Becky Kramer

NORTHPORT, Wash. – Rose Kalamarides was in her early 20s when she was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis.    Her older brother also got the debilitating disease. So did one of her childhood friends, her third-grade teacher and a former classmate at her elementary school. At the kitchen table of her mother’s home in Northport, Kalamarides noted a common thread in each diagnosis: People who got sick were from families who were downwind and downstream from a smelter in Trail, B.C., that funneled pollution through the narrow canyon of the Columbia River.

In the early 1990s, anglers in the Upper Columbia River reported seeing beads of liquid mercury floating in the water. The sightings were followed by advisories from the Washington Department of Health warning people to limit the fish they ate from the river.

More information will be released later today about a death on the Colville National Forest during Friday afternoon’s thunderstorms, which produced high-intensity winds, according to the Ferry County Sheriff’s Department.

When Shane Stancik grew up near the old Bunker Hill Mine and Smelter complex, it was a magnet for neighborhood kids. He and his friends poked around the rusting equipment and rode their bikes down the slag piles. “I was playing in the middle of a Superfund site,” said Stancik, a fifth-generation Silver Valley resident. “I didn’t know any better.”

Two prized trout fisheries in the Lake Pend Oreille watershed will get a $39.5 million boost from the federal government through an agreement with the Kalispel Tribe. The money will be spent over the next decade to improve stocks of native bull trout and westslope cutthroat trout, whose numbers plummeted after Albeni Falls Dam was built in the 1950s.

At Farragut State Park, Jokulhlaup Viewpoint offers visitors sweeping views of Lake Pend Oreille. Logging last winter “opened up one of the few vistas that the public has at the park,” said Randall Butt, the park’s manager. Without an obstructing curtain of trees, visitors can look out over a panorama that includes Pack Saddle Mountain on the lake’s eastern shoreline and Bernard Peak, a favorite haunt of mountain goats.

Grizzly bears have keen noses – far keener, in fact, than a bloodhound’s. The big bruins literally sniff their way through life, relying on their sense of smell to find distant mates and remote food sources. So, to count the number of grizzlies in the Cabinet-Yaak ecosystem, researchers turned to a distilled essence of fish guts and cow’s blood. The liquid is sprinkled on logs surrounded by barbed wire. When the bears crawl over the wire to investigate the scent, they unwittingly leave DNA behind in clumps of hair, which will be analyzed to identify individual bears.

Good basketball players are quick and agile, with fast reflexes and well-honed hand-eye coordination. But when robots play 3-on-3 basketball, there’s physics, geometry and computer programming involved.

BONNERS FERRY, Idaho – To get from her front door to the end of the driveway, Alicia Tatum needs a boat. Two weeks ago, she could park her car in the meadow surrounding the mobile home where she lives with her cousin. But steady rains and high flows in the Kootenai River have created a deep pool in the front yard.