Killdeer – Dustin Monke

Fulfilling a favor: Paralyzed Keene man takes last mountain lion of season in N.D. with help of his friends

From left to right, Beau Wisness, Dusty Hausauer, Chase Wisness, Rusty Christophersen, Chaston Lee and Hailey Schaper pose with the mountain lion that Chase Wisness, who is paralyzed from the waist down, killed on Monday, Dec. 14, 2015. It was the last mountain lion allowed to be hunted in western North Dakota this year. Special to the Forum

It was late July 2008 when Levi Wisness asked his friend, Rusty Christophersen, to do him a favor.

Levi wanted Christophersen to help his younger brother, Chase, hunt a mountain lion in the North Dakota Badlands.

“He goes, ‘Do you ever think we could get Chase in on one?’” Christophersen recalled on Wednesday. “I said yeah, I’ll do everything I could do to get him one.”

Levi Wisness died a week later in his sleep from complications related to a brain tumor he’d been battling for nearly a year.

At the time,17-year-old Chase’s future was uncertain.

He had been paralyzed from the waist down, the result of an auto accident in June 2007 — just months before his brother was diagnosed with the tumor.

“It was pretty cool he thought of me then and it was cool that Rusty was serious when he said we could do it,” Chase said on Saturday.

Over the past month, Christophersen did everything he could to fulfill the favor.

Last Monday, he and about a dozen friends capped off more than three weeks of tracking, scouting and hunting to help Chase, 24, of Keene, hunt and kill a 100-pound female mountain lion near Grassy Butte.

It was the last mountain lion allowed to be hunted this year in the state Game and Fish Department’s western North Dakota zone.

“It finally worked out,” Christophersen said.

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$80K worth of oil stolen in Dunn County

KILLDEER — A Dunn County roustabout service is estimating that $80,000 worth of crude oil was stolen from tanks it maintains at two well sites north of Dunn Center.
Greg Krueger, the owner of K&R Roustabout, said he reported the theft of about 760 barrels of oil to the Dunn County Sheriff’s Office on July 1.

“Somebody is going in there and taking oil,” Krueger said.

Cornerstone Natural Resources owns the wells, but Krueger said a K&R pumper was the first to raise a red flag after the amount of oil calculated in tanks at two different sites came up short and didn’t match truck tickets.

Under North Dakota law, the theft would be considered a Class B felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, a fine of $10,000, or both.

Krueger said throughout the past two weeks, he has been “disheartened” by the effort being put into the investigation by the Dunn County Sheriff’s Office. He said no one responded to his initial report until July 4.

“It bummed me out that the guys aren’t taking it serious,” Krueger said.

Dunn County Sheriff Clay Coker said his office is investigating the alleged theft, adding theft is the most probable answer to the missing oil because a seal to one tank was missing and a seal at another was broken. The sheriff’s office is unsure of the exact dates the thefts occurred, but they are believed to have occurred over a weekend, Coker said.

Krueger said he thinks the thefts happened at night, adding that the well sites where the tanks are located are in secluded, rough terrain areas near the Little Missouri State Park.

K&R has set up motion-activated cameras typically used for monitoring wildlife at well sites, Krueger said, to help prevent further losses.

“We just hope to hell they come back and we catch them on the game cam,” Krueger said. “I’d like to catch them. They’re going to go to jail for a long time.”

North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources spokeswoman Alison Ritter said her office’s production audit department is aware of missing oil and is doing their part to help the investigation.

“Like anything else, it’s a valuable property,” Ritter said. “But the big thing where we would come in is if we could look at other run tickets we receive, and if anything seems off where we could provide a lead, we could do that.”

Dunn County Airport hangar destroyed, planes overturned

One of the more shocking scenes in the aftermath of Monday evening’s storm in Dunn County was the damage to Weydahl Field, commonly known as the Dunn County Airport on the north side of Killdeer.

The airport, which has seen a surge in usage because of oil activity in the area and was in the process of being improved, suffered a huge setback Monday when winds that reached up to 85 mph, overturning airplanes and completely destroying the hangar, leaving only the terminal intact.

“I think it’s a real tragedy because the people that own those airplanes have helped tremendously in the effort to help rebuild the hangar and the whole airport in general,” said Mike Schollmeyer, the vice chairman of the Dunn County Airport Authority. “It’s a lot of hard work that just got blown away. I feel really bad for everybody that’s put so much time in up there.”

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Killdeer Area Ambulance Service working to keep up with oil’s impact

killdeer ambulance — Killdeer Area Ambulance Service Manager Ann Hafner, left, chats with squad leader Stephanie Bren on the steps of the service’s newly aquired ambulance on Thursday during an open house and groundbreaking for the service’s new ambulance station.

KILLDEER — Ann Hafner knew she wanted to become an ambulance volunteer after her sister-in-law, living in another state, died of an asthma attack when the ambulance responding to the call got lost en route.

“I didn’t want that to happen to anybody,” Hafner said.

Several years later, Hafner is living up to that goal as the manager of the Killdeer Area Ambulance Service.

However, she said it is becoming more difficult as the oil industry in the Bakken increasingly rears its booming head on the Killdeer landscape.

“It’s all coming this way,” Hafner said. “We have days when, ‘What’s going to happen next?’”

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