Now that The Obamas have come and gone, Yellowstone National Park can get down to business managing their August crowds. While advance planning is advised during this peak travel month, in the past week or so we’ve heard reports of people getting rooms inside the park on the day of their arrival. If you’re not one of them, check out this video of an iconic Yellowstone experience. 

The annual Conference of the Society for Environmental Journalism in Roanoke, Va., last month was not a wellspring of happy news. In panel after panel, scientists reported on the negative impacts of human development on our fragile life support system (the planet, in other words). It has never been more important to live conscientiously, with an eye toward how your actions affect the web of life. Travel is no exception. Many of the steps the casual traveler can take are simple, and one of the easiest ones was outlined by Crawford Allan, the erudite director of TRAFFIC North America, a wildlife trade monitoring program that is part of the World Wildlife Fund. The trade in wildlife is huge business. About 96 million animals from the wild were imported legally into the United States in 2006 and 2007, Allan said. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service confiscated about $35 million worth of illegal animals and animal products between 2000 and 2004, but the service has only 114 inspectors at 38 ports in the United States, according to Salvatore Amato of the FWS (who also spoke at the conference). Where do tourists come in? On cruise ships. “We found that out of 650 tourist stores in the Dominican Republic, 90 percent were selling sea turtle products. Those things are being sold to you and me on a cruise ship vacation,” Allan said. The turtles weren’t even from the Caribbean. They were being captured and processed in Southeast Asia and then sold to Caribbean nations to be sold as knick-knacks. Allan said that after his group’s investigation, the Dominican government cracked down on the sale of the items (combs, jewelry, etc.) but that the trade continues. One sure way to stop the trade is to end the demand. If it looks like coral, turtle shell, fur, claw or tooth, don’t buy it.

As of last Friday, your humble Travel correspondent took leave from the Star Tribune to spend nine months at the University of Colorado-Boulder. I’m a fellow at the Center for Environmental Journalism, which is another way of saying after 22 years of working, I’m a student again.

Today is Freshman Move-in Day, so the streets are filled with moving trucks and concerned looking parents. I moved into a cabin at Chautauqua Park, on a hill overlooking the city. The cabin, and the whole Chautauqua complex, are National Historical Monuments, which means that for the first time in my life, I’m living in a tourist attraction. The Chautauqua was built in the 1890s as a place for mass education and entertainment; it was the internet of the day. Here, travelers came to hear great thinkers, musicians and to exercise in the clean mountain air. That’s exactly what they do today, too. (Last night at the Community Hall there was a discussion of “What exactly constitutes a sustainable diet?” And tonight, Bruce Hornsby is playing the Auditorium. ) Tourists walk across my yard, tourists stand and gape at me on my front porch, tourists talk on their cell phones much too loudly; Alice didn’t make it to the park because couldn’t find her way out of paper bag with a flashlight.

So there’s some poetic justice involved, since much of the last 22 years I’ve been a tourist in other people’s yards. I’ll continue to blog from the Rocky Mountain Bureau here on Gaillardia (not giardia) Lane, on the same eclectic mix of topics and, on my area of study here, which is mainly on how tourism helps and hurts the environment. As always, the floor is open for discussion.

I visited a refuge in Bolivia where a woman was rehabilitating monkeys who’d been mistreated as pets and circus animals in the late ’90s; one of the beautiful ironies of the place was that she lived in a cage (literally, a cage with a plywood roof) and the monkeys lived in the jungle around the clearing. She had to live in a cage in order to eat or get anything done; when she was outside, the 30 monkeys in the refuge monkeys were rifling her pockets, stealing her pens, and, peeing on her or worse. As I had my pen stolen, my pockets rifled and worse, the experience gave me a whole new perspective on the saying “more trouble than a barrel-full of monkeys.”

This is the second casting call for traveling animal stories, good, bad or ugly. Allison, thanks for the whale tale on the previous posting.

For years I’ve had a sign over my desk that says in English and Spanish: “Caution! These monkeys bite and cause serious injuries!” My dad, who doesn’t like unexpected visitors, actually found it in a catalog of some kind, and put one on his fence. He found it more effective than, “Warning, Guard Dogs.” So I was intrigued to receive the book “A Stingray Bit My Nipple,” a compilation of travel anecdotes from the readers of Budget Travel magazine. In India, monkeys at temples are known for their viciousness.

A good friend of mine from Minneapolis, Trisha Farrell, was bitten by one last fall near Rishikesh. She took a picture of the monkey, then sat down at a table to write post cards. The monkey came to the table and took her camera. When she tried to take it back, he bit her face. She needed stitches. This fellow, also at a temple in India, was more fortunate, according to the book’s cutline. The photos were taken seconds apart and the monkey didn’t pursue the hapless tourist. The book’s stories and photos aren’t limited to unpleasant animal episodes, but it has a lot of them. I’m opening the floor to any and all animal related travel anecdotes. Or anything else that comes to mind.