News from Neighbors
Handy bags mountain lion in hunt of a lifetime
GRANT TRIBUNE-SENTINEL, Jan. 8 — Eighteen inches of snow in Nebraska’s Pine Ridge stacked the odds even higher against Travis Handy bagging the trophy of a lifetime — a mountain lion.
Handy and Ben Polson, both of Grant, Nebraska, purchased a pair of the 400 licenses for this year’s mountain lion season available in the south unit of the Pine Ridge.
The season opened Thursday, Jan. 2, and Handy and Polson planned to stay in Chadron, Nebraska, up to a week in search of a cat.
Miraculously, the hunt ended just more than four hours after it began, Handy said.
Handy beat the odds. He said less than 1% of hunters will ever bag a mountain lion. And of that 1%, less than 1% of those will be successful without using dogs to track the mountain lion down, he noted. But Handy did it.
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Medevac pilot reports near miss
STERLING JOURNAL-ADVOCATE, Jan. 11 — The “worst case scenario” that local officials feared earlier this week may have come close to happening Tuesday. A Flight for Life helicopter pilot has reported that the helicopter he was flying on a routine mission to Fort Morgan on Tuesday was buzzed by an unmanned small aircraft.
Officials have expressed concern that the reported flights of drones over northeast Colorado over the past few weeks could result in tragedy if one of the drones collided with another aircraft. That concern grew this week when it was reported that drones allegedly had been sighted over Sterling Regional MedCenter, raising fears that such flights could endanger emergency medical helicopters flying in and out of the hospital’s airspace.
That concern became very real Tuesday night, apparently, when Kirk Peebles, who flies for Flight for Life out of St. Anthony’s Hospital in Lakewood, reportedly told a Denver television station that the drone passed under the helicopter, about 100 feet below him. He said it happened in just a matter of seconds and he was unable to tell what kind of drone it was.
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