Serving Southern Jefferson County in the Great State of Montana
Serving Southern Jefferson County in the Great State of Montana
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Imagine a million-acre wilderness: Mountain peaks. Rushing rivers. Bears and wolves. Now imagine a city the size of, say, Chicago. In my corner of Montana every summer, those two things merge. Montana is home to Glacier National Park, and 30 years ago, the park had about a million visitors a year. Nowadays, the park attracts more than 3 million people a year. It's like a major city teleported to the spine of the Rockies. Those visitors have needs-food, restrooms, parking lots, and trails. They deserve to be safe. They expect to have fun. That's...
Sometimes when I drive past the little house my wife and I bought when we first married, 30 years ago, it makes me sad. Not only because of nostalgia, but because of economics. We were young professionals and bought a cute one-bedroom crackerbox in a small Montana town for less than $50,000. Today on Zillow, that house lists for more than $300,000. There's no way salaries have kept up with that kind of inflation. Clearly, rising costs are hitting the working class hard. The escalating prices of...
Biologist Diane K. Boyd has had a front-row seat to 40 years of wolf recovery in the West, but her new memoir reveals that entanglements with humans in Montana were often tougher than dealing with the four-legged predators. There's a proud literary canon of women telling their stories of studying wildlife in remote places-Mardy Murie in Alaska, Jane Goodall in Tanzania, Dian Fossey in Rwanda. Now, Boyd's memoir, A Woman Among Wolves-My Journey Through Forty Years of Wolf Recovery, runs in that...
Is there any habit harder to break than harboring a grudge against an old adversary? Yet burying hatchets is exactly what it might take to conserve our wildlife, in the face of ever-increasing pressures on the places they need to survive. Consider grizzly bears. In 1973, grizzlies were on a steep decline and headed for the list of threatened species. Wolves were almost extirpated from the West. As that story was told, its villains were often the folks in the cowboy hats. It was an old tale that cattle and predators didn’t mix. E...
Imagine you were part owner of a nice piece of rural land, maybe with a trout stream running through it. But your neighbors won’t let you in. You don’t have to imagine, because access to far too much public land is legally blocked by private property owners, causing headaches throughout the West. If you look at a map of the region, big tracts of land run in a “checkerboard” pattern of mixed public and private land ownership. The West is literally diced up into alternating square-mile sections of federally managed land and private ground,...
Early in the Covid-19 epidemic, I visited the Bison Range on the Flathead Indian Reservation in northwestern Montana. But the bison didn't get the memo about social distancing. A trio of bull bison - each a ton on the hoof - fed on bunchgrass. I watched my son's eyes grow wider as one of the bulls approached our truck, as if it might want to rub off its winter coat on the fender. Not long ago, the Bison Range visitor center would have given my family a history of the place by focusing on...
I own a closet full of guns. But nowhere in that closet is ammunition. That is locked up elsewhere, reflecting a rule I was taught in childhood. Guns are powerful, even deadly, tools. If you own one, it’s on you to keep it safe. That is what the parents of a Michigan teenager failed to do, and their son murdered four of his fellow high school students. Not long ago, safety seemed gospel for gun owners and the gun industry alike. But something has changed. Responsibility has been discarded in a twisted form of gun idolatry. That change is d...
