With Halloween coming up, with the ever-looming prospect of kids with too much candy on their hands, I thought I’d share a brilliant idea that a co-worker told me about. When she was growing up, she and her brother were allowed to eat as much candy as they wanted Halloween night, but then, all the left-overs went to into giant pumpkin shaped bowls to be left for the Pumpkin Prince.

In the morning, the candy would be gone – taken by the Pumpkin Prince – and, magically, in its place would be some amazing, and much-desired present. The kids thought this was fantastic – new basketball shoes, toys, whatever – and felt like gloating when the other kids had only their paltry daily ration of Halloween candy in their lunches. And the advantages to the parents? After the one-night candy-fest, the kids were happily back to eating healthy food. And then, of course, there is the Pumpkin Prince, who makes out like a bandit with all the kids’ candy, which can then be generously re-distributed at events or throughout the year.

Happy Halloween!

JeffreyTrust.com is a great read – and not just because I know him. One of the articles that particularly caught my mind was Jeffrey’s musings about what a solution for managing bears would be. He talks about some of the things that they’ve tried – things that haven’t worked, like trying to condition bears to avoid human food, or putting up yet another bloody sign next to the ones that are already up, and things that have worked (to a degree), like improved food storage and ‘hazing’ bears with rubber bullets and loud noisemakers. It’s helping – but it’s hard to see and count the number of bears that remain wild that wouldn’t have otherwise, while dealing with the one bear that becomes dangerous, who has run out of other solutions, is a heart-breaker. Bringing us back to the questions: What else can we do? What is the solution?

Just as it’s in a bear’s nature to get the most calories for the least effort, it’s in a person’s nature to keep their food where it is convenient (not necessarily in a properly shut bear box) and to be lazy about walking the trash to the dumpster.

Idea 1. Make the lazy option OK. People may already be investigating different mechanisms that automatically lock and close without any additional effort from the people using them. Trouble is, bears seem to be shockingly good at figuring out how to open things, so this automated mechanism has to be complicated enough to foil clever bears, who have years to figure it out, but not so complicated as to confuse non-clever people who drove in late and just want to get to bed. Hm – now that I think of it, those could be overlapping sets. Tough problem.

Idea 2. Make the consequences more severe. The one solution/non-solution, that Jeffrey promises (I hope) to return to at some later date, is the option of issuing more/bigger citations for improper food storage. I hope he does, because his perspective would be interesting. I’m sure increasing the consequences for improper food storage isn’t a new idea for Jeffrey, or the others who have been working for years with Yosemite’s bears, but here are my thoughts anyway, since I’m thinking them.

It seems that the way to make that effective, is to do it in a way that makes it remarkable. Make the consequences for getting caught severe. Get a few headlines: “Yosemite NPS is cracking down on illegal food storage. $5000 fine for a forgotten sandwich…” Recruit travel writers like Tom Stienstra or Marek Warszawski to write articles. Issue a Press Release. Make the new policy big enough to make NEWS.

Not that you could EVER do this, but if we hazed people for leaving food out the same way we haze bears for getting close, people would take notice and start telling their friends. Nothing like a little hostile fire to encourage me to get that food into the locked bear box – pronto. Plus, it would be cathartic for rangers to open up with paintball guns on repeat offenders, wouldn’t it? (Joking! …kind of)

I don’t know. If there was an easy solution someone would have done it already, wouldn’t they? I’m sure there is no magic bullet. So, we creep up on a solution, one tracking collar, rubber bullet, sign, citation and heartbreaking bear story at a time. Thanks for the writing, Jeffrey. I hope we can figure it out.

[PS. Thanks to Loyd over at YosemiteBlog for pointing Jeffrey's new site out to me.]

The Village Grill is opening tomorrow with a great new menu, and today people from NPS and DNC were invited to a ‘tasting’, and a chance to take a look at what changes have been made to the menu. Chef Gover, who they have brought in this year to manage the Grill in addition to the Yosemite Lodge Mountain Room and the Food Court, presented a few of the changes that he put into place before we all stood in line for our food. The Grill is the closest source of calories to my desk (excluding the vending machine in the lobby), so I end up eating there fairly often during the summer months. I like absorbing a little sunshine while eating outside on the deck (even if it does frustrate me when people feed the wildlife). So, I’m glad that there seem to be some big new improvements in the menu.
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Tom has been bugging me for a while about how much protein I don’t eat. I keep telling him that I am not vegetarian, so probably my protein intake is taken care of, but then he points out that when we eat together, I always eat vegetarian because he is, and since I wrinkle my nose at protein supplements I sometimes get less than he does. So, I decided to try to find out exactly how much protein I’m supposed to get and start keeping score.
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Yesterday, it was spring – warm weather, wildflowers, sunshine. This morning, I woke up and there was a kid sledding down the street in front of my house. Just a reminder that weather can change quickly in the mountains, and just because the calendar says it is now spring, doesn’t mean diddly squat in terms of what to prepare for outside.

This morning Badger Pass was buried under 18 inches of new snow (at 7200 ft), we had around a foot here at our house in Yosemite West (~5300 ft), and someone in the Valley said that they even had accumulations of 5 inches or so. I wonder if it snowed down as far as the bright fields of poppies that everyone has been so crazy about lately, and also whether any intrepid soul managed to get a picture of the poppies with some snow on them. That would have been a unique picture to get.

There was, unfortunately, so much snow that Badger Pass didn’t open today – much to the chagrin of DP who is here from FL and was hoping to get a day of skiing in during his trip. I hope he’ll be able to squeeze some time in tomorrow to get a few runs. Tom and I are planning to have dinner with him this evening at the Mountain Room. I love the food at the Mountain Room, and I’m looking forward to that for sure!

For my part, it’s pretty hard for me to stomach most of the commercially available bars out there. Never mind that they are a convenient source of calories packaged nicely for consumption on the trail. They’re mostly … well… yucky. If I were going to design the perfect trail bar, it’d look, taste, and function pretty much like a Snickers Bar, but wouldn’t melt all over if it was hot out. Ta da.

Tom, on the other hand, is much more nutritionally minded. His ideal bar could taste like cardboard, as long as it was high protein and had a relatively low sugar content. (This capacity to consume yucky stuff is why Tom is able to eat those off-the-shelf bars, in my opinion.)

Enter the YouBar. At YouBar.com, you build your own custom bar, choosing the ingredients to put in. They have plenty of delicious-sounding options – organic nut butters, dates, nuts, dried fruit, granola, chocolate chips, honey – everything a snicker-loving person could want. They also have a nifty nutrition label on the right side as you design your bar so that you can make sure that you have the right combination of protein, sugar, and vitamins – and you can immediately see the effect of adding chocolate chips to your bar, for example. There are blanks in the form for special requests, and if you’re willing to deal with a ‘delicately textured’ bar, you can even get 14g protein with only 5 g of sugars.

Then, you can name your bar, conveniently labeled so that we wouldn’t confuse Theresa’s bars with Tom’s bars, and they ship it off to you – and they are guaranteed delicious. If you try some funky concoction that you absolutely can’t eat, they’ll take the left-overs back and send you some other option.

The big downside is that at $3/ bar, they’re far more expensive than your typical off-the-shelf bar, and I’m struggling with myself to justify the cost. It looks like so much fun! Has anyone tried this? What do you think?