Mail Tribune (Medford, OR — Wayback)
· snapshot 2018-07-08
EAGLE POINT — Kevin Van Dyke owns three pairs of running shoes and a set of soccer cleats, and they are wearing down fast. The Eagle Point senior participates in both soccer and cross country, just like his older brother Tyler did. The younger Van Dyke’s life involves running 5-10 miles each weekday before scrambling to soccer practice. Some weekends he competes in cross country meets in the morning and in soccer matches later in the day. Every so often, he has to choose between th
Mail Tribune (Medford, OR — Wayback)
· snapshot 2018-07-08
Creativity and madness can often go hand-in-hand, and the new musical comedy “Divine Lunacy” explores this relationship while shining a spotlight on mental-health issues and mental-health resources in the valley. Theater team Peter Quince and David Gabriel drew on personal experience to create a show that makes people laugh but also provokes thoughts about the way society responds to mental illness. “We want people to come away from the show with more awareness about mental
Mail Tribune (Medford, OR — Wayback)
· snapshot 2018-07-08
More wheelchair-accessible sidewalk ramps will pop up in west Medford next year if the city awards a $623,300 contract for the project to the low bidder, Roxy Ann Rock of Medford. “We have several people with wheelchairs,” said Sara Davis, director of Living Opportunities Inc. “They can’t get anywhere if they don’t have wheelchair accessible sidewalks.” Living Opportunities serves about 200 residents with disabilities in the greater Medford area. Roxy An
Mail Tribune (Medford, OR — Wayback)
· snapshot 2018-07-08
Ashland police officers are now carrying Narcan (naloxone) kits that immediately bring opioid overdose victims back from the edge of death. Officers received the kits a month ago and were trained on how to administer Narcan to reverse the effects of heroin, oxycodone, morphine, opium and other opioids. Officers insert a small tube of Narcan in an atomizer cap and spray it in the nose of the victim. “Use (of opioids) is on the rise, and Ashland has a noticeable problem,” says police
Mail Tribune (Medford, OR — Wayback)
· snapshot 2018-07-08
Felony arrests Drugs —  Raymond LeRoy Laux Jr., 51, of the 100 block of W. Jackson Street. Medford police Thursday arrested Laux on charges of methamphetamine possession, first-degree burglary, a parole violation, third-degree theft, first-degree trespass and providing false information.  He was lodged in the Jackson County Jail on $48,000 bail. Drugs —   Evelynn Keziah Enriquez, of the 27300 block of Highway 62, Trail. Sheriff's deputies Friday arrest
Mail Tribune (Medford, OR — Wayback)
· snapshot 2018-07-08
LOWELL  — A Lowell charter school is no longer pursing a change to district policy that would have allowed teachers and administrators to carry guns in school. The Mountain View Academy School Board decided Tuesday to table the conversation and any potential action to change the ban on firearms, The Register-Guard reports. The charter school southwest of Eugene is housed inside the Lowell School District's Lundy Elementary School and therefore must follow Lowell district policies. Mo
Mail Tribune (Medford, OR — Wayback)
· snapshot 2018-06-29
Advocates for wild fish and clean water want the state's top environmental managers to apply new Oregon Department of Forestry rules that expand streamside riparian protection rules on Western Oregon's private and commercial forestlands to southwest Oregon. Forrest English, program director for Ashland-based Rogue Riverkeeper, said Gov. Kate Brown or the state Environmental Quality Commission should step in and enact wider no-cut buffers to shade fish-bearing streams and provide other benefits f
Mail Tribune (Medford, OR — Wayback)
· snapshot 2018-06-29
May was the 43rd month in the past 45 that the Medford airport broke a passenger record. The airport has eclipsed annual records the past four years, capped by the 901,578 travelers who passed through the gates in 2017. With activity running 14.3 percent ahead of last year, the million-passenger plateau isn’t that far off. All of that has airport Director Jerry Brienza talking terminal expansion. “We’re working on an airport master plan that isn’t scheduled for completion until 2020,” Brienza sa
Mail Tribune (Medford, OR — Wayback)
· snapshot 2018-06-29
ASHLAND — A wet and snowy winter coupled with a slow snowmelt has the big-three reservoirs of the Talent Irrigation District refilling at the slow and steady pace that water managers pine for. Hyatt and Howard Prairie lakes were down around all-time lows last October but both have risen over the half-full level for the first time since summer 2014, according to federal Bureau of Reclamation statistics. Heavy rains all winter also have triggered enough runoff that the lower-elevation
Mail Tribune (Medford, OR — Wayback)
· snapshot 2018-06-29
For kids and families interested in pitching in and keeping streams clean, Bear Creek Park offered something of an environmental double feature. Early lessons on the importance of stream stewardship and community participation abounded Saturday at the park in south Medford, as a morning Stewardship Day volunteer stream cleanup led into the educational Kids & Creeks Fair. Saturday was the first time the educational fair had been held in September, according to Kids & Creeks organizer Kristi Reyno
Mail Tribune (Medford, OR — Wayback)
· snapshot 2018-06-29
A shed full of supplies will be available to emergency responders after the Talent City Council approved spending $2,200 from its discretionary fund for the 2018-19 fiscal year. Talent has no emergency supplies in town for first responders, according to a request for funds made by the city’s Together for Talent Committee. Items could be used by Community Emergency Response Team members who live in Talent. “Talent is at the very end of the supply chain when (the) Cascadia (earthquake) happens. Ta
Mail Tribune (Medford, OR — Wayback)
· snapshot 2018-06-29
State wildlife officials are ramping up the monitoring of bats this spring after a deadly fungal strain surfaced last week in Washington. Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife biologists have more questions than answers on whether Oregon bats are at increasing risk from white-nose syndrome, commonly called WNS, which has killed 6 million bats in North America since it was discovered a decade ago. They have enlisted county public health officers, wildlife rehabilitators and the general public to
Mail Tribune (Medford, OR — Wayback)
· snapshot 2018-06-29
PHOENIX — For years, Jim Ferguson and other volunteers have used a special fish trap, water bucket and a simple aquarium fishnet to survey for wild steelhead captured in the Bear Creek Basin's urban tributaries. Ferguson would pull them out of the trap with the net and place them in the bucket to be identified, counted and released. This year, however, he's added a pair of scissors to expand that survey one little snip of a fin at a time. Ferguson and others are adding a new twist to
Mail Tribune (Medford, OR — Wayback)
· snapshot 2018-06-29
Conservation groups Monday petitioned the government to list the rare Siskiyou Mountains salamander under the federal Endangered Species Act, claiming federal land managers' apparent reneging on old "look before you log" provisions in potential future logging sales imperil the rare forest amphibian. However, the federal Bureau of Land Management maintains that its new resource plan guiding management of its Western Oregon lands still focuses on salamander protections at high-profile areas as it
Mail Tribune (Medford, OR — Wayback)
· snapshot 2018-06-29
A White City man who skipped his trial on felony pollution charges surfaced in court Wednesday to face allegations he dumped garbage in a creek while running an illegal White City auto-salvage yard he later abandoned, stiffing the landlord for the cleanup. Joshua Michael Smith, 43, appeared in Jackson County Circuit Court Wednesday to answer a bench warrant issued for him April 4 when he failed to show up for a court appearance two days before he was scheduled to go on trial for two felony and t
Mail Tribune (Medford, OR — Wayback)
· snapshot 2018-06-29
MERLIN — What used to be the tallest known Ponderosa pine on the planet has died, and now its namesake campground is set to join it. A beetle infestation has done in the 259-foot Ponderosa pine that was tallest of its ilk known for more than three decades before it was supplanted in 2011 by another tree in the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest by about 9 feet. It once was one of 61 "Living Witness Trees" tapped in 1987 as being around when the U.S. Constitution was ratified. Now i
Mail Tribune (Medford, OR — Wayback)
· snapshot 2018-06-29
Monte Chamberlain picks his way up a steep trail strewn with fallen branches, damp leaves and blackberry vines. The 88-year-old is relatively spry with the help of his rabbit-handled walking stick ? but like him, the path isn’t in quite the shape it used to be when he was a young boy growing up here, a few miles north of the dam that cleared this land of people. “I killed a lot of rattlesnakes up here,” Chamberlain says. He’s had a broad smile on his face since getting out of the truck a few hun
Mail Tribune (Medford, OR — Wayback)
· snapshot 2018-06-29
TRAIL — A 500-foot-long gravel berm kicked up by the 1964 flood and now cloaked with blackberries stands like a shrine to all things wrong for wild salmon in Elk Creek over the past five decades. The berm blocks access to Elk Creek's lower floodplain that served as an important winter refuge for young coho salmon needing to escape high winter flows in this major upper Rogue River tributary. Yet with plans for it to be shrouded by 100 feet of reservoir water behind a dam and stocked w
Mail Tribune (Medford, OR — Wayback)
· snapshot 2018-06-29
Oregon's Democratic U.S. senators have proposed a nearly doubling of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument as a way to better protect the unique biodiversity and habitats in the face of climate change. Sens. Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden have proposed expanding the 16-year-old monument by more than 66,500 acres inside a new, more than 100,000-acre footprint that stretches northwest past Dead Indian Memorial Road, west to Emigrant Lake, east into Klamath County and south into California near Iron G
Mail Tribune (Medford, OR — Wayback)
· snapshot 2018-06-29
CENTRAL POINT — Lois Smith remembers an innocent-sounding request made of her in the mid-1970s that created an outdoor staple of her life and the lives of Rogue Valley students. Smith, who taught pre-kindergarten in the Central Point School District at the time, grew up with the Table Rocks as her childhood playground. A grade-school teacher asked Smith whether she'd be willing to lead a hike there. "I said, 'Yes, I would,' and that was a mistake," Smith says with a laugh. "I was occ