Climbing and Outdoor News from Here and Abroad - 7/14/16

Northwest:

--A climber was rescued off Mt. Stuart last week. To learn more, click here.

--In preparation for the 5Point Film Festival in Bellingham, AAI will co-host a mountain trivia night on August 2nd at Stone's Throw Brewery in Bellingham's Fairhaven district.

--Employees at REI in Seattle are currently working to change the working environment and the wages that the company provides. It appears that the benefits are good if you work full-time, but very few people are promoted to full-time positions. To read more, click here.

Desert Southwest:

--Most Republican politicians kept their distance when a group of armed militants, under the leadership of the infamous Bundy family, took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon earlier this year. But while they didn’t love the optics of the Oregon takeover, it appears that some Republicans do embrace radical opposition to the federal government’s power to protect land from corporate exploitation. The latest battle over public lands pits Republican congressmen against a coalition of Native American tribes over the status of Bears Ears, an area of southern Utah that encompasses 1.9 million acres of mountainous land that features thousands of sites of archeological interest. To read more of this article, click here. To read about the Access Fund's take on this and how it will affect climbers, click here.

--Dave Larson, an employee of the Joshua Tree National Park Association, was recently awarded a customer service award from the Department of Interior. Larson went to Washington, D.C., to attend the ceremony and receive hi award from Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell. He was one of eighter recipients of the award, according to a news release from the National Park Service. To read more, click here.

Notes from All Over:

--Ashima Shiraishi took a 45-foot ground fall at the Stone Summit climbing gym in Kennesaw, Georgia yesterday, July 7. Her father Hisatoshi Shiraishi was belaying her at the time of the accident. Ashima, 15, was taken to a hospital by ambulance and after several hours in the emergency room she was released last night, according to her agent Jonathan Retseck. To read more, click here.

--AAI Guide Angela Henderson was recently interviewed by KFSK community radio in Petersburg, Alaska. In the interview she talks about the challenges of guiding Denali. To read more, click here.

--The State of Iowa has agreed to pay a former University of Iowa student $75,000 after he fell 30 to 40 feet from the school’s climbing wall in 2012 and suffered serious injuries, including two crushed vertebrae in his spine. To read more, click here.

-- A hiker was bitten by a grizzly bear on the Savage River Alpine Trail on Friday, the same day Denali National Park staff reopened the Savage River area from earlier bear closures. The hiker, 28-year-old Fangyuan Zhou, was hiking the trail along with two friends when they encountered an adolescent grizzly bear about one-quarter mile from the trailhead. Zhou's group had seen the bear earlier and made efforts to avoid it, but when the bear charged them they played dead. To read more, click here.