’s atmosphere from below it, within it and above it. My hunger was never satisfied, and my love of flight never waned at all, even though it tried to kill me many times.

As I learned to fly in gliders, then small aircraft, then military jets, I always had the secure feeling that the atmosphere was the in-finite “long delirious burning blue” of Magee’s poem, even though of all people, I well knew about space and its nearness. It seemed impossible to believe that with just a little more power and a little more bravery, I couldn’t continue to climb higher and higher on “laughter-silvered wings.” My life was a celebration of the infinite gift of sky, atmosphere, and flight.

But what I saw in the first minutes of entering space, following that violent, life-changing rocket-ride, shocked me.

If you look at Earth’s atmosphere from orbit, you can see it “on edge”—gazing towards the horizon, with the black of space above and the gentle curve of the yes-it’s-round planet below. And what you see is the most exquisite, luminous, delicate glow of a layered azure haze holding the Earth like an ethereal eggshell. “That’s it?!” I thought. The entire sky—my endless sky—was only a paper-thin, blue wrapping of the planet, and looking as tentative as frost.

And this is the truth. Our Earth’s atmosphere is fragile and shock-ingly tiny—maybe 4 percent of the planet’s volume. Of all the life we know about, only one species has the responsibility to protect that precious blue planet-wrap. I hope we did, and I hope you do.

After 36 years as an astronaut—with a tenure that included four shuttle missions and three spacewalks—Stephen K. Robinson retired from NASA in 2012. He is now a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California, Davis.

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WEDNESDAY NOV. 25n Ski Fitness with Whitney Wright7:00am, Dancers’ Workshop, $225.00, 307-733-6398n Boot Camp7:00am, Teton Recreation Center, $8.00 - $82.50, 307-739-9025n Pilates Mat Classes at Dancers’ Workshop8:30am, Dancers’ Workshop, $12.00 - $16.00, 307-733-6398n Toddler Gym8:30am, Teton Recreation Center, $0.00 - $2.50, 307-739-9025n Yoga9:00am, Teton Recreation Center, $8.00 - $82.50, 307-739-9025n Art Market Days9:00am, Art Association Gal-lery, Free, 307-733-6379n Zumba at Dancers’ Workshop9:30am, Dancers’ Workshop, $12.00 - $16.00, 307-733-6398n Toddler Gym10:00am, Teton Recreation Center, $0.00 - $2.50, 307-739-9025n Tech Tutor10:00am, Teton County Library, Free, 733-2164 ext. 218n Open Hockey10:15am, Snow King Sports & Event Center, $10.00, 307-201-1633 n Fables, Feathers, and Fur10:30am, National Museum of Wildlife Art, Free, 307-733-5771n Lap Sit - Victor11:00am, Valley of the Tetons Library, Free, 208-787-2201n Public Skating12:00pm, Snow King Sports & Events Center, $6.00 - $8.00, 307-201-1633n Total Fitness12:10pm, Teton Recreation Center, $8.00 - $82.50, 307-739-9025n Free Beer Tasting1:00pm, The Liquor Store, Free, 307-733-4466n Oil Painting2:00pm, Art Association of Jackson Hole, $100.00 - $120.00, 307-733-6379n Raptor Encounters2:00pm, Teton Raptor Center, $10.00 - $12.00, 307-203-2551n Freestyle Skating3:00pm, Snow King Sports & Event Center, $10.00, 307-201-1633

n Chess Club: Grades K to 123:30pm, Teton County Library Youth Auditorium, Free, 307-733-2164 x118n Semi-Private Painting + Drawing4:00pm, Art Association of Jackson Hole, $20.00 - $130.00, 307-733-6379n Free Wine Tasting4:00pm, The Liquor Store, Free, 307-733-4466n Free Highwater Vodka Tasting5:00pm, The Liquor Store, Free, 307-733-4466n Evening Yoga6:00pm, Teton Recreation Center, $8.00 - $82.50, 307-739-9025n Glass Critters + Beads6:00pm, Art Association of Jackson Hole, $40.00, 307-733-6379n Open Gym - Adult Basketball6:30pm, Teton Recreation Center, $3.75, 307-739-9025n Salsa at Dancers’ Workshop7:00pm, Dancers’ Workshop, $12.00 - $16.00, 307-733-6398n Oneness Deeksha Meditation7:30pm, Akasha Yoga, $5.00, 307-413-3965n Tavern Trivia w/ Crazy Tom8:00pm, Town Square Tavern, Free, 307-733-3886n Vinyl Night9:00pm, The Rose, Free, 307-733-1500n DJ Epps & DJ ERA10:00pm, Town Square Tavern, Free, 307-733-3886

THURSDAY NOV. 26n Kettlebells7:00am, Teton Recreation Center, $8.00 - $82.50, 307-739-9025n 23rd Annual Thanksgiving Day Turkey Trot7:15am, Jackson Parks and Recreation, $25.00 - $35.00, 307-739-9025n Library Closed8:00am, Teton County Library, 307-733-2164n Zumba at Dancers’ Workshop8:30am, Dancers’ Workshop, Free, 307-733-6398n Museum Closed9:00am, National Museum of Wildlife Art, 307-733-5771

n Yoga9:00am, Teton Recreation Center, $8.00 - $82.50, 307-739-9025n Opening Day Winter 2015/169:00am, Jackson Hole Moun-tain Resort, 307-733-2292n Art Market Days9:00am, Art Association Gal-lery, Free, 307-733-6379n Intermediate/Advanced Ballet @ Dancers’ Workshop9:30am, Dancers’ Workshop, $12.00 - $16.00, 307-733-6398n Tech Tutor10:00am, Teton County Library, Free, 733-2164 ext. 218n 2nd Annual Community Thanksgiving11:00am, Jackson Elks Lodge #1713, Free n Crystal Sound Bowl Experience with Daniela Botur12:00pm, Intencions, Free, 307-733-9290n Open Gym - Adult Basketball12:00pm, Teton Recreation Center, $3.75, 307-739-9025n Public Skating12:00pm, Snow King Sports & Events Center, $6.00 - $8.00, 307-201-1633n bootybarre® at Dancers’ Workshop1:30pm, Dancers’ Workshop, $12.00 - $16.00, 307-733-6398n Oil Painting2:00pm, Art Association of Jackson Hole, $100.00 - $120.00, 307-733-6379n All About Handbuilding3:30pm, Art Association of Jackson Hole, $125.00, 307-733-6379n Miller Sisters at the Trap Bar4:00pm, Grand Targhee Resort, Free, 800-TARGHEEn Yoga4:15pm, Teton Recreation Center, $8.00 - $82.50, 307-739-9025n Total Fitness5:30pm, Teton Recreation Center, $8.00 - $82.50, 307-739-9025n Knit Nite6:00pm, Knit on Pearl, Free, 307-733-5648n Glass Critters + Beads6:00pm, Art Association of Jackson Hole, $40.00, 307-733-6379

THIS WEEK: November 25 - December 1, 2015 Compiled by Caroline Zieleniewski

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The War on WildFilm delves into debate, captures the beauty of one of this world’s most cherished and endangered natural places.BY KELSEY DAYTON

@Kelsey_Dayton

The Purcell Mountains of British Columbia, Canada, are a place you have to see to understand. Peaks jut to the sky, the chain broken only by massive glaciers.

“I don’t think there is a comparison to that level of wild in the Lower 48,” said Nicholas Waggoner, a film director who has skied across the United States including Alaska. “It’s massive, massive country. Until you are there and standing in that place, you don’t know what it’s like.”

It is in this wild place a battle has raged for 25 years. The players? A company that wants to develop a massive ski resort; environmentalists who want to protect the land; biologists who worry about the loss of grizzly bear habitat; native people who view the land as sacred; and backcountry skiers and snowboard-ers captivated by the area’s solitude and rugged nature.

Waggoner tells the story in the film “Jumbo Wild,” which screens at the Pink Garter Theatre Tuesday thanks to the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance and the Wyoming Wilderness Association.

The film is meant to be a voice for the landscape and the communities trying to protect it, but Waggoner also wanted

to show the nuances of the story. Like many public land cases, there are a variety of arguments on multiple sides.

“Jumbo is a textbook case of development and land use and ecology and environment and protection for wild plac-es,” Waggoner explained. “It’s not a clear picture. That’s what makes it a textbook case. These issues are complex. They are never black and white and they are never easy to decide on.”

To make the film, Waggoner had to navigate 25 years of bureaucracy, as well as interviewing people across a variety of value systems. He wanted to depict the humanity in all the characters involved in the issue.

Though a daunting task, he also wanted to transport people to this incredible place. “You can never, ever do justice for a place like that,” he said. “Cameras can’t capture that type of beauty.”

But viewers will decidedly get a taste of just how special the area is through images Waggoner captured of the landscape, and through the passion that translates on the screen from the myriad people who treasure this special place.

“Jumbo Wild” screens at 7 p.m., doors open at 6 p.m., featur-ing Patagonia athlete Alex Yoder, who has been touring with the movie. Tickets are available for $10 at pinkgartertheatre.com or $12 at the door. PJH

Chasing Lines, Prayers and LuggageRob Kingwill premieres Warren Miller’s latest film as a fundraiser for Nepal.BY KELSEY DAYTON

@Kelsey_Dayton

Last March local pro snowboarder Rob Kingwill found himself on the most epic adventure of his life. It involved riding elephants and ox-drawn carts, lost luggage and a

basecamp at 14,000-feet. It also involved riding the slopes of massive Himalayan Mountains. “You are going to this place of legend when you go to Nepal,” Kingwill said.

Kingwill and his friend, Olympic gold medalist, Seth Wescott, were filming for “Chasing Shadows,” a new Warren Miller film, which is premiering in Jackson Friday at the Pink Garter Theatre. The film is family-friendly and focuses on telling sto-ries. “There’s a lot of awesome action, but also really good back-story to the segments,” Kingwill said.

One of those backstories is Kingwill’s, of course. Viewers see his adventure unfold as he tries to truly experience Nepal, from the big city to the small villages, all in a place of incredible beauty. You’ll also see buildings and places that, a month after filming,

crumbled when a massive earthquake struck Nepal in April. That’s why Kingwill says he wanted to fashion the movie

premiere into a fundraiser. Proceeds from ticket sales, as well as AVALON7 gear, will go to the dZi Foundation, a nonprofit help-ing rebuild Nepal.

Aside from being an event benefiting a good cause, the film is amazing to see on the big screen. “This is the greatest adventure of my life and you get to see it so big,” Kingwill said. “I saw one of the most amazing cirques on the planet and you are standing right there on the edge.” But the film takes viewers to other hoods too, from a segment shot in Jackson at Monopalooza last winter, to a sweet mogul segment, to female rippers crushing it in Alaska.

When Kingwill left Nepal, he left behind a snowboard for the Sherpas living and working at basecamp. He loves the thought of

them carving turns and sliding down snow faces, but he knows, with winter approaching, the assistance people need right now is monetary.

Attendees have a chance to win prizes, including a trip to Portillo in Chile. People are encouraged to wear their most unbecoming sweaters to compete in the “Flashback Friday Ugly Sweater Contest,” where winners will receive lift tickets to Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. Following the second screening, which is for folks 21 years and older, DJ Whipple will spin at the AVALON7 after party.

Warren Miller’s “Chasing Shadows,” film screening and a fundraiser for Nepal, doors at 6 p.m., show starts at 6:30 p.m. for an all ages screening. Doors open at 8:30 p.m. and show starts at 9 p.m. for a 21 and older screening, Pink Garter Theatre. $10 kids; $12 adults; $15 at the door. PJH

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AT LEFT: Jumbo is a wild area one company wants to turn into a ski resort, while backcountry skiers and environmentalists want to protect the open space. AT RIGHT: The battle for the Jumbo area has raged for 25 years with stakeholders on all sides of the issue

fighting for and against a new ski development.

Local pro-snowboarder Rob Kingwell practices his levitation skills with some kids in Nepal while filming for Warren Miller’s 66th feature ski and snowboard film “Chasing Shadows,” playing this Friday at The Pink Garter.

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n Modern Dance Class at Dancers’ Workshop6:15pm, Dancers’ Workshop, $12.00 - $16.00, 307-733-6398n Open Gym - Adult Soccer6:30pm, Teton Recreation Center, $3.75, 307-739-0925n Salsa Night9:00pm, The Rose, Free, 307-733-1500n Karaoke9:00pm, Virginian Saloon, Free, 307-739-9891

FRIDAY NOV. 27n Boot Camp7:00am, Teton Recreation Center, $8.00 - $82.50, 307-739-9025n Toddler Gym8:30am, Teton Recreation Center, $0.00 - $2.50, 307-739-9025n bootybarre® at Dancers’ Workshop9:00am, Dancers’ Workshop, $12.00 - $16.00, 307-733-6398n Yoga9:00am, Teton Recreation Center, $8.00 - $82.50, 307-739-9025n Art Market Days9:00am, Art Association Gal-lery, Free, 307-733-6379n Flashback Friday9:00am, Jackson Hole Moun-tain Resort, $6.00, 307-733-2292n Ballet Workout at Dancers’ Workshop9:30am, Dancers’ Workshop, $12.00 - $16.00, 307-733-6398n Zumba at Dancers’ Workshop10:00am, Dancers’ Workshop, $12.00 - $16.00, 307-733-6398

n Toddler Gym10:00am, Teton Recreation Center, $0.00 - $2.50, 307-739-9025n Open Hockey10:15am, Snow King Sports & Event Center, $10.00, 307-201-1633n Yoga12:00pm, Teton Recreation Center, $8.00 - $82.50, 307-739-9025n Public Skating12:00pm, Snow King Sports & Events Center, $6.00 - $8.00, 307-201-1633n Total Fitness12:10pm, Teton Recreation Center, $8.00 - $82.50, 307-739-9025n Oil Painting2:00pm, Art Association of Jackson Hole, $100.00 - $120.00, 307-733-6379n Freestyle Skating3:00pm, Snow King Sports & Event Center, $10.00, 307-201-1633n Town Square Lighting5:00pm, Town Square, Free, 307-201-2309n Friday Night Meditation6:00pm, Zendler Chiropractic, Free, 307-699-8300n Glass Critters + Beads6:00pm, Art Association of Jackson Hole, $40.00, 307-733-6379n Warren Miller’s Chasing Shadows6:00pm, Pink Garter Theatre, $10.00 - $12.00, 307-733-1500n Open Gym - Adult Soccer6:30pm, Teton Recreation Center, $3.75, 307-739-0925

n Pam Drews Phillips Plays Jazz7:00pm, The Granary at Spring Creek Ranch, Free, 307-733-8833n Rock Creek7:30pm, Silver Dollar Show-room, Free, 307-733-2190n Warren Miller’s Chasing Shadows9:00pm, Pink Garter Theatre, $10.00 - $12.00, 307-733-1500n AFROMAN!!10:30pm, Town Square Tavern, , 307-733-3886

SATURDAY NOV. 28n Small Business Saturday8:00am, Town, Free n Zumba at Dancers’ Workshop9:00am, Dancers’ Workshop, $12.00 - $16.00, 307-733-6398n Art Market Days9:00am, Art Association Gal-lery, Free, 307-733-6379n Barre Fusion at Dancers’ Workshop9:30am, Dancers’ Workshop, $12.00 - $16.00, 307-733-6398n Adult Oil Painting10:00am, The Local Galleria, $25.00 - $80.00, 208-270-0883n Health Insurance Marketplace Assistance10:00am, Teton County Library Computer Lab, Free, 307-733-2164n Open Hockey10:15am, Snow King Sports & Event Center, $10.00, 307-201-1633n Tram Jam11:00am, Base of the Bridger Gondola, Free

SEE CALENDAR PAGE 19

SATURDAY & SUNDAY BRUNCH

Monday-Saturday 11am, Sunday 10:30am832 W. Broadway (inside Plaza Liquors)•733-7901

10:30am - 3:00pmBottomless Mimosas & Bloody Marys $15

•••••••••••

HAPPY HOUR 1/2 Off Drinks Daily 5-7pm

This favorite holiday event features a visit from Santa Claus, holiday music and Christmas carols from the Jackson Hole Community Band and Jackson Hole Chorale.

Town Square LightingFriday, 5pm, Town Square

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Resorts Represent, Afroman ReturnsThe Ghee’s Trap Bar releases concert schedule, Rendezvous Fest to bring top-notch acts and Afroman smokes down the Tavern.BY AARON DAVIS

@ScreenDoorPorch

Get Trapped and love every minuteIt’s generally a sure bet. Whatever band is performing

when you decide to après at The Trap Bar is likely to be entertaining, if not an act you’d desire to chase down again. The level of talent often complements Grand Targhee’s bal-ance of solitude, fantastic snow and inviting winter culture. Another aspect that makes for centralized revelry is having the only watering hole on the hill. Check out the long list of local, regional and national talent that will play the stage December through April. GrandTarghee.com.

JHMR’s Gold AnniversaryBy now, you’ve heard the good news about the 2016

Rendezvous Fest, a.k.a. Jackson Hole Mountain Resort’s 50th Anniversary weekend, March 17 to 20. Zac Brown Band is, without a doubt, a score. Brown is not only a homerun within the country music genre and a household name to anyone who follows mainstream music, but his down-to-earth per-sonality is an acre away from the over-produced, truck-and-party lyrics of some of pop-country’s chart toppers. He’s also taken home three Grammys, and has three multi-platinum albums and 11 number one singles.

Like recent CMA award-winner Chris Stapleton or genu-ine honkytonk darling Stergill Simpson, he’s an interesting act within a genre that often suffers from too much fluff and

sparkle. (Though Brown did call “old” country “predictable,” and then released an EDM song, “Beautiful Drug,” after publicly calling out Luke Bryan for his song “That’s My Kind of Night,” that lacked “real instrumentation”). The country music industry loves its drama, after all.

Also booked for the weekend is Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats. Rateliff may still be under-the-radar to many, but his star has been on the rise ever since his hushed indie-folk album and label debut, “In Memory of Loss” (2010/Rounder). With his latest project and its accompanying self-titled album this year with Stax, “Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats” takes the soulful R&B/gospel road adorned with horns, fitting nicely next to the sounds of Van Morrison, with hints of Sam Cooke and even Bruce Springsteen.

While the upped ante is largely designed to increase des-tination traffic, this is certainly a weekend to look forward to for local and regional folks. JacksonHole.com.

Afroman returnsAfroman’s Grammy-nominated track “Because I Got

High,” from “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” (circa 2002), has become a classic stoner anthem. Here are a few of his straight-forward lyrics about the inability to complete every-day tasks because of weed: “I was gonna go to class before I got high / I coulda cheated and I coulda passed but I got high / I am taking it next semester and I know why / Cause I got high.” Bringing to mind Biz Markie and Cypress Hill, the drummer/guitarist comes from the old school, feel good entourage of early rap. This dude is one funny character.

Afroman performs 10:30 p.m., Friday at Town Square Tavern. 733-3886. PJH

Aaron Davis is an award-winning singer-songwriter, trout whisperer, multi-instrumentalist, member of Screen Door Porch and Boondocks, and founder/host of Songwriter’s Alley.

DEC 4: Dirt Road Band DEC 5: Sons of Bannock DEC 11: Cory Mon DEC 12: One Ton Pig DEC 18: What the Folk DEC 19: Wyatt Lowe & the Mayhem Kings DEC 22: Longest Night Winter Solstice Party with Jeff Crosby & The Refugees (9 p.m., $5)DEC 24: Christmas Eve with Papa Chan Trio DEC 25: Ugly Sweater Day DEC 26-27: Cure for the CommonDEC 29: (and every Wednesday thereafter) - White Lightning Open Mic JAN 8: Canyon Kids JAN 15: Sneaky Pete & the Secret Weapons JAN 22: Winship & Sneed JAN 23: Chanman Roots Band

JAN 29: Kitchen Dwellers JAN 30: Brian Maw BandFEB 6: Mardi Gras Party with Jackson 6FEB 12: Kris Lager Band (9 p.m., $TBD)FEB 13-14: Kris Lager BandFEB 19: Greenneck DaredevilsFEB 20, 22: Willie WaldmanFEB 26-27: Blaze & KellyFEB 28: Dirt Road BandMAR 5: Nate Robinson Band MAR 6: John Wayne’s WorldMAR 11-12: Screen Door PorchMAR 13: Boondocks MAR 18: Miller SistersMAR 19: One Ton PigMAR 20: Shark WeekMAR 25: Swagger APR 1: The InnocentsAPR 8: Che Zuro

TRAP BAR MUSIC SCHEDULE Shows are 3 to 6 p.m. and free, unless noted.

Zac Brown Band will rock the 2016 Rendezvous Fest at JHMR in March (left), while Afroman drops in on the Town Square Tavern this Friday night (right).

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n Oil Painting2:00pm, Art Association of Jackson Hole, $100.00 - $120.00, 307-733-6379n Raptor Encounters2:00pm, Teton Raptor Center, $10.00 - $12.00, 307-203-2551n Glass Critters + Beads6:00pm, Art Association of Jackson Hole, $40.00, 307-733-6379n Open Gym - Adult Soccer6:30pm, Teton Recreation Center, $3.75, 307-739-0925n Live Music7:00pm, The Virginian Saloon, Free, 307-739-9891n Rock Creek7:30pm, Silver Dollar Show-room, Free, 307-733-2190n Canyon Kids10:00pm, Town Square Tavern, Free, 307-733-3886

SUNDAY NOV. 29n Open Hockey10:15am, Snow King Sports & Event Center, $10.00, 307-201-1633n NFL Package11:00am, The Virginian Saloon, Free, 307-739-9891n Jackson Reads12:00pm, KHOL Radio Show, 307-733-2164n Oil Painting2:00pm, Art Association of Jackson Hole, $100.00 - $120.00, 307-733-6379n Open Gym - Adult Volleyball4:00pm, Teton Recreation Center, $3.75, 307-739-9025n Stagecoach Band6:00pm, Stagecoach, Free, 307-733-4407n Taize6:00pm, St. John’s Episcopal Church, Free, 307-733-2603n Glass Critters + Beads6:00pm, Art Association of Jackson Hole, $40.00, 307-733-6379

MONDAY NOV. 30n Ski Fitness with Whitney Wright7:00am, Dancers’ Workshop, $225.00, 307-733-6398n Boot Camp7:00am, Teton Recreation Center, $8.00 - $82.50, 307-739-9025n Pilates Mat Classes at Dancers’ Workshop8:30am, Dancers’ Workshop, $12.00 - $16.00, 307-733-6398

n Toddler Gym8:30am, Teton Recreation Center, $0.00 - $2.50, 307-739-9025n Jazzercise9:00am, Teton Recreation Center, $8.00 - $82.50, 307-739-9025n Zumba at Dancers’ Workshop9:30am, Dancers’ Workshop, $12.00 - $16.00, 307-733-6398n Toddler Gym10:00am, Teton Recreation Center, $0.00 - $2.50, 307-739-9025n Open Hockey10:15am, Snow King Sports & Event Center, $10.00, 307-201-1633n Little Hands, Little Feet10:30am, Art Association of Jackson Hole, $70.00 - $80.00, 307-733-6379n Public Skating12:00pm, Snow King Sports & Events Center, $6.00 - $8.00, 307-201-1633n Total Fitness12:10pm, Teton Recreation Center, $8.00 - $82.50, 307-739-9025n Story Time1:00pm, Valley of the Tetons Library, Free, 208-787-2201n Oil Painting2:00pm, Art Association of Jackson Hole, $100.00 - $120.00, 307-733-6379n Freestyle Skating3:00pm, Snow King Sports & Event Center, $10.00, 307-201-1633n After School Kidzart Club3:30pm, Art Association of Jackson Hole, $135.00 - $165.00, 307-733-6379n Hand + Wheel4:15pm, Art Association of Jackson Hole, $125.00 - $150.00, 307-733-6379n Open Range4:30pm, Archery Range at the Recreation Center, $8.00 - $82.50, 307-739-9025n Explore Archery4:45pm, Teton County Parks and Rec Gym, $7.00, 307-739-9025n Library Book Club: “A Woman of Independent Means”5:30pm, Teton County Library, Free, 307-733-2164n Barre Fusion at Dancers’ Workshop5:30pm, Dancers’ Workshop, $12.00 - $16.00, 307-733-6398

n Evening Yoga6:00pm, Teton Recreation Center, $8.00 - $82.50, 307-739-9025n Beginning Throwing6:00pm, Art Association of Jackson Hole, $155.00 - $185.00, 307-733-6379n Glass Critters + Beads6:00pm, Art Association of Jackson Hole, $40.00, 307-733-6379n Open Level Ballet at Dancers’ Workshop6:30pm, Dancers’ Workshop, $12.00 - $16.00, 307-733-6398n Monday Night Football6:30pm, The Virginian Saloon, Free, 307-739-9891n Open Gym - Adult Basketball6:30pm, Teton Recreation Center, $3.75, 307-739-9025n The JH Chorale Rehearsals7:00pm, Music Center in the Center for the Arts, Free, 585-872-4934

TUESDAY DEC. 1n Kettlebells7:00am, Teton Recreation Center, $8.00 - $82.50, 307-739-9025n Zumba at Dancers’ Workshop8:30am, Dancers’ Workshop, Free, 307-733-6398n Yoga8:30am, Teton Recreation Center, $8.00 - $82.50, 307-739-9025n Ballet Workout at Dancers’ Workshop9:30am, Dancers’ Workshop, $12.00 - $16.00, 307-733-6398n Toddler Time10:05am, Teton County Library, Free, 733-2164 ext. 118n Crystal Sound Bowl Experience with Daniela Botur12:00pm, Intencions, Free, 307-733-9290n Words on Wellness: Advances in Joint Replacements12:00pm, Teton County Library Ordway Auditorium, Free, 307-733-2164 x229.n Open Gym - Adult Basketball12:00pm, Teton Recreation Center, $3.75, 307-739-9025n Public Skating12:00pm, Snow King Sports & Events Center, $6.00 - $8.00, 307-201-1633n MELT at Dancers’ Workshop12:10pm, Dancers’ Workshop, $12.00 - $16.00, 307-733-6398

SEE CALENDAR PAGE 20

Murders Up North, There‘Fargo’ TV Show continues the spirit of the Coen Brothers classic.BY ANDREW MUNZ

@AndrewMunz

Of all the excellent films that came out in the 90s, “Fargo” remains one of my favorites. Set in snowy North Dakota

and Minnesota, the film stars Frances McDormand as local police chief Marge Gunderson, who is investigating a series of homicides that have rattled her hometown. Heavy doses of black humor mixed with the ho-hum monotony of Midwestern charm make for a hilarious dark comedy with a surprising amount of heart. The film went on to win two Academy Awards and is No. 84 on the American Film Institute’s list of the Top 100 Best American films.

Last year, showrunner Noah Hawley (writer/producer of “Bones”) created the first season of a new television show called “Fargo,” which would be a spiritual spin-off of the movie. Other than its tone and loca-tion, the show has no relation to the film, but is so well done that it slides into the film’s universe like a severed hand in a mitten.

Similar to the film, each episode of the show begins with the following disclaimer:

This is a true story. The events depicted took place in Minnesota in [year]. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.

The first season, set in 2006, centered on Lester Nygaard (Martin Freeman), an insur-ance salesman who seems a long-lost brother to William H. Macy’s character in the film. Bullied by his wife and his high school nem-esis, Lester is on the verge of a nervous break-down. But that all changes when a strange

drifter played by Billy Bob Thorton carries out a murder on Lester’s behalf, pushing Lester to murder someone as well. Deputy Molly Solverson (Allison Tolman) takes the Frances McDormand role, and begins trying to piece the strange puzzle together.

The show was wildly praised by critics and won a Golden Globe for Best Miniseries. Billy Bob Thorton also walked home with the award for Best Actor in a Miniseries. Having loved the first season so much, I was thrilled to see what Hawley would do with a second season. Throughout the show, Molly Solverson’s father, Lou, kept mentioning something called “the Sioux Falls incident,” and sure enough the second season travels back in time to 1979 to cover this event.

Starring Patrick Wilson as State Trooper Lou Solverson, the season begins with a tri-ple homicide at a Minnesota waffle house, resulting in the death of a judge from North Dakota. A sweet married couple (Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons) gets involved after Dunst accidentally hits the waffle house murderer with her car. In true “Fargo” fash-ion, everything gets a whole lot more compli-cated from then on, including some involve-ment by Ronald Regan (Bruce Campbell).

As with most excellent television pro-gramming, the production value of “Fargo” is incredibly high. Not only do they snag some of the most perfect A-list actors for their respective roles, but the writing (most of the episodes are written by Hawley) is always on-point. Ethan and Joel Coen, writers and directors of the film, act as executive pro-ducers for the show, which I can only assume helps with keeping the tone true to its source.

As we settle into winter and finally have some time to catch up on our favorite shows, I cannot recommend “Fargo” enough. Because it’s an anthology show (“American Horror Story”), you don’t need to watch the first season to enjoy the second, but I would defi-nitely encourage that you do. If you’re a fan of the film, you certainly owe it to yourself to return to the wintery northern Midwest with this masterpiece.

Oh yah, you betcha. PJH

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The small screen “Fargo” will please fans of the hit movie.

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Silencing the StormHow meditation can make you a better mountain athlete. BY RYAN BURKE

Good athletes take care of their phys-ical body, but great athletes sharpen their minds as well. For many, the

off-season provides an opportunity to rest your muscles after a full summer, but can also be a chance to calm down your monkey mind. Meditation, often talked about but rarely practiced, can be a needed release of stress and a way to tap into the silence beyond the storm of daily living. Learning how to pause our minds not only improves the quality of our lives, but also enhances our performance in the mountains.

When we encounter risky situations in the outdoors, our ability to think clear-ly improves our chances of survival, much more than how many pull ups we can do in the gym. As athletes, we spend the bulk of our time training our bodies for peak per-formance, preparing ourselves for when it counts in the mountains. Why, then, do we not train our minds in the same way?

Meditation is like mental push-ups that can teach us to stay calm when our lives are on the line. Research shows that regu-lar meditation strengthens the connections between the “assessment” center and “fear” area of the brain, according to Rebecca Gladding a psychiatrist at UCLA. So when a

person who regularly meditates confronts a threatening situation, they are more pre-pared to examine the danger from a logical and rational perspective. For example, when anxiety hits during a crux move of a climb, previous meditation will help the climber to see a way out of the conundrum without becoming consumed by fear.

Still, many people will never start med-itating because they do not believe they are patient enough or have the time in their day. However, meditation is defined as “turning your attention away from distract-ing thoughts and focusing on the present moment.” Therefore, no extended time requirement is needed to meditate and this simple process can be done at any point of the day. Meditation at its roots is about training your brain – you are in charge of your actions and will not let your thoughts bully you around. All meditation takes is focusing on one point of reference; such as your breath, bodily sensations, or a single word. When remembering what is necessary to meditate the memorable acronym PBR is helpful: Pause your mind, Breathe out, Repeat. Practicing this deceptively simple process is the best preventative medicine for overcoming obstacles in your life and in the mountains. Learning how to steady your breath will teach you how to steady your mind and that could make the differ-ence between life or death. When we see our thoughts as opinions instead of facts, impul-sive actions wane and we see a more clear view of reality. According to Dr. Dan Seigel of UCLA, regular meditation improves the connections and communication between the two sides of the brain, giving us quicker and easier access to information.

However, we will still need to overcome

a built-in negativity bias in the brain that sees the potential problems in all scenarios. This bias has helped our ancestors to sur-vive for millions of years, but also creates a glitch in our decision-making processes. In caveman terms, our chances of survival increase if we spend more time worrying about saber-toothed tigers than the delicious berry bushes around the corner. According to Rick Hanson, a psychologist at Berkeley, this bias of focusing on problems instead of positivity stems from two-thirds of the neu-rons in the amygdala, “smoke detector” of the brain, being primed to receive “bad news.” Hanson states that mindfulness and medita-tion are the best ways to counteract the alarm bells in our brains that overreact to perceived threats in our environment.

As often happens in the mountains, small mistakes lead to bigger mistakes, partially due to the initial stressor hijacking our criti-cal thinking skills. Once we label something as “bad” during a ski tour or climbing trip that initial anxiety provoking thought can cas-cade into bad decisions. Mindfulness, sim-ply defined as “noticing without labeling,” can help us halt worries from avalanching into fear-based behavior. Taking an objective view of the situation can take the emotions out of the equation and help us to see the full picture. In the heat of the moment, clear decisions are more likely to come if you have practiced the skill of staying calm previously. Meditation and mindfulness are two tools that teach us how to stay focused in our daily lives. After all, if we can’t stay composed on the valley floor then we stand little chance of succeeding in the high alpine realm. PJH

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Author contemplating his next move in the Peruvian Andes.

n bootybarre® at Dancers’ Workshop1:30pm, Dancers’ Workshop, $12.00 - $16.00, 307-733-6398n Oil Painting2:00pm, Art Association of Jackson Hole, $100.00 - $120.00, 307-733-6379n Build Your Own Free Website3:00pm, Teton County Library Computer Lab, Free, 307-733-2164

n Freestyle Skating3:00pm, Snow King Sports & Event Center, $10.00, 307-201-1633n The Night before Christmas3:30pm, Art Association of Jackson Hole, $35.00 - $45.00, 307-733-6379n Yoga4:15pm, Teton Recreation Center, $8.00 - $82.50, 307-739-9025n Jazzercise5:30pm, Teton Recreation Center, $8.00 - $82.50, 307-739-9025n Total Fitness5:30pm, Teton Recreation Center, $8.00 - $82.50, 307-739-9025n Build Your Own Free Website5:30pm, Teton County Library Computer Lab, Free, 307-733-2164n Ski Fitness5:30pm, Teton Recreation Center, n Intro to Camera Operation + Photoshop Basics6:00pm, Art Association of Jackson Hole, $120.00 - $145.00, 307-733-6379n Beginning Throwing6:00pm, Art Association of Jackson Hole, $155.00 - $185.00, 307-733-6379n Glass Critters + Beads6:00pm, Art Association of Jackson Hole, $40.00, 307-733-6379n Jumbo Wild Film Screening6:00pm, Pink Garter Theatre, $10.00 - $12.00, 307-733-9417n SheJumps & Jackson Hole Outdoor Leadership Institute Present: Ladies Avalanche Awareness Clinic6:00pm, Teton County Search & Rescue Facility, n Open Gym - Adult Volleyball6:30pm, Teton Recreation Center, $3.75, 307-739-9025n Hip Hop at Dancers’ Workshop7:00pm, Dancers’ Workshop, $12.00 - $16.00, 307-733-6398n Adult Oil Painting7:00pm, The Local Galleria, $25.00 - $80.00, 208-270-0883n Language Exchange Night7:00pm, Valley of the Tetons Library, Free, 208-787-2201n Astronomy Extravaganza7:00pm, Teton County Fair Exhibit Hall, Free, 307-739-9025n One Ton Pig7:30pm, Silver Dollar Showroom, Free, 307-732-3939

FOR COMPLETE EVENT DETAILS VISIT PJHCALENDAR.COM

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Comeback FightCreed smartly builds on the 40-year legacy of Rocky.BY SCOTT RENSHAW

@scottrenshaw

If anything should be painfully clear as we approach the release of a new Star Wars film, it’s how impossible it is to

separate a movie from what we bring to it as viewers. The feverish anticipation is part of a 40-year-history, and an emotional connec-tion that may be only incidentally connected to whatever J.J. Abrams ends up putting on the screen. William Faulkner’s celebrated quote—”The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”—might as well be the marketing slo-gan for the perpetual reboot/remake cycle of contemporary filmmaking.

Creed, coincidentally, also appears this year as the seventh installment in a 40-year-old franchise, and co-writer/director Ryan Coogler brings a fresh concept for revitaliz-ing it. Yet it would be crazy not to acknowl-edge that much of what works about Creed is built on a larger film-history context. Rocky Balboa’s name may be nowhere to be found in the movie’s title, but it’s his soul that ani-mates the story.

In no way is that a slight to Michael B. Jordan, who plays Adonis “Donny” Johnson. We meet the character first as an angry orphaned teen, rescued from the foster-care system by the widow (Phylicia Rashad) of boxing legend Apollo Creed. She has learned that Donny is the illegitimate son of her late husband, and has decided to take respon-sibility for him—and that unique back-story as a tough kid brought into a life of privilege gives Jordan the opportunity for a terrific performance. Jordan has a fascinat-ing face on screen, one that can melt in an instant from ferocity into the look of a scared boy, and Coogler—who directed Jordan in Fruitvale Station—takes advantage of those characteristics to let the actor shine.

Coogler also tries to place his own stamp on the Rocky legacy both through his story and his direction, with uneven results. It’s

an unexpected shift from the tradition of the series’ boxing sequences when Coogler shoots Adonis’s first big fight in one seem-ingly unbroken take, giving it an edgy energy that’s perfect for a young fighter still learning on the job. But he also introduces a romantic sub-plot—between Adonis and his neighbor, a hearing-impaired musician (Dear White People’s Tessa Thompson)—that feels about as perfunctory as a romantic sub-plot can feel, the kind of thing that plays more like a studio script note than a relationship that shapes Adonis in any way.

That’s largely because the truly signif-icant relationship is between Adonis and Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone), whom Adonis seeks out in Philadelphia to train him when he decides that fighting is his destiny. And it’s hard to separate the appeal of Stallone’s performance from seeing him return to the introverted, big-hearted Rocky of the original film. When Coogler shows him visiting the graves of his beloved wife Adrian and best friend Paulie, it feels like eavesdrop-ping on a genuinely intimate moment, not like an actor trying to get back into a charac-ter by reverting to familiar tics. Creed builds an affecting connection between Adonis and Rocky—one of them in need of a father figure, the other a lonely man looking for his own family ties—but there’s little ques-tion that the connection is as potent as it is because one of those guys is Rocky Balboa.

Coogler is savvy enough not to mess with

the formula of building up to one big show-down with a seemingly invincible opponent, in this case a British champ (real-life boxer Tony Bellew) looking for a last big payday before heading to prison. He even knows well enough to turn that fight into a rock-’em-sock-’em battle; the next time you see a guy fight defensively in a Rocky movie will be the first time.

But the buzz of familiarity starts long before the fight itself, when we see Rocky pass on to Adonis that training technique of chasing a chicken around a yard. And then comes the moment in the Big Fight’s final round when Coogler fires up Bill Conti’s rousing old-school Rocky theme, and the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, and audience members involuntarily applaud. By the time Creed concludes with a walk up those iconic steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it feels less like a passing of the torch that a recognition that torches we all carry for beloved movies never really stop burning. PJH

CREEDBBB.5Michael B. JordanSylvester StalloneTessa ThompsonRated PG-13

TRY THESERocky(1976)Sylvester StalloneTalia ShireRated PG

Rocky II(1979)Sylvester StalloneCarl WeathersRated PG

Rocky IV(1985)Sylvester StalloneDolph LundgrenRated PG

Fruitvale Station(2013)Michael B. JordanMelonie DiazRated R

Michael B. Jordan and Sylvester Stallone in Creed

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WEEKEND OF NOV. 27n Between the Wars: The Great Depression in Northern UtahFri - Sat Brigham City Museum of Art and History, 24 N. 300 West, Brigham City, Freen Birds of Paradise: Amazing Avian EvolutionFri - Sun Natural History Museum of Utah, 301 Wakara Way, Salt Lake City, 10:00am, $9.00 - $13.00, 801-581-6927n Brian Bress: Make Your Own FriendsFri - Sun Utah Museum of Fine Arts, 410 Campus Center Drive, Salt Lake City, $12.00 - $14.00, 801-581-7332n Brian Christensen: RECONFIGUREFri - Sat CUAC, 175 E. 200 South, Salt Lake City, Freen The British Passion for Landscape: Masterpieces from National Museum WalesFri - Sun Utah Museum of Fine Arts, 410 Campus Center Drive, Salt Lake City, $12.00 - $14.00, 801-581-7332n Christmas in ColorFri - Sat Kearns Oquirrh Park Fitness Center, 5624 S Cougar Lane, Kearns, $20.00 - $25.00n Firelei Baez: Patterns of ResistanceFri - Sat Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, 20 S West Temple, Salt Lake City, Freen Glass Art Guild of Utah ShowFri - Sun Red Butte Garden, 300 Wakara Way, Salt Lake City, 9:00am, $6.00 - $10.00n Grouch Who Stole ChristmasFri - Sat The Off Broadway Theater, 272 South Main St, Salt Lake City, 7:30pm, $8.00 - $16.00n Mystery Escape RoomFri - Sat The Gateway, 157 S. Rio Grande St., Salt Lake City, 9:30am, $29.95n Redford Film SeriesFri Sundance Mountain Resort, 8841 N Alpine Loop Rd, Sundance, 8:00pm, Free, 801-223-4144n Statewide Annual Photography, Craft & Video & Digital WorksFri Rio Gallery, 300 S Rio Grande St, Salt Lake City, 8:00am, Free, 801-245-7272n Stefan Lesueur: ObscuraFri - Sat Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, 20 S. West Temple, Salt Lake City, 11:00am, Freen Strayboots Interactive Scavenger HuntFri - Sun Salt Lake CIty, Salt Lake City, 10:00am, $10.00, 877-787-2929n Utah Arts Festival and Art Access: 70 Artists in 2015 Holiday ShowFri Utah Arts Festival, 230 S. 500 West, Salt Lake City

n Young FrankensteinFri - Sun Egyptian Theater Company, 328 Main St, Park City, 8:00pmn Andy GoldSat Wiseguys Ogden, 269 25th St., Ogden, 8:00pm, $10.00n New Orleans Pelicans at Utah JazzSat EnergySolutions Arena, 301 W South Temple, Salt Lake City, 7:00pm

WEEKEND OF DEC. 4n Art DogFri - Sun Salt Lake Acting Company, 168 W. 500 North, Salt Lake City, 7:00pm, $16.00 - $26.00n Between the Wars: The Great Depression in Northern UtahFri - Sat Brigham City Museum of Art and History, 24 N. 300 West, Brigham City, Freen Birds of Paradise: Amazing Avian EvolutionFri - Sun Natural History Museum of Utah, 301 Wakara Way, Salt Lake City, 10:00am, $9.00 - $13.00, 801-581-6927n Brian Bress: Make Your Own FriendsFri - Sun Utah Museum of Fine Arts, 410 Campus Center Drive, Salt Lake City, $12.00 - $14.00, 801-581-7332n Brian Christensen: RECONFIGUREFri - Sat CUAC, 175 E. 200 South, Salt Lake City, Freen The British Passion for Landscape: Masterpieces from National Museum WalesFri - Sun Utah Museum of Fine Arts, 410 Campus Center Drive, Salt Lake City, $12.00 - $14.00, 801-581-7332n Christmas in ColorFri - Sat Kearns Oquirrh Park Fitness Center, 5624 S Cougar Lane, Kearns, $20.00 - $25.00n FearlessFri, Sat, Sat Marriott Center for Dance, 330 1500 E #106, Salt Lake City, 7:30pm, $8.00 - $12.00n Festival of TreesFri - Sat South Towne Expo Center, 9575 S. State Street, Sandy, 10:00am, $3.00 - $6.00, 385-468-2260n Firelei Baez: Patterns of ResistanceFri - Sat Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, 20 S West Temple, Salt Lake City, Freen Glass Art Guild of Utah ShowFri - Sun Red Butte Garden, 300 Wakara Way, Salt Lake City, 9:00am, $6.00 - $10.00n The Great Christmas AdventureFri - Sat Gardner Village, 1100 West 7800 South, West Jordan, 5:30pm, $5.00 - $7.00n Grouch Who Stole ChristmasFri - Sat The Off Broadway Theater, 272 South Main St, Salt Lake City, 7:30pm, $8.00 - $16.00n It Happened One ChristmasFri - Sat Pioneer Theater Company, 300 S. 1400 East, Salt Lake City, 7:30pm, $40.00 - $62.00n Mystery Escape RoomFri - Sat The Gateway, 157 S. Rio Grande St., Salt Lake City, 9:30am, $29.95n Statewide Annual Photography, Craft & Video & Digital WorksFri Rio Gallery, 300 S Rio Grande St, Salt Lake City, 8:00am, Free, 801-245-7272n Stefan Lesueur: ObscuraFri - Sat Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, 20 S. West Temple, Salt Lake City, 11:00am, Freen Strayboots Interactive Scavenger HuntFri - Sun Salt Lake CIty, Salt Lake City, 10:00am, $10.00, 877-787-2929n Utah Arts Festival and Art Access: 70 Artists in 2015 Holiday ShowFri Utah Arts Festival, 230 S. 500 West, Salt Lake City

Who’s up for a road trip? There’s plenty to do down south in Salt Lake City next weekend. Whether your interests lie in music, theater and the arts—or something a bit more down-to-earth—here’s what’s going on in the Beehive State. (Visit cityweekly.net/events for complete listings.) So hit the road! But be sure and bring a snack—because, now and then, everybody craves something salty.

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n James P. ConnollySat Wiseguys Ogden, 269 25th St., Ogden, $10.00n Universes: Live from the EdgeSat Kingsbury Hall, 1395 Presidents Cir, Salt Lake City, 7:30pmn Utopia Early Music: A Medieval ChristmasSat, Sun Cathedral Church of St. Mark, 231 E. 100 South, Salt Lake City, 8:00pm, $10.00 - $15.00n Winter MarketSat Rio Grande Depot, 300 S. Rio Grande Street, Salt Lake City, 10:00am

WEEKEND OF DEC. 11n Art DogFri - Sun Salt Lake Acting Company, 168 W. 500 North, Salt Lake City, 7:00pm, $16.00 - $26.00n Between the Wars: The Great Depression in Northern UtahFri - Sat Brigham City Museum of Art and History, 24 N. 300 West, Brigham City, Freen Birds of Paradise: Amazing Avian EvolutionFri - Sun Natural History Museum of Utah, 301 Wakara Way, Salt Lake City, 10:00am, $9.00 - $13.00, 801-581-6927n Brian Bress: Make Your Own FriendsFri - Sun Utah Museum of Fine Arts, 410 Campus Center Drive, Salt Lake City, $12.00 - $14.00, 801-581-7332n The British Passion for Landscape: Masterpieces from National Museum WalesFri - Sun Utah Museum of Fine Arts, 410 Campus Center Drive, Salt Lake City, $12.00 - $14.00, 801-581-7332n Christmas in ColorFri - Sat Kearns Oquirrh Park Fitness Center, 5624 S Cougar Lane, Kearns, $20.00 - $25.00n Firelei Baez: Patterns of ResistanceFri - Sat Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, 20 S West Temple, Salt Lake City, Freen Glass Art Guild of Utah ShowFri - Sun Red Butte Garden, 300 Wakara Way, Salt Lake City, 9:00am, $6.00 - $10.00n The Great Christmas AdventureFri - Sat Gardner Village, 1100 West 7800 South, West Jordan, 5:30pm, $5.00 - $7.00n Grouch Who Stole ChristmasFri - Sat The Off Broadway Theater, 272 South Main St, Salt Lake City, 7:30pm, $8.00 - $16.00n Holiday Store Event: Kate MacLeodFri Ken Sanders Rare Books, 200 E. 268 South, Salt Lake City, 7:00pm, Freen It Happened One ChristmasFri - Sat Pioneer Theater Company, 300 S. 1400 East, Salt Lake City, 7:30pm, $40.00 - $62.00n MacbethFri, Sat, Sat Egyptian Theatre Company, 328 Main St, Park City, 7:00pm, $9.00 - $14.00n Mystery Escape RoomFri - Sat The Gateway, 157 S. Rio Grande St., Salt Lake City, 9:30am, $29.95n Statewide Annual Photography, Craft & Video & Digital WorksFri Rio Gallery, 300 S Rio Grande St, Salt Lake City, 8:00am, Free, 801-245-7272n Stefan Lesueur: ObscuraFri - Sat Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, 20 S. West Temple, Salt Lake City, 11:00am, Freen Strayboots Interactive Scavenger HuntFri - Sun Salt Lake CIty, Salt Lake City, 10:00am, $10.00, 877-787-2929n Utah Arts Festival and Art Access: 70 Artists in 2015 Holiday ShowFri Utah Arts Festival, 230 S. 500 West, Salt Lake City

WEEKEND OF DEC. 18n A Christmas CarolFri - Sun Hale Center Theatre, 3333 S. Decker Lake Drive, West Valley City, 8:00pm, $16.00 - $35.00, 801-984-9000n A Christmas CarolFri, Fri, Sat, Sat, Sat Hale Center Theater Orem, 225 W. 400 North, Orem, 8:00pmn A Fairly Potter Christmas CarolFri, Sat, Sat The Ziegfeld Theater, 3934 Washington Blvd., South Ogden, 7:30pm, $17.00 - $20.00, 855-ZIG-ARTSn A Pioneer ChristmasFri - Sat Provo Pioneer Village, 500 W 600 N, Provo, 6:00pm, Free, 801-375-9299n A Visual FeastFri - Sat Horne Fine Art Exhibit, 142 East 800 South, Salt Lake City, Freen Adam Cayton-Holland- ComedianFri - Sat Club at 50 West, 50 West Broadway, Salt Lake City, 6:00pmn AIARE Level 1Fri - Sun Snowbird Resort, Highway 210 Little Cottonwood Canyon, Snowbird, 8:00amn Alex Metric at ElevateFri Elevate, 155 W. 200 South, Salt Lake City, 9:00pmn Alta’a 3 Day Off Trail Workshop at the Snowpine LodgeFri Snowpine Lodge, Alta, 8:00am, $1.00 - $600.00n American Adventure Special Exhibit: Brave the MazeFri - Sat Union Station, 2501 Wall Avenue, Ogden, 10:00am, $3.00 - $5.00n Art DogFri - Sun Salt Lake Acting Company, 168 W. 500 North, Salt Lake City, 7:00pm, $16.00 - $26.00n BAC presents The NutcrackerFri, Sat, Sat Covey Center for the Arts, 425 West Center Street, Provo, 7:30pmn Ballet West - Salt Lake CityFri, Sat, Sat, Sun, Sun Capitol Theatre, 50 W. 200 South, Salt Lake City, 7:00pmn Benjamin Gaulon: Corrupt.YourselfFri - Sat Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, 20 S West Temple, Salt Lake City, 11:00am, Freen The Best Christmas Pageant Ever!Fri - Sat CenterPoint Legacy Theatre, 525 N. 400 West, Centerville, 7:00pm, $15.00n Birds of Paradise: Amazing Avian EvolutionFri - Sun Natural History Museum of Utah, 301 Wakara Way, Salt Lake City, 10:00am, $9.00 - $13.00, 801-581-6927n Brian Bress: Make Your Own FriendsFri - Sun Utah Museum of Fine Arts, 410 Campus Center Drive, Salt Lake City, $12.00 - $14.00, 801-581-7332n BYU Athletics: Men’s basketball vs. Central MichiganFri Marriott Center, 1497 N 450 E, Provo, 7:00pmn Cactus Jack Holiday ShowFri The Stereo Room, 521 N 1200 W, Orem, 8:00pmn Candy’s RiverhouseFri The Spur Bar and Grill, 352 Main Street, Park City, 9:30pmn Centennial CelebrationFri Logan Library, 255 North Main Street, Logan, 10:15am, Freen Cheryl Sandoval: Steps from the ReservationFri - Sat Mestizo Institute of Culture & Arts, 631 W. North Temple, Suite 700, Salt Lake City, Freen Children’s Expression Through Painting: Works by Fahimeh Amiri and StudentsFri Salt Lake City Main Library, 210 E. 400 South, Salt Lake City, 6:30pm

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Been There, Doon ThatAn evening with Bonny Doon’s Randall Grahm.BY TED SCHEFFLER

@critic1

It’s no secret to anyone who reads this column that I’m a longtime fan of Bonny Doon founder and winemaker Randall

Grahm. He was one of the first wine “indus-try” types to get me excited about wine, in part because his talents extend so far beyond winemaking. Grahm’s world-class wit, endless affection for puns, mastery of language, self-deprecating humor, and love of philosophy and literature are just a few reasons to love the guy.

He’s also a mensch who happens to make uniquely fabulous wines. So, when I was extended an invitation to attend a Bonny Doon wine dinner earlier in November, I jumped at the chance.

Through the years, we’d exchanged tweets, emails, faxes and such on

topics ranging from French Chartreuse to the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, but somehow I’d always missed meeting Grahm in person. My first order of business was to tell him how much I enjoyed his writ-ing; I assumed he already knew how much I enjoyed his wines. Each bottle of Bonny Doon comes with added value. Whatever you think of the wine, you can rest assured you’ll be entertained—and possibly even informed—by Grahm’s witty wine labels. For evidence, just do a little research, or take a look at Grahm’s terrific book Been Doon So Long regarding the labeling of his Clos de Gilroy California Grenache. It’s just one of a long lineage of less-than-lackluster labels.

We dipped into some Clos de Gilroy 2014 ($19.32) Grenache from Monterey County (my wife’s favorite wine of the eve-ning) alongside a stunning dish of trout mousse with grilled toast, pickled strawber-ry and watercress that chef Phelix Gardner’s team had created. As Grahm put it, Clos de Gilroy isn’t made from the “weapons-grade Grenache” that he uses to produce Bonny Doon Le Cigare Volant. This is a softer, more feminine, spicy wine that’s mostly Grenache, with a smidgeon of Mourvédre and what Randall calls “a homeopathic amount of Syrah” blended in.

Earlier, we’d begun the evening with pumpkin “leather” and peppercorn ricotta while sipping Bonny Doon Querry Cider

($13.75). I hadn’t realized that Grahm had gotten into the cider biz, but this grown-up fruit juice brimming with pear, apple and quince flavors made me happy he did. I’d be tempted to bring a bottle of Querry with me to my next sushi sit-down.

Bonny Doon Le Cigar Blanc Réserve (en bon-bonne) 2011 ($50) was a surprise. I was expecting a traditional Château neu f-du-Pape Blanc-st yle wine—which happens to be one of my favorite indul-gences. Without getting too wine geeky, this Roussa n ne/Grenache Blanc/Picpoul blend ages not in barrels, but in glass demijohns (bon-bonnes) which serve, as Grahm puts it, “as a sort of lees hotel: the lees check in, but they don’t check out.” The presence of the lees in the wine gives it a luscious, cloudy and creamy texture with hints of pear and quince

(is there some Querry in there?)—a wine with elegance that could tag-team a plate of buttery shellfish. At Finca, it was served with a killer

dish of creamy leeks and cave-grown mushrooms.

Le Cigare Volant is Bonny Doon’s f lagship wine, so

it was a real treat to get to taste 2008 Le Cigare Volant en foudre ($55). En foudre refers to the 10,000 liter upright wood tanks that this blend of Grenache, Syrah, Mourvédre, Cinsault and Carignane lives in before bottling. Here’s a little secret: There just might be Grenache clones from the renowned Châteauneuf-du-Pape producer Chateau Rayas in a bottle of Le Cigare Volant. Perhaps they inad-vertently fell into someone’s luggage. Shhhhhh … Just shut up, drink up, and toast Randall Grahm for allow-ing us this little glimpse into Heaven. PJH

BEER, WINE & SPIRITS IMBIBE

Trio is located just off the town square indowntown Jackson, and is owned & operatedby local chefs with a passion for good food.Our menu features contemporary Americandishes inspired by classic bistro cuisine. Dailyspecials feature wild game, fish and meats.Enjoy a glass of wine at the bar in front ofthe wood-burning oven and watch the chefsperform in the open kitchen.

Dinner Nightly at 5:30pm

45 S. Glenwood

Available for private events & catering

For reservations please call 734-8038

Lunch 11:30am Monday-SaturdayDinner 5:30pm Nightly

307.201.1717 | LOCALJH.COMON THE TOWN SQUARE

HAPPY HOUR Daily 4-6:00pm

Local is a modern American steakhouse andbar 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.

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SALES@PLANETJH.COM OR 307.732.0299

CONTACT YOUR

ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE TODAY TO

LEARN MORE

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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 & CHINESETETON THAIServing 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.

KAZUMIKazumi is a family-owned and operated restaurant serving unique sushi rolls, fresh sashimi and nigiri, and off-the-charts specialty items. Located near the Town Square, we also feature hot noodle soups and the spiciest rolls in town! Open Monday through Saturday at 11 a.m - 9:30 p.m. 265 West Broadway, 307-733-9168, jacksonholesushi.com.

CONTINENTALTHE BLUE LIONA Jackson Hole favorite for 37 years. Join us in the charming atmosphere of a historic home. Ask a local about our rack of lamb. Serving fresh fish, elk, poultry, steaks, and vegetarian entrées. Live acoustic guitar music most nights. Open at 5:30 p.m. Closed Tuesdays. Off Season Special: 2 for 1 Entrees. Good all night. Must mention ad. Reservations recommended, walk-ins welcome. 160 N. Millward, (307) 733-3912, bluelionrestaurant.com

CAFE GENEVIEVEServing inspired home cooked classics in a historic log cabin. Enjoy brunch daily at 8 a.m., dinner nightly at 5 p.m., and happy hour daily 3-5:30 p.m. featuring $5 glasses of wine, $5 specialty drinks, $3 bottled beer. 135 E. Broadway, (307) 732-1910, genevievejh.com.

ELEANOR’SEnjoy all the perks of fine dining, minus the dress code at Eleanor’s, serving rich, saucy dishes in a warm and friendly setting. Eleanor’s is a primo brunch spot on Sunday afternoons. 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.

McDonald’s November Locals Special®

ONLY$499+ tax

Get a Big Mac®, Medium Fries and a Medium Soft Drink for only $4.99 plus tax

during the month of November.

Fast, Affordable and On Your Way!

1110 W. BroadwayJackson, Wyoming

Open daily 5:00am to midnightFree Wi-Fi

THE LOCALSFAVORITE

PIZZA2012, 2013

& 2014

TV Sports Packages and 7 Screens

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

7 LUNCH SPECIALSlice, salad

& soda$4 Well Drink

Specials

• • • • • • • • •

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

$

307-733-3448 | Open Daily 11am-7pm180 N. Center St. | 1 block n. of Town Square

Next to Home Ranch Parking Lot

Steamed SubsHot Dogs

Soups & SaladsThe Deli That’ll Rock Your Belly

A Jackson Hole favorite since 1965

Dining room and bar open nightly at 5:00pm(307) 733-2460 • 2560 Moose Wilson Road • Wilson, WY

FAMILY FRIENDLY ENVIRONMENT

PIZZAS, PASTAS & MORE

HOUSEMADE BREAD & DESSERTS

FRESH, LOCALLY SOURCED OFFERINGS

TAKE OUT AVAILABLE

WWW.TETONLOTUSCAFE.COM

• • • • • • •

Breakfast • Lunch

Serving breakfast and lunch daily 8am - 3pm

Closed Thanksgiving Day145 N. Glenwood • (307) 734-0882

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FULL STEAM SUBSThe deli that’ll rock your belly. Jackson’s newest sub shop serves steamed subs, reubens, gyros, delicious all beef hot dogs, soups and salads. We offer Chicago style hot dogs done just the way they do in the windy city. Open daily11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Located just a short block north of the Town Square at 180 N. Center Street, (307) 733-3448.

LOCALLocal, 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 seasonally-inspired 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 CAFEServing 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. Open daily 8am for breakfast lunch and dinner. 145 N. Glenwood St., (307) 734-0882, tetonlotuscafe.com.

MANGY MOOSEMangy 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.

SNAKE RIVER BREWERY & RESTAURANTAmerica’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.

SWEETWATERSatisfying locals for lunch and dinner for over 36 years with deliciously affordable comfort food. Extensive local and regional beer list. Lunch 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. features blackened trout salad, elk melt, wild west chili and vegetarian specialties. Dinner 5:30 to 9 p.m. including potato-crusted trout, 16 ounce ribeye, vegan and wild game. Reservations welcome. (307) 733-3553. sweetwaterjackson.com.

TRIOOwned and operated by Chefs with a passion for good food, Trio is located right off the Town square in downtown Jackson. Featuring a variety of cuisines in a relaxed atmosphere, Trio is famous for its wood-oven pizzas, specialty cocktails and waffle fries with bleu cheese fondue. Dinner nightly at 5:30 p.m. Reservations. (307) 734-8038 or bistrotrio.com.

ITALIANCALICOA 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 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.

MEXICANEL ABUELITOServing 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.

PIZZADOMINO’S PIZZAHot and delicious delivered to your door. Hand-tossed, 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’SThe locals favorite! Voted Best Pizza in Jackson Hole 2012, 2013 and 2014. Seek out this hidden gem under the Pink Garter Theatre for NY pizza by the slice, salads, stromboli’s, 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.

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 uniquedining experience. The personable staff will make youfeel RIGHT AT HOME and the funky western decor will

keep you entertained throughout your entire visit. Reservati ons a t (307) 733-4 913

32 95 Vi lla ge Drive • Teton Vill age , WYwww.mangymoose .com

265 WEST BROADWAY307-733-9168

JACKSONHOLESUSHI.COM

BUY 1 GET 1 APPETIZERS

LIMIT 1 PER A TABLE

(307) 733-0330520 S. Hwy. 89 • Jackson, WY

®

Large Specialty Pizza 1399 $ADD: for an extra

$5.99/eachWings (8 pc)Medium Pizza (1 topping)Stuffed Cheesy Bread

2FOR1ENTREES

OFF SEASON SPECIAL

733-3912160 N. Millward • Reservations recommended

Reserve online at bluelionrestaurant.com

Good all night • Open nightly at 5:30pmClosed tuesdays • Ends December 10th

Go to devourutah.comfor pick up locations

p. 14

p. 39

p. 46

It’s time to

Do It Yourself

Issue 6 • September/October 2015 • DIY

Good seeds p. 28

YourselfYourselfIt’s time to do it

Hands-on

restaurant design

p. 14

Meet SLC’s artisan

butcher

p. 38

The Jewish deli

from NYC to SLC

p. 46

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Power of Thankful ThoughtPracticing gratitude, being cognizant of even life’s small miracles can improve your physical and mental health.

Feeling gratitude and expressing thanks is a simple, powerful and proven way to live happier and

healthier. Living life though the lens of gratitude means taking the time to notice and reflect every day on things large and small for which you are thankful. Even in the most difficult circumstances, there are still things for which you can be grate-ful. It may sound silly, but because you are alive you can, as yoga teaches us, always feel grateful for your breath. The feeling of gratitude immediately opens the heart and connects to wisdom and love.

But don’t take my word for it. There is a large body of scientific research demonstrating gratitude has a long list of measurable benefits to our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual wellbe-ing. Being mindful of the small mira-cles, those that happen every day, stimu-lates the biochemistry of wellbeing. The immune system subsequently enjoys a boost from the positive emotion of grat-itude, contributing to greater physical health and mental focus. Feeling grateful also dissipates anxiety and lowers blood pressure. A spiritual benefit is that being thankful significantly adds to feelings of support and connection with the miracle of all life.

Thankfully, gratitude is easy to learn and to practice. As always, it requires only that elusive idea: “You have to want to.” However, if necessary, you can also fake it till you make it. Here are some ways to go about reaping the benefits of gratitude on Thanksgiving and every day. And here’s hoping you will.

Three Gratitude Exercises to Practice at Thanksgiving Dinner (Or During Any Meal)

1. Be silent for a few minutes, close your eyes and try on the feeling (no con-tent, simply the feeling) of gratitude for life.

2. The science behind the age-old tradition of blessing your food is that food and water upgrade their molecular structure in response to positive human thoughts and emotions. Try it. Place your hands over your food, pause, close your eyes and allow yourself to experience gratitude for the meal you are about to enjoy. Try and feel the energy in your heart extend down your arms to your hands and into the food.

3. Take the time to focus on any of the foods on your plate, and bring to mind all the people, in all the places, in all the steps along the way – including animals and plants, natural resources, modes of transport, technology and preparation – involved in bringing this one food item to your table. This is a “wow” about connec-tion and gratitude.

Two Gratitude Exercises to Keep it Going

1. Research indicates that listing five things for which you are grateful before you go to sleep every night and/or when you wake up in the morning will have lasting positive effects on your life. You can say these silently to yourself, or aloud, or write them in a notebook. Some people keep a gratitude notebook on their night table. Keep this fresh by not repeating the same five things every day.

2. Take a large empty glass jar and place it on the kitchen counter or in your office in a central place with a pad of paper and a pen nearby. Whenever there is something in your day for which you are thankful, take a moment, write it down, fold the paper and put it in the jar. Once a week or once a month, or maybe every New Year’s Eve, re-read everything in the jar. Enjoy the bounty of your bless-ings, empty the jar and start anew.

Lastly, keep in mind that the more you focus on authentic feelings of gratitude, more things to be grateful for will show up in your experience! That’s the Law of Attraction in action. PJH

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

PRChoice

IT’S PRO-CHOICE OR NO-CHOICE.

Take away a woman’s right to choose and she’s left to take matters into her own hands.

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Please support keeping abortion safe and legal.

4 2 8 0 W. L E E P E R • W I L S O N • 3 0 7 - 7 3 3 - 4 3 3 1

W E S E RV I C E T H E M A L L … RABBIT ROW REPAIR

OLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR

THE LATEST PLANET HAPPENINGS!

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“MAN TO MAN” By Gary Schlapfer & C.C. Burnikel

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2015

ACROSS1 Healthy bar creations7 Rudiments11 Diced dish15 Bee relative19 End of an uncertain statement20 Qatar home of the Aspire Tower21 Canyon response22 “__ Dinka Doo”23 Position for Walter Cronkite25 Bell site27 “The Black Cat” author28 Out of juice29 Style31 Surfer wannabe32 Rounded hammer part33 Wish list responder34 Mortar spreaders36 Official arachnid of South Carolina40 On the money42 Arabic leader?43 Finish the team practice45 Political fund-raiser49 Stuck with52 Silent film star Lillian53 Tipped toppers54 Benny’s 39, so he said55 Superhero letter56 Make changes to58 Keats’ “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” begins one60 Narrowly escape bogey, in golf lingo63 Real poser65 Gobble (down)67 Most prudent68 Guitar accessory70 Stroll around the station?73 Holliday allies74 “Manhattan” and “Nashville”76 Shout target77 Gift giver’s cry79 Brings together81 “I pity the fool” speaker

82 Allen who never really made furniture83 “That’s gross!”86 __ center87 Biathlon needs89 Pandora’s inventory91 Buck Rogers weapon93 Camping attraction96 Crazed Muppet drummer98 Nothing but99 Monkeys (with)101 Focused group?104 Beverage made with buds107 __ Martin: Bond’s car109 Actress Rowlands110 Three Stooges specialty111 Seafood sauce113 Bridge position114 Sun Devils’ sch.117 Lou Gehrig nickname, with “The”119 Hobbit world122 Actor Dick Van __123 Duel-purpose tool124 Drink with a polar bear mascot125 Penguin suit126 Appear127 Chef Bobby to beat on a reality show128 Low in fat129 Conspicuous display

DOWN1 Ivory in a dish2 River through Florence3 Hat-borne parasites4 Louisville Slugger material5 Two-element tubes6 Actress with a record 19 Oscar nominations7 Ritalin target8 ’20s fashion accessory9 Mythological fire-breathers10 Microwaving aid

11 Pajamaed publisher12 Spread unit13 Drivers’ local knowledge14 Babe15 Dating scene returnee, maybe16 Battery terminal17 “Cheers!”18 Western buds24 Fox or wolf26 “__ Were the Days”30 Small bites32 Fizzling-out sound33 Beyond cold35 Carpentry tool36 Boat trailer37 Cheers at soccer matches38 Empty words39 Steals, as a toy41 That, in Mexico44 Give minimal effort46 All-bark, no-bite type47 Visibly stunned48 After-dinner brand50 National Dr. Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall locale51 Texter’s “Horrors!”53 Wife of Zeus57 Slammin’ Sammy quartet59 Rooster’s cue61 Where Mozart met Haydn62 He played Tony on “NYPD Blue”64 Babe in the woods65 Cut reminder66 Lake litter68 Blue toon69 Office supply71 Sources of after-hrs. cash72 Metric speed abbr.75 Opening word?78 Corn carrier80 Rescue team on the slopes82 Violinist Mischa

84 Smoke, perhaps85 Wasn’t surprised88 Pique condition90 Twizzlers ingredient92 Place with a pool94 Co-founder of Women’s Media Center95 Escape mechanism96 Office underling: Abbr.97 Not under the table100 Once in a blue moon102 Starts over103 Get in on the deal104 Surprise missions105 How pastrami is often ordered106 Stir the fire108 Language that gave us “cheroot” and “curry”112 Continent with 11 time zones113 Not the best place for apple-tasting?114 Two-dimensional measure115 Norms: Abbr.116 “I’m in for it now!”118 Not right120 Crack gp.?121 Rose of rock

L.A.TIMES

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.

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These businesses provide health or wellness services for the Jackson Hole community and its visitors.WELLNESS COMMUNITY

TO ADVERTISE IN THE WELLNESS DIRECTORY, CONTACT JEN AT PLANET JACKSON HOLE AT 307-732-0299 OR SALES@PLANETJH.COM

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and disease, and often eliminate them

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Professional and Individualized Treatments • Sports/Ortho Rehab • Neck and Back Rehab • Rehabilitative Pilates • Incontinence Training • Pelvic Pain Rehab • Lymphedema TreatmentsNorene Christensen PT, DSc, OCS, CLTRebekah Donley PT, DPT, CPIMark Schultheis PT, CSCSKim Armington PTA, CPINo physician referral required.(307) 733-5577•1090 S Hwy 89

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGYBY ROB BREZSNY

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.

ARIES (March 21-April 19)“We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange,” wrote novelist Carson McCullers. “As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.” I’m guessing that these days you’re feeling that kind of homesickness, Aries. The people and places that usually comfort you don’t have their cus-tomary power. The experiences you typically seek out to strengthen your stability just aren’t having that effect. The proper response, in my opinion, is to go in quest of exotic and experimental stimuli. In ways you may not yet be able to imagine, they can provide the grounding you need. They will steady your nerves and bolster your courage.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20)The Pekingese is a breed of dog that has been around for over 2,000 years. In ancient China, it was beloved by Buddhist monks and emperors’ families. Here’s the legend of its origin: A tiny marmoset and huge lion fell in love with each other, but the contrast in their sizes made union impossible. Then the gods intervened, using magic to make them the same size. Out of the creatures’ consum-mated passion, the first Pekingese was born. I think this myth can serve as inspiration for you, Taurus. Amazingly, you may soon find a way to blend and even synergize two elements that are ostensibly quite different. Who knows? You may even get some divine help.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20)Author Virginia Woolf wrote this message to a dear ally: “I sincerely hope I’ll never fathom you. You’re mystical, serene, intriguing; you enclose such charm within you. The luster of your presence bewitches me … the whole thing is splendid and voluptuous and absurd.” I hope you will have good reason to whisper sweet things like that in the coming weeks, Gemini. You’re in the Season of Togetherness, which is a favorable time to seek and cultivate interesting kinds of intimacy. If there is no one to whom you can sincerely deliver a memo like Woolf’s, search for such a person.

CANCER (June 21-July 22)Some people are so attached to wearing a favorite ring on one of their fingers that they never take it off. They love the beauty and endearment it evokes. In rare cases, years go by and their ring finger grows thicker. Blood flow is constricted. Discomfort sets in. And they can’t remove their precious jewelry with the lubrication provided by a little olive oil or soap and water. They need the assistance of a jeweler who uses a small saw and a protective sheath to cut away the ring. I suspect this may be an apt metaphor for a certain situation in your life, Cancerian. Is it? Do you wonder if you should free yourself from a pretty or sentimental constriction that you have outgrown? If so, get help.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22)“Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted,” wrote Leo author Aldous Huxley. That’s the bad news. The good news is that in the coming weeks you are less likely to take things for granted than you have been in a long time. Happily, it’s not because your familiar pleasures and sources of stability are in jeopardy. Rather, it’s because you have become more deeply connected to the core of your life energy. You have a vivid appreciation of what sustains you. Your assignment: Be alert for the eternal as it wells up out of the mundane.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22)In their quest to collect nectar, honeybees are attuned to the importance of proper timing. Even if flowering plants are abundant, the quality and quantity of the nectar that’s available vary with the weather, season, and hour of the day. For example, dandelions may offer their peak bless-ings at 9 a.m., cornflowers in late morning, and clover in mid-afternoon. I urge you to be equally sensitive to the sources where you can obtain nourishment, Virgo. Arrange your schedule so you consistently seek to gather what you need at the right time and place.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22)Are you willing to dedicate yourself fully to a game whose rules are constantly mutating? Are you resourceful enough to keep playing at a high level even if some of the other players don’t have as much integrity and commitment as you? Do you have confidence in your ability to detect and adjust to ever-shifting alliances? Will the game still engage your interest if you discover that the rewards are different from what you thought they were? If you can answer yes to these questions, by all means jump all the way into the complicated fun!

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21)I suspect your body has been unusually healthy and vigor-ous lately. Is that true? If so, figure out why. Have you been taking better care of yourself? Have there been lucky acci-dents or serendipitous innovations on which you’ve been capitalizing? Make these new trends a permanent part of your routine. Now I’ll make a similar observation about your psychological well-being. It also seems to have been extra strong recently. Why? Has your attitude improved in such a way as to generate more positive emotions? Have there been fluky breakthroughs that unleashed unexpect-ed surges of hope and good cheer? Make these new trends a permanent part of your routine.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21)From the dawn of civilization until 1995, humans cataloged about 900 comets in our solar system. But since then, we have expanded that tally by over 3,000. Most of the recent discoveries have been made not by professional astrono-mers, but by laypersons, including two 13-year-olds. They have used the Internet to access images from the SOHO satellite placed in orbit by NASA and the European Space Agency. After analyzing the astrological omens, I expect you Sagittarians to enjoy a similar run of amateur success. So trust your rookie instincts. Feed your innocent curiosity. Ride your raw enthusiasm.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19)Whether or not you are literally a student enrolled in school, I suspect you will soon be given a final exam. It may not happen in a classroom or require you to write responses to questions. The exam will more likely be administered by life in the course of your daily challenges. The material you’ll be tested on will mostly include the lessons you have been studying since your last birthday. But there will also be at least one section that deals with a subject you’ve been wrestling with since early in your life—and maybe even a riddle from before you were born. Since you have free will, Capricorn, you can refuse to take the exam. But I hope you won’t. The more enthusiastic you are about accepting its challenge, the more likely it is that you’ll do well.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18)For $70,000 per night, you can rent the entire country of Liechtenstein for your big party. The price includes the right to rename the streets while you’re there. You can also create a temporary currency with a likeness of you on the bills, have a giant rendition of your favorite image carved into the snow on a mountainside, and preside over a festive medieval-style parade. Given your current astrological omens, I suggest you consider the possibility. If that’s too extravagant, I hope you will at least gather your legion of best friends for the Blowout Bash of the Decade. It’s time, in my opinion, to explore the mysteries of vivid and vigorous conviviality.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20)Are you available to benefit from a thunderbolt healing? Would you consider wading into a maelstrom if you knew it was a breakthrough in disguise? Do you have enough faith to harvest an epiphany that begins as an uproar? Weirdly lucky phenomena like these are on tap if you have the courage to ask for overdue transformations. Your blind spots and sore places are being targeted by life’s fierce tenderness. All you have to do is say, “Yes, I’m ready.”

The First Thanksgiving Struggling pilgrims are free at last.

I have an invite to go to Lill’s for Thanksgiving din-ner! The last time I

shared Thanksgiving with Lill she had bacon hors d’oeuvres, bacon wrapped turkey stuffed with bacon, mashed potatoes with bacon pieces and for desert, pecan pie with whipped bacon grease replacing Crisco in the crust. I had brought Little Clyde, my nephew, along. His parents were in Vegas taking advantage of a slow time for Sin City and special deals that included free buffets.

After dinner and during halftimes and commercial breaks in football games, I had taken the time to tell Little Clyde the story of the first Thanksgiving. For those unfa-miliar or needing a primer on the Pilgrims and why we feast and give thanks every November, I have included the story below.

The pilgrims were East and West Coast hedge fund managers and trust funders who longed for the liberty to live like real cowboys, in massive log homes with heat-ed driveways, wine rooms and servant’s quarters for their domestic staff. They want-ed the liberty to buy western art without ridicule from snobby connoisseurs. They longed for the freedom of a new land and, as they already had a house in Martha’s Vineyard, Sedona and Vail, they searched for new frontiers, hopefully one that had no state income tax. And so they set sail into the unknown, leaving all they had behind in their Park Avenue townhomes. The first winter in Jackson was long, cold, and very hard. Massage therapist and sushi shops were still a rarity and there were only two golf courses! Danger lurked around every corner, not just from uncivilized natives, but from malnutrition, as in the early days opportunities for fine dining were rare; many Pilgrims had to engage the services of a cook merely to survive.

But the pilgrims did survive that first difficult year with help from local natives who supplied them with not only cooks but with nannies, maids, and caretakers, teaching them about their new home, and giving them the skills needed to endure in a strange land.

Finally the pilgrims, armed with noth-ing but a checkbook, a pen, a realtor, and an interior designer, carved a new civilization from the wilderness; a civilization defined by a rugged-rustic-western-luxury lifestyle. Four Star dining establishments and galler-ies specializing in western and wildlife art appeared and many of the pilgrims bravely spent as many as four weeks a year in the valley, flying in for the holidays and catered weddings.

The natives became civilized, learning the nuances of ski butlership and caretak-ing. Nonstop jet service was introduced, subsidized by locals who, having tasted the ambrosia of civilization, could not get enough.

So every year the pilgrims f ly into Jackson for a long weekend to remember those early days and to offer thanks for sur-viving, to count blessings along with bank accounts. This Thanksgiving, as we stuff ourselves with turkey and football, let us give thanks and remember the struggles of the first pilgrims. PJH

REDNECK PERSPECTIVESATIRE

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