Mustache Bash
Firefighters grew mustaches for the seventh annual Mustache Bash, held November 16, 2018 at Flying Saucer Draught Emporium in Cordova.
Stephen Zachar with the Memphis Fire Department and Jensen Pilant with the Bartlett Fire Department came up with the idea. They based it on “Movember, where guys grow mustaches for men’s health, prostate cancer awareness, that kind of stuff,” Zachar said.
They decided to make the event “something we can do in our community.” The Leukemia Lymphoma Society is this year’s beneficiary.
Normally, firefighters aren’t allowed to wear mustaches, but Director of Fire Services Gina Sweat
dropped the grooming policy for November. “We have to stay within a regulation the other 11 months,” said Zachar. “We can grow them as big and crazy as we can for that month.”
During November, firefighters also donate a dollar a day, which Sweat collects for Wings of Memphis. “That is really a good way to boost morale,” said Zachar. “To come out of the grooming policy and raise money for a charity.”
Sweat herself wore a fake mustache to this year’s event, but Zachar says, “She had that professionally glued on.”
Yellowstone Comes to Memphis
Story by Jesse Davis / Photographs by Michael Donahue
A light snow glistened on the grounds of the Memphis Country Club, and flurries danced on the chill breeze, prompting the guest speakers to joke that they had brought a little Wyoming weather to Memphis. The guest speakers in question — Heather White, president and CEO of Yellowstone Forever, and Todd Koel, Ph.D., leader of the Native Fish Conservation Program at Yellowstone National Park — had flown to Memphis in November, the first leg of a Tennessee tour that included stops in Nashville and Knoxville, to promote Yellowstone.B. Lee and Susan Mallory and Scott and Carolyn Heppel hosted White and Koel at the Memphis Country Club, where they spoke eloquently about the importance of America’s first national park and the importance of the preservation of our remaining wild spaces.
The event was part mixer, part fund-raiser, and part informative presentation. Fire crackled in the fireplace, voices mingled, and snow fell outside the windows as people admired a slideshow of photos from Yellowstone —misty mountains, snow-dusted buffalo, and grizzlies wading in the park’s waters. White spoke first, thanking her hosts and giving a nod to her rootsin the Volunteer State. “This is so fun for me, to have a Tennessee homecoming,” she said.White, who originally hails from East Tennessee, credited her youth spent hiking in the Great Smoky Mountains for informing her conservation ethos, which led her to the top position at Yellowstone Forever.
“Our mission is tocreate experiences for all people,” White said. “We’re trying to reach people where they are.” She spoke excitedly about the future of the park, listing a few of the projects in the works: the Old Faithful Inn, and upkeep and support for the “Grand Canyon of Yellowstone” — the vista captured by painter Thomas Moran in the painting of the same name, which was among a series of sketches and paintings he showed to Congress to help drum up support for the park.
“Yellowstone is the world’s first national park, andwe’re excited about 2022, which is the 150th anniversary for the park,”White said, before thanking her hosts again and turning the presentation over to Koel. Looking appropriately outdoorsy in a trim beard and a plaid shirt, Koel heads the park’s Native Fish Conservation Program at Yellowstone, and works primarily with cutthroat trout, the species of trout native toYellowstone’s waterways — which, in this instance, often means combating the rise of invasive species in the ecosystem. Non-native trout, such as lake trout, were introduced in 1889 or 1890 because much of the waters in Yellowstone were naturally barren of fish.
People saw that as an opportunity to introduce fish, primarily to provide food for visitors and park staff, but also for sport fishing. “Lake trout from the Great Lakes were brought in in 1890 to large lakes in the south part of the park,” Koel said. “Those same lake trout somehow made their way into Yellowstone Lake, which is where we have a program to suppress those non-native lake trout. They’re big predatory fish, kind of like wolves of the water, and they feed on our native cutthroat trout.” And that’s a danger to the entire park ecosystem, even to those large mammals — the snow-dusted bison and grizzlies from the slide show — so linked to the park in the public’s imagination.
“A lot of animals that people come to Yellowstone to see feed onfish,” Koel said. The cutthroat trout underpin an ecosystem in the park that includes grizzly bears, eagles, river otters, and ospreys, and cutthroat consumers were displaced because of the promulgation of lake trout. Koel outlined a “huge” netting effort — up to 40 miles of nets — put in place by the park staff to help curtail the spread of lake trout. The lake trout are coldwater fish who swim and spawn in deep waters, which makes them difficult prey for predators to keep in check. “Birds can’t get to ’em,” Koel explained. The cutthroat trout, however, prefer shallow waters, so the netting initiative relies on a system of depth segregation to catch only the invasive, coldwater lake trout Koel outlined, bullet-point-style, a list of other programs to help restore the balance of Yellowstone’s waterways.
There is an angler program to remove rainbow trout selectively, and in some areas of the park, Koel and his staff have worked toward the reintroduction of native Arctic grayling as eggs and young fish. Anglers have been catching them downstream, proof positive that Koel’s efforts are yielding results. Koel said the park staff have been “seeing responses from predators, including grizzly bears.” Good news for Yellowstone — and for visitors to the park. Someone asked about the reintroduction of grey wolves into the parkin the 1990s. Koel and White tag-teamed the question, explaining that the wolves are doing well and that most famous of Yellowstone reintroduction efforts was largely funded by Yellowstone Forever. Koel added that the wolves have brought the elk population back into “more of a balance,” and that the elk population affects the health of the river-and-stream ecosystems. It’s another vivid example, in a presentation full of the same, of the interconnectivity of our planet’s ecosystems.
