Somebody wondered in a most-miffed fashion the other day, in a response to a previous post, “what important community issue was shelved to make room for this stupid, worthless blog entry.” Well, if you have to ask…I did have a breaking news story about white stallions I probably shoulda put in there instead, but, well, […]
Heidi Walters
Heidi Walters worked as a staff writer at the North Coast Journal from 2005 to 2015.
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Eureka’s Newest Stench
A block from home, the smell accosts you. You look around the dark street for the stray dog that’s rolled in dead skunk then topped off the treatment with a wallow in fresh excrement. There is no dog. You reach the stairs, ascend to the porch, and the putrid scent intensifies. Check your feet — […]
Posted inNews
Who’s Your City?
Last week, we took it upon ourselves to once and for all solve the forever-niggling question: Arcata or Eureka, which is the superior specimen? The two cities have been duking it out since the 1850s when they were mere get-rich-quick settlements looking to profit off the gold rush in the mountains. And historian Jerry Rohde […]
Posted inNews
Port o’ Gold
It’s been a month since more than a hundred people crammed into the Wharfinger Building to first hear a plan to turn Humboldt Bay into a major industrial, international shipping port connected to the railroad, with a big cruise-ship enterprise on the side — and to let one of the world’s top investment banking firms, […]
Posted inNews
Breathe. Two (2) Bigfoot updates
The Cupertino Courier (via the S.J. Mercury News ) has a story about a private investigator named David Paulides, who has a book coming out Aug. 1: “The Hoopa Project: Bigfoot Encounters in California.” Paulides is head of North American Bigfoot Search , an outfit devoted full-time to researching our friend. (Even if you absolutely […]
Posted inNews
Feds move to seize properties
The federal government took the first step last Thursday toward seizing the nearly 2,000 acres near Whitethorn that were the main target of last week’s “Operation Southern Sweep.” The raids brought 450 agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, the IRS, the U.S. Postal Service and others, who joined […]
Posted inNews
Sweep: Land could be seized
Federal agents: They came, they searched, they left — but not before filing documents at the county courthouse that may allow them to seize about 2,000 acres in Humboldt and Mendocino counties. Federal and local law enforcement confirmed that the land was the target of the raids conducted last week in a massive show of […]
Posted inNews
Tsk, tsk DMV
Assemblywoman Patty Berg called Monday to say that she’d prodded the Department of Motor of Vehicles into reinstating Salyer Volunteer Fire Department’s Dave Murphy as the guy who gives fire fighters their driving tests so they can drive the fire engines and water tender trucks. We wrote about this in the June 19 Journal. To […]
Posted inNews
“I’ll have the salmon, please.”
The juicy news today from kabazabagazillionaire-land is that a Chinese investor has made the winning bid — $2.1 million — in a charity auction for a lunch date with Warren Buffett, head honcho of Berkshire Hathaway Inc . which owns PacifiCorp which operates certain dams on the Klamath River that cause quite a few salmon to have a […]
Posted inNews
Tow Happy
One Friday morning in mid-May, Bill Hartin was sitting inside his house in central Eureka when he saw a woman get out of a little white car with a City of Eureka logo and walk over to the polished blue ’85 T-bird he and his wife, Arlene, own. “It was 9:58 in the morning,” says […]
Posted inNews
Can’t Swim
Monday, 6:30 a.m.: Swimming instructor Jan Carroll sits on a table at one end of the 25-yard, six-lane Eureka High School pool going over paperwork. She’s been here half an hour already, shepherding swimmers in her Eureka Adult School class as they do their laps. Light filters through the swampy bank of windows on one […]