Davis vs Sealth, more crossover info

Pirates to play Chief Sealth

Davis has replaced Hermiston, Ore., with Chief Sealth of Seattle for its non-league opponent this Friday night. Kickoff is set for 6 p.m. at Zaepfel Stadium.
Hermiston (2-6) pulled out because of a restructured Oregon playoff format that advances the Bulldogs, despite a winless league record, into a playoff game Friday against Jefferson of Portland.
Chief Sealth, a member of the Metro League, is 1-7 with its lone win coming against Ingraham, 12-6, in Week 2.

4A, 3A crossovers

With the CBBN 4A No. 4 seed secured, Davis (5-3) will play at Mead on Nov. 4 in a 6 p.m. season finale. Mead (4-4), the Greater Spokane 4A No. 4 seed, finishes league play Thursday against University.
The winner of Friday’s Eisenhower-Walla Walla game will host Rogers (0-8) in Week 10. The loser of that game at Walla Walla will not have a Week 10 game.
In 3A crossovers, West Valley and Sunnyside will be put into a pool of six teams with pairings to be decided based on travel and previous meetings. Whoever their opponents are, West Valley and Sunnyside will both host Week 10 games on either Nov. 4 or 5.

Internet hoax brings another to mind

YAKIMA, Wash. — The results page of the same Google Images search that helped the Internet-savvy son of a North Dakota cougar hunter debunk the cougar-in-the-background photo I wrote about in today’s column brought to mind another rumor mill driven by e-mails and hunting forums.

And the photo behind that Internet-driven insanity is right on that same Google Images page of mountain lion photos.

The cougar shot taken by retired wildlife biologist Chris Wemmer two years ago near his California home and published on his Camera Trap Codger blog shows up on page nine of that Google Images gallery of mountain lion photos. You can’t miss it, with the eyes glowing in the camera’s flash; and it’s easily recognizable in the Photo-shopped photo that showed up on a slew of hunting-related websites, including this one.

Now look further up the gallery at page three. See the guy holding what looks to be a pretty enormous cougar in what seems to be a garage? Well, several years back that photo the subject of a similar Internet hoax, being sent around the country in e-mails and posted on online hunting forums, each time referenced with a bogus caption of where the cougar had been shot and how large it was.

The cat was described on some of them as being upwards of 300 pounds (it weighed roughly 200, still enormous by cougar standards) and had been killed in Indiana, southeast of Wichita, Kans., just north of Harrisburg, Penn., in Texas, “about 10 miles from my ranch,” in Missouri, and in so many places in Iowa that the state wildlife department had to hold dozens of meetings around the state to assure residents that Iowa wasn’t being overrun by massive cougars. The hunter holding the big cat in the photo was some guy from the maintenance shop, somebody’s cousin, the friend of somebody’s brother, or somebody that particular forum-poster used to hunt with.

In reality, it was shot by a professional hunter in North Bend. His name wouldn’t be hard to look up, but I’m not going to mention it again here, because when I talked to him for the last story, his frustration over the whole thing was almost palpable. “I’m telling you, if I ever shot a bigfoot, I’d just take his skull home and never tell anybody,” he told me. “That’s how annoying this whole thing has been.”

Chris Wemmer, the California guy whose cougar picture was Photo-shopped by persons unknown to generate this latest Internet craze, hasn’t been quite so bothered. This is a guy with some serious street cred as a wildlife biologist, having once been in charge of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (back in the days when it was known as the National Zoo’s Conservation and Research Center). Wemmer just thinks the whole hoax-cougar thing is funny. And he didn’t mind that it brought some attention to his blog site, even if the visitors were primarily hunters disappointed that this ultra-cool photo of the elk hunter unaware of the cougar behind him was, in fact, somebody’s idea of a joke.

“This is like bait,” he said of whoever came up with the idea to doctor the hunting photo with a cougar. “It’s like using Velveeta cheese for catfish. You just have to wait for the big sucker to come along.”

Yeah, I know, I used that quote in the column already. I just love the quote. And I swear to you it wasn’t Photo-shopped.

– Scott Sandsberry

Off-again, on-again: Wolves re-listed

YAKIMA, Wash. — The political (and, OK, scientific) football game that is this country’s wolf management has seen the ball change sides once again with Tuesday’s announcement that Northern Rockies gray wolves are back on the endangered species list.

The decision essentially reiterates that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will comply with a District Court ruling in Montana two and a half months ago. That Montana ruling pretty much said, in effect, the Service musn’t leave wolf management in the hands of the states because the states will hunt them back into endangered status — this barely more than a year after the Northern Rocky Mountain region’s gray wolf populations were considered so solid that they were removed from federally-protected status under the Endangered Species Act.

In the middle of this state and federal back-and-forth over how many wolves constitute a stable population base is Idaho, where a philosophical line in the sand has been drawn between livestock owners and hunters on one side and environmentalists on the other. Idaho Gov. “Butch” Otter has been quite forthcoming with his disdain for the feds’ decision-making and two years ago said he’d like to see hunters kill all but 100 of his state’s wolves.

Barely two months after the August 5 ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Donald Molloy put an end to state-authorized wolf hunts, Otter publicly washed his state’s hands of anything to do with wolves, declaring that the Idaho Dept. of Fish and Game would no longer act as the USFWS’ agent in wolf management in that state. Translation: You feds want wolves in Idaho? Here, you take the calls every time a wolf pack makes a meal out of one of our ranchers’ cows or sheep.

That was Oct. 18. Three days later, the USFWS announced it would resume control of wolf management in Idaho. And now, five days after that announcement, the Service has put gray wolves back on the Endangered Species List.

Right now, neither side seems to be able to decide between punting — Fine, here, it’s YOUR problem now — and going for it on fourth down.

And I think we’re still in the first quarter of this thing.

– Scott Sandsberry

10/26 What’s Happening

Wildlife areas look at ESA ‘incidental takes’

The third of four public scoping meetings on a habitat conservation plan (HCP) regarding Endangered Species Act compliance coverage on Washington state wildlife areas will be held in Ellensburg tonight.

The 6:30 p.m. meeting at the Hal Holmes Center (209 N. Ruby St., Ellensburg) is intended to generate public input towards developing an environmental impact statement on the proposed Wildlife Areas HCP. Two such meetings were held last week and another is set for Wednesday in Spokane.

The state wildlife department’s proposed HCP includes a permit that would authorize a small “incidental take” on 32 ESA-protected species, as well as 20 others that are unlisted but might receive ESA protection during the term of the HCP.

For more information, go to www.fws.gov/wafwo/

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Ski Benders raising money for DNR again

Next Tuesday’s (Nov. 2) monthly meeting of the Yakima Ski Benders will take on a new focus — fundraising for the state — for the second time in two years.

A year ago, when the Department of Natural Resources couldn’t find $25,000 in its budget to pay for “oversight” — read: an enforcement/management presence to prevent vandalism — at its five Central Washington-area Sno-Parks, the Yakima Ski Benders came up with the money with a fundraising campaign of its own.

At next week’s 7 p.m. meeting at Yakima’s El Rincon Restaurant, they’ll start doing the same thing again. Last year being the first of the DNR’s two-year budgetary cycle, DNR officials said last winter the agency would face the same shortfall this year. So the Ski Benders and other Washington State Snowmobile Association groups have begun to pitch in.

Anyone with questions or wanting to help can contact Devin Dekker at 509-945-1741, or devin@greenacrefarms.com.

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Presentation focuses on bird nesting habits

Idie Ulsh, a renowned butterfly and birding expert, will be the featured speaker at Thursday’s Yakima Valley Audubon Society meeting, 7 p.m. at the Yakima Area Arboretum. The event is free and open to the public.

Ulsh’s presentation will focus on her findings from her recent three-year study of bird nests, during which she photographed the nests of more than 30 species, with an emphasis on songbirds. A past president of the Seattle Audubon, founder of the Washington Butterfly Association and a freelance nature photographer, Ulsh will discuss how, where and why birds build nests.

The photographs will be her own, as well as others from the University of Puget Sound’s Slater Museum, Cornell Lab of Ornithology and many regional photographers.

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Adrenaline junkies: These are for you

Two new adrenaline-pumping extreme ski/snowboard films will be hitting local screens in the next couple of weeks.

• A new high-definition documentary by Teton Gravity Research will be the season’s second feature in Central Washington University’s Adventure Film Series, with a 7:35 p.m. showing at the university’s student union theater. The film, “Light The Wick,” was filmed all over the world, including some footage from as close as Stevens Pass.

Tickets are $8 for CWU students and Recreation Center members, $12 for general admission, and can be purchased online at www.cwu.edu/~wildcattickets.

• “Wintervention,” Warren Miller’s latest winter-sports adventure film will hit Yakima on Nov. 12, with a 7:30 p.m. showing at the Capitol Theatre. Narrated by skiing icon Johnny Moseley and featuring names like Chris Davenport, Lindsey Vonn and White Pass’s own Andy Mahre, the Capitol stop is part of Miller’s 61st annual film tour.

Tickets are on sale at Sporthaus, TicketsWest and the Capitol box office, and attendees receive vouchers for a free lift ticket to White Pass and other freebies.

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BIRD ALERT

The north fork of the Ahtanum was the place to be if you were looking for grouse this week. A male spruce grouse was spotted about half a mile up the hunters trail from Gray Rock trail head and five sooty grouse were noted at Clover Flats. About eighty gray-crowned rosy finches were feeding below Darland Mountain. The gray-crowned rosy-finch is a medium-sized finch that nests in crevices in cliffs and talus among glaciers and snowfields above timberline in the Cascade Range.

Northern shrikes are starting to be reported from around the county with one observed perched nicely on a wire on North Wenas Road, another on the west end of Cottonwood Canyon Road, and a third one  on the West Slavin Road. The northern shrike is a predatory songbird that feeds on small birds, mammals, and insects, sometimes impaling them on spines, such as on the Russian olive tree or barbed wire fences.

An immature peregrine falcon was sitting in a tree on the east side of the Yakima River opposite Buchanan Lake and there were three bufflehead also on the lake. Western scrub jays are routinely being seen at the intersection of Hillcrest and Mountainview Roads in Terrace Heights.

A Yakima hunter out duck hunting north of Moses Lake harvested a mallard duck with a band on its leg and when he reported the number from the band he found out it was from a duck banded here in Yakima County off of Lateral A road just this year.

Please call your bird sightings into the Yakima Valley Audubon phone line at 509-248-1963

— Kerry L. Turley

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AROUND AND ABOUT

LAKE WENATCHEE ROOT ROT: The Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission will hold a public meeting at

7 p.m. Wednesday at Leavenworth City Hall to discuss the agency’s plan to remove trees infected with root rot from Lake Wenatchee State Park. The park was closed briefly in late August after two seemingly healthy trees fell in the park’s south campground, later determined to be the result of root rot.

ICICLE CLOSURE: Icicle Road out of Leavenworth is closed this week through Thursday one mile past the Johnny Creek Campground (just past the intersection with Road 7605) because of heavy road equipment and blasting in the area.

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ON THE CALENDAR

TODAY: The Cascadians’ “Tuesdays” will hike up Iron Peak, a 7-mile trek with not quite 2,600 feet of elevation gain. The group meets at 8 a.m. at the 40th Avenue Bi-Mart parking lot and heads from there to the trailhead. Bring lunch, plenty of water and lots of energy.

THURSDAY: The Cascadians’ Pokies will do their traditional Halloween hike through Umtanum Canyon off the Yakima River Canyon. For meeting time and place, Grace Anderson at 966-3934.

SATURDAY: The Cascadians will host an easy hike intended for newcomers, prospective members or new hikers who wants to try out the Cascadians but are afraid of getting in over their heads. The hike will be on part of the historic Coal Mines Trail between Roslyn and Ronald, following follows the abandoned Burlington Northern Railroad bed from the late 1800s.

Following the hike the group will visit the Coal Mine Museum in Roslyn and, on the way home, stop at the Cle Elum Bakery and Vinmans Bakery in Ellensburg. Bring sturdy shoes, water, rain gear (just in case) and lunch; the return home will be about 4 p.m. For meeting time and place, call Peg at 509-966-6194.

SATURDAY: The Cascadians will lead a hike to American Lake, a 14-mile hike with 300 feet of elevation loss on the way out and the same 300 feet to gain on the way back. For meeting time and place, call Maurine Peck at 509-453-4244.

Hunting … or hunted?

Outdoorsmen forced to shoot young cougar that crossed their path one too many times

YAKIMA, Wash. — Dan Parrott had only seen one cougar in 28 years of hunting, and wasn’t the first to see the one he ended up shooting last Thursday. His hunting partner saw the cat first.

And then the two of them spent the next half-hour wondering if, perhaps, the young cougar was hunting them.

Parrott, a Bremerton resident, and Robert Hedrick of Naches were hiking back to their truck after a long day of deer hunting near Fife’s Ridge, north of State Route 410, when Hedrick began to get an eerie feeling.

“It felt like somebody was watching us. You know that feeling? I kept looking around,” Hedrick recalled.

On one of those glances back, he saw a cougar watching them. Hedrick shouted at it and threw some rocks in the cat’s direction, and it scurried away down the hill.

“I thought, OK, he’s gone,” Parrott said. “We started walking again and I heard a stick break, and we turned around, and it was closer — maybe 40 yards away, behind us and off the trail. We threw another rock, that chased it off, and we continued down the hill.”

Several minutes later, they saw the cat again off to one side, still keeping pace with them.

Parrott thought the cat looked hungry and probably confused, just a young animal that hadn’t been on its own very long.

“For some reason, I didn’t put my rifle up to it or anything,” said Parrott, who routinely buys a cougar tag but had never used it. “Bob says, ‘You gonna shoot him?’ And I said, ‘Naah, I’m not to that stage where I’m gonna shoot him yet.’”

So they threw more rocks, chased it off again and agreed to keep their eyes out for its return.

Sure enough, the next time they saw the cougar, it was below them and coming up a ravine in their direction.

“We had chased it off three times, and the fourth time I was like, ‘Put some lead in that damn thing,’” Hedrick said. “When it started getting in front of us, I thought something’s goofy with this cat. I figured we hadn’t been seeing any deer over there, and maybe he’s just kind of on the hungry and seeing what we’re going to do. Or else he’s just looking for some company.

“Either way, I don’t want him next to me no more.”

So Parrott took aim at the approaching cougar and shot it.

The two hunters described the incident to Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife enforcement officer Alan Baird at a game-check station at Crow Creek, adding to what had already been for Baird “kind of an unusual year.”

For one thing, Baird has already had to kill four cougars this year — one of them injured last winter when it ran in front of a snowplow, and the other three young cougars in trees in populated areas.

“In those situations, obviously lethal removal is kind of the last option,” Baird said. “But the drugs we use take a few minutes to take effect; it’s not instantaneous. And a cat with a needle stuck in its butt is going to be traveling. I tried darting a cat one time several years ago just south of Ellensburg, and as soon as that needle hit its butt, that cat was off and we never found it.

“And when you’re around houses and people and kids, you don’t want a scared cougar running around with a dart in it.”

But just as unusual for Baird was that on the same day he met Parrott and Hedrick, he met another hunter who killed a cougar not far from that same area.

“So in one day, two bag checks on cougars, that’s another rarity,” Baird said. “Most guys will get a tag for bear and a tag for cougar, so they can take one if they happen to come across one when they’re out hunting for deer or whatever.”

But here it is, deer season, and Baird has only checked the same number of hunters who have tagged a cougar as those who have taken a deer.

“Hey, is it really deer season if no deer or hunters show up?” Baird said wryly. “Guys have gotten the word that (deer) numbers are down, so they’re hunting in other areas. I’ve heard of a couple of nice bucks being taken in the Shushuskin (Canyon south of Ellensburg) and quite a few in the Blues, Dayton and that area. But all total I’ve checked maybe two out in the field this season.

“Guys are seeing deer around here — does, spikes, two-points, that kind of stuff — but we really need to have some rebound years to get our deer population back up to what it was. Guys are asking me, where are all our deer? How do I know, pal — it’s as big a mystery to me as anybody else.”

It wasn’t too mysterious for Parrott and Hedrick, each of whom took a hefty buck before the weekend was out. But to Parrott, the mysterious feeling of being tracked by a cougar — if indeed that’s what the young cat was doing — felt a little bit like something had come full circle.

“I’ve been coming out in the woods since I was 7 years old, and the older I’ve gotten, I (hunt) for food. I don’t do it for the big trophy. I’d be just as happy with a spike as a 5-point,” said Parrott, who gave the cougar to Hedrick to tan for the pelt.

“If for any reason a bear or cougar got me in the woods and I was to die, I’d figure it’s just me paying them back for all the years I’ve spent out there living off the land.

“Life is too short to be afraid and worry about it.”

Long odds don’t limit thrill of elk hunting

YAKIMA, Wash. — Nothing offers more fascination or appeal to big game hunters in Washington than an elk. Because the animals are so big, yet so hard to find, they are a top prize to many hunters.

This weekend, literally thousands of hunters from every corner of the state will converge on the hills west of Yakima in hopes of putting their tag on an elk. A few will have branch-antler permits. Others will have cow tags. But the majority will be scouring the hills in search of a spike elk, the 11?2-year-old bulls that only carry two spiked antlers on their heads.

Most of the hunters hitting the hills over the next couple of weeks will be unsuccessful — if, that is, they equate success with bagging an elk. According to numbers put out by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, last year only about 6 percent of the elk hunters hunting in our area were successful. Most hunters know the odds are slim, yet still they come.

The large brown and buff ungulates are easy to spot standing in the road, or milling around at the Oak Creek feeding station, but put them out into the hundreds of square miles of wooded hillsides along the eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains and the elk become the proverbial needle in a haystack.

Hunters headed to our part of the state this year should find a few more animals, including spike bulls, when the general season opens.

According to local WDFW biologists, the Yakima elk herd is still hovering around 9,500 animals, but the calf recruitment was up slightly this year to 38 calves for every 100 cows. That means there should be a few more spikes available to hunters.

According to the counts, which were done last March, numbers in some game management units (GMUs) in Central Washington were up, while others were down.

“Some of the areas are up a little,” says Jeff Bernatowicz, WDFW region 3 big game biologist. “And others, such as the Oak Creek area, are down.”

Which doesn’t make much sense, because Oak Creek is where the majority of the elk are fed throughout the winter months. But that’s what the numbers show.

All the units in the region hold elk, of course, and hunters who work hard at getting away from the roads and the crowds will have a better chance at notching their tags. But no matter how hard you hunt, it’s a tough proposition.

The Yakima elk herd is spread out over a fairly large area, bordered by the crest of the Cascade Mountains to the west, Interstate 90 to the north, the Yakama Nation Reservation to the south and I-82 to the east. This huge area includes high desert shrub steppe at the lower levels, all the way up to the deepest darkest timber at elevations of 7,000 feet or more. Elk can be found in just about all of it.

Looking at the success numbers for spike hunters last year, the best GMUs in the Yakima region were Cowiche, Manastash, Umtanum, Little Naches and Bethel, but all produced some success. Last year the weather was mild and the elk weren’t migrating much. This year it could be totally different. The snow in the higher elevations this past weekend should help. A decent snowstorm or two in the higher elevations usually will get at least some elk moving down to lower elevations.

If it stays nasty, snowy and cold, the lower Yakima units such as the Nile (352), Bethel (360), Cowiche (368), Manastash (340) and Umtanum (342) should be worth hunting. Elk can move 20 miles or more literally overnight if they get the gumption.

It’s still not the good old days when it comes to elk hunting in Central Washington. The biologists are scratching their heads as to the reasons why the cow-calf ratio numbers aren’t better, especially considering the last couple of relatively mild winters.

Even with the numbers being not where the biologists want them, there are still several thousand elk in the hills, woods, and mountains west of Yakima. When the general firearm season opens on Saturday, it’s a sure bet there will be plenty of orange-clad hunters out there after them.

And when the season comes to a close on Nov. 7, a few lucky hunters will have some excellent-eating elk venison for the freezer.

• Rob Phillips is a freelance outdoor writer and partner in the advertising firm of Smith, Phillips & DiPietro. He can be reached at rwphillips@spdadvertising.com.

Doctored image makes rounds on Internet, only to be debunked

YAKIMA, Wash. — It sounded too good to be true. So, of course, it was.

A state wildlife enforcement officer I know told me yesterday about a photograph a friend had e-mailed him showing an elk hunter posing in front of the 6-by-6 bull he had apparently just taken … with a

cougar, unbeknownst to the hunter, standing in the darkness just a few feet behind him.

The story in the e-mail was that the guy had used his camera timer to take the photo and hadn’t looked at the image until he got home — when, so the story went, he saw the cougar for the first time.

I went online, typed in a few key words and found the photo — on a bunch of sites, and with a bunch of different stories. It was allegedly taken by a Colorado hunter in New Mexico, by some guy in Texas, and a whole bunch of times by somebody in North Dakota.

In one of them, the guy in the photo was named “Sven Ghoulie,” which sounded so ridiculous I looked it up. What I found was your basic dead giveaway to the gag: Turns out “Svengoolie” was the handle of a thoroughly campy host of a Chicago-based horror TV show who wore a wig, face makeup and a top hat.

Well, as bogus as it was, this cougar-lurking-behind-the-hunter photograph went all over the world, on the websites and blogs of numerous hunting magazines and newspapers. Naturally, it also prompted e-mails from hunters to state game departments wanting to know if the photo had, indeed, been taken in their state.

Three weeks ago, a North Dakota Game and Fish Department biologist named Stephanie Tucker — after having received eight or 10 of those e-mails herself — debunked the myth.

“I actually was not the one who originally found (the proof),” Tucker told me over the phone. “An avid mountain lion hunter in our state, his son actually found it online. We had all suspected it was Photoshopped, and this gentleman’s son went online to Google Images, and there it was.”

It was the same photograph of the cougar — pre-Photoshopping — that had been taken 21?2 years ago by a retired wildlife biologist in California, Chris Wemmer, and posted on Wemmer’s blog (cameratrapcodger.blogspot.com).

Tucker then sent an e-mail to curious hunters and others in her department, explaining the hoax and including a link to Wemmer’s blog.

And each recipient must have sent it to everyone he knew, because the hit-counter on Wemmer’s site started going crazy.

“Three weeks ago, I noticed all of a sudden I was getting a lot of hits — more than 1,000 a day,” said Wemmer, whose site typically gets about a quarter of that. “I wondered why it was making these jumps.”

While looking at the source of the hits, he found numerous online hunting forums and other sites — including one in The Netherlands, written entirely in Dutch — showing “this picture of the guy with the elk and this mountain lion in the background. I thought it looked a little bit fakey, but I didn’t recognize my own picture.”

Wemmer estimated that he has “about 50” photographs of cougars, all taken on a motion-sensor “photo-trap” devices he sets up in the rugged Sierra Nevada foothills of northern California, where he lives. The one that ended up in the hoax photo was taken barely 100 yards from his home.

Eventually, of course, Wemmer found a reference to the hoax and the link to his own site, went back into his own archives and found his original 2008 photo. His blog is still getting several hundred hits a day even after the hoax has been reported in several places.

One online forum actually posted the link to Wemmer’s original photo, and yet another poster argued later on the same thread that the hoax photo just had to be real, because “you just can’t Photoshop this well.”

Of course you can. Somebody did. And while Wemmer’s happy for the increased hits on his blog site, he’s disappointed it’s for all the wrong reasons.

“It just shows you that that kind of fakery captures the imagination of the people who read these hook-and-bullet forums,” said Wemmer, who has since posted the hoax photo on his own site. “There are some people who just want to believe it’s real, even when they see it’s a Photoshopped picture. They still don’t want to accept it — It could have happened, man — and it’s an interesting phenomenon how that stuff catches on.

“This is like bait. It’s like using Velveeta cheese for catfish: You just have to wait for the big sucker to come along,” he said.

• Outdoors editor Scott Sandsberry can be reached at 509-577-7689 or ssandsberry@yakimaherald.com

CWU’s Gaisie wins special teams honor

SPOKANE — Central Washington’s Dominique Gaisie, a junior, has been named the GNAC special teams co-player of the week after recording a season-high 108 yards on seven punt returns, and 80 yards on three kickoff returns during the Wildcats’ 26-18 victory over Humboldt State.

Gaisie shares the award with Lucas Gonsalves of Western Oregon.

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College Volleyball

Try named player of the week

Central Washington senior Kady Try was named the GNAC women’s volleyball player of the week after finishing with 19 kills and a .366 hitting percentage in the Wildcats’ 3-1 victory over Northwest Nazarene.

Try not only leads the Wildcats in kills per set (4.26) and points per set (4.81), but she also leads the conference and is ranked 10th nationally in the NCAA Division II in both categories.

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Prep Volleyball

Wildcats beat Wolves

WAPATO — The Toppenish Wildcats defeated the Wapato Wolves 3-1 in a CWAC league match on Monday by scores of 16-25, 25-17, 25-14, 25-21.

Leticia Campos led the Wolves with 10 kills and four blocks, Megan Lopez had nine kills, and Lizette Melendez added 15 digs and two aces.

Wapato highlights: Leticia Campos 10 kills, 4 blocks; Megan Lopez 9 kills; Joann Anderson 5 kills; Nakota Strom 4 kills, 8 digs; Lizette Melendez 15 digs, 2 aces; Maria Galindo 5 digs.

All things cross country

 

Central legend Osgood dies at 86

YAKIMA, Wash. — A Central Washington football legend is gone.

Charles R. “Bob” Osgood, a Little All-American for the Wildcats in 1948, died Tuesday in Olympia. He was 86.

A Hoquiam native who went to high school in Elma, Osgood was named to the 1948 Little All-American team and was awarded the Williamson Trophy, symbolic of the squad’s MVP, according to close friend and former teammate Duncan Bonjorni.

Afterward, Bonjorni said, Osgood donated the trophy to Central.

He excelled as a guard and middle linebacker for what was then known as Central Washington College of Education. Osgood played his freshman year in 1942, enlisted in the Marine Corps and served in World War II until 1946, when he returned to Ellensburg and played from that year through his senior season of 1948.

“When he came to Central in the fall of 1942,” Bonjorni recalled, “he thought he’d be a fullback. But they switched him to guard, and he made the all-conference team that year at that position, and also at linebacker.”

Osgood was inducted into Central Washington University’s athletic Hall of Fame in 1983. The 1942 and 1946 football teams have been similarly enshrined.

He later taught and coached at Raymond and Sammamish high schools.

“Ossie changed the lives of a lot of kids,” Bonjorni said. “He taught woodshop and also some metal shop, and a lot of schools had woodshops where the kids were given projects and the teachers did them a lot of the time.

“Ossie taught the kids how to use the equipment and tools, inspired them to use them, and gave them knowledge the average high school student didn’t have.”

Bonjorni also recalled Osgood as playing at 5-foot-8, 180 pounds, and remembered him as a fierce competitor but also a compassionate coach.

As a senior Osgood played with an injury that kept him from fully extending one of his knees, Bonjorni said, yet remained productive as a pulling guard and linebacker.

“As a coach, he always looked at the welfare of the kids,” Bonjorni said. “He had a quarterback who got a concussion and took him out of the game, and the kid had to sit out a week until the doctors cleared him to play. Even then, Ossie said, ‘No, let’s keep him out another week just to be safe.’

“He was a prince of a guy. I knew him for more than 64 years and we never had a cross word.”

Services for Osgood have been scheduled for Oct. 31 at 1 p.m. at Funeral Alternatives in Tumwater.

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