Writing Samples

Here are some of my favorite writing samples. Click the headline to be taken to the full story.

A garbage feeding pit for bears? That used to be a popular national parks attraction

Don’t feed the bears.

National park rangers have for years warned tourists against feeding or getting too close to bears.

Food must be locked up in bear-safe storage. Bears have been euthanized after getting their paws on human food. And some people have even faced jail time after coming within feet of bears.

But in the early 1900s, it was a different story.

‘What am I looking at?’ 1,600 baseball cards glued to the wall uncovered in Idaho home

Melissa Brodt was dreading finding out what could possibly be behind shingles in her newly purchased Idaho home.

The wall had exterior roof shingles plastered on an interior wall. It made Brodt “a little suspect.”

“I was thinking, ‘oh boy,’” Brodt told McClatchy News in an interview. “What’s going on behind there?”

What she found was 1,600 baseball cards glued to the wall.

Idaho children with mental illness have to be sent out of state for treatment. Here’s why

After years of trying to find help in Idaho’s mental and behavioral health systems, Ellinger made the decision this summer for Matthew to receive residential psychiatric treatment in Little Rock, Arkansas — 1,803 miles from home. After applying for residential treatment through Medicaid, she said the treatment center in Little Rock was one of few in the nation that could help her son’s specific needs.

Some national parks are booming. What to know as 44 parks smash records in 2021

Some national parks across the country are overflowing with tourists — and the data shows it.

More than 297 million people visited national parks in 2021, the National Park Service announced Wednesday, Feb. 16. That’s 60 million more people than in 2020.

Their father’s plane was shot down in WWII. This weekend they finally buried him

Gretchen Wronka and Martin Hintz had spent more than 60 years thinking their father, an Army pilot, was buried in Italy after he died in a plane crash during World War II.

Then a group of Italian archaeologists told them they were going to look for more of their father’s remains.