Fed Up With Capital, Ex-Reagan Aide Takes Powder

--Former Secretary of Education Terrel H. Bell has been going downhill since he left Washington--and that’s the way he likes it. Now that Bell, 65, is back in his Salt Lake City home, he has the time and opportunity to go skiing again. He told the Chronicle of Higher Education that he left Washington two years ago because “I had done about all I could do.” Also, he said he was taking a pounding in conservative publications. “And then I got back out here, to be just a little flippant about it, and I went on the ski runs that I’d skied on for 30 years, and I fell down. I couldn’t believe it. If I had stayed in Washington any longer, just think what a hopeless case I’d have been!” Bell, now a professor of educational administration at the University of Utah, has just finished writing a book called “The Thirteenth Man: A Reagan Cabinet Memoir” that will be published this fall.

--An overnight snowfall, traffic jams and winds of 25 m.p.h. made a difficult job even harder as cowboys herded 400 cantankerous bison across a high mountain valley in Colorado. The bison’s owner, Brian Ward, said it’s not too difficult to herd the 1,000-pound animals. “It’s easy, as long as you herd them where they want to go,” he said. The buffalo, part of a herd owned by the High Meadow Ranch, were being driven 35 miles across the San Luis Valley to summer pasture. Ward said he thought it was the longest drive in history for such a large herd. Although the huge valley has fewer than 10,000 residents, highways and roads along the drive were sometimes choked with onlookers. So Ward altered his route about halfway through the drive--going cross-country to get away from a traffic bottleneck. Because of an overnight snowfall of about two inches, the buffalo were hesitant to leave their winter pasture. The drovers got the animals to move by pulling a hay wagon ahead of them and sprinkling the road with hay.

--Britain’s Princess Margaret, sister of Queen Elizabeth II, will pay an official visit to China in May, Kensington Palace announced. The princess and her two children, Viscount Linley, 25, and Sarah Armstrong-Jones, 22, will visit China from May 18-27. Margaret then will visit Hong Kong alone May 27-29. Officials at the princess’ London residence said Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping suggested to the queen during her visit to China last October that her only sister should also make the trip.