Archive for August, 2007

>The weekend sightings began Friday night, when camper Dan Root was resting in a sleeping bag outside his tent at the KOA campground six miles west of West Yellowstone.

Root awoke with a yell when a curious bear bit him lightly on his leg. The yell frightened the bear away, but not before it had bitten into an empty cooler at a nearby campsite.

“The bear had bit the upper part of my leg and bit me good,” Root said. “It’s pretty bruised up right now.”

Root called 911 but refused medical treatment.

The owner of the chomped cooler, Benjamin Allen, a U.S. Air Force captain stationed in Rapid City, S.D., said he heard an animal roaring in the distance Friday night – a sound KOA staff attributed to nearby cattle. Allen said he heard the cattle, too.

On Saturday night, Allen moved his family into a cabin and bolted the door. He said that at 1:40 a.m. Sunday, a bear came up to the cabin and fiddled with the latch.
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>WILX-TV – Lansing,MI,USA
The scene Friday at the Cottonwood Campground in Lansing was mass chaos, when a tree crushed a camper with a family inside. The scene the day after the storm isn’t much better; the tree has been cut in half, the trailer has somehow been removed, but there’s still devastation and destruction as far as the eye can see.

“I don’t think I want to go through this again,” says Jerry Cole, who weathered the storm with his wife in their RV at the campground. They had just arrived there earlier Friday, a quick stop-over before heading home to Florida. An eight-foot tree limb sliced through his roof during the storm.

“Like a dagger, standing straight up.”
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>Two people are dead after a hot-air balloon burst into flames during takeoff from its Surrey launch pad Friday evening — then plunged into a nearby trailer park.

According to John Kageorge, spokesman for Fantasy Balloon Charters, the pilot heard a pop while filling the balloon and asked all the passengers to get out. Soon afterwards, flames appeared, he said.

Passenger Diana Rutledge, 56, said the trouble began within 30 seconds of the 12 passengers hopping aboard. She said as they left, the balloon rocketed into the air and the flames grew.

She later watched the flaming balloon drift over Hazelmere RV Park and Campground, the two passengers still inside.

“A piece of debris fell and a motorhome exploded and then another motorhome exploded,” Rutledge said.
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