From the Sunday, October 21, 2007 online edition of the Missoulian . . .
You lose things as you travel north.
First to go is the cell phone connection, lost before you're barely out of town.
Then the power lines disappear, then the driveways.
No houses, no streetlights, no billboards.
When you lose the pavement, you're still just a dozen miles out of town, "but you have the feeling you've crossed a boundary," said Deb Kaufman.
[...]
That the Polebridge Mercantile, full of food and coffee and people, has not fallen derelict here so far from the grid, so close to the Canadian line, is testament to the vision of Kaufman and her husband, Dan, as well as to their remarkable baking skills.
That's the real surprise within the surprise - this bakery in this mercantile in this far-flung landscape.
But it's time now, Kaufman said, for another adventure, up yet another road into the unknown.
Read the entire article . . .
Michael Jamison did a nice article on John Frederick's pending retirement and the changing of the guard at the North Fork Hostel. It appeared in the Monday, October 15, 2007 online edition of the Missoulian . . .
His first impulse was to run, to turn tail and never look back at that ramshackle stack of logs the real estate agent kept calling a cabin.
“But I was looking for something a little more exciting than Ohio, and the more I thought about it, the more exciting it seemed,” John Frederick said.
Frederick wanted to live “somewhere on the rustic side,” and his future ex-wife wanted to run a hostel, like the European hostels in which she'd spent four years while traveling the continent.
And there it was, the decrepit cabin on 2 1/2 acres, backed by public land and a wild and scenic river - many, many miles from the nearest power line - where grizzly bears, despite their endangered status, outnumbered the human neighbors by a considerable margin.
Needless to say, he bought it.
Lock, stock and barrel for $39,000.
It was the '70s, after all, and this ponytailed back-to-the-lander was “just living. That's all. Just living.”
A full 30 years later, Frederick finally is selling his wildly popular North Fork Hostel, located on the outskirts of downtown Polebridge.
Read the entire article . . .
A few months ago, someone noticed that the northforkhostel.com web address actually pointed to the web site of a competitor, the Home Ranch Bottoms. Same for northernlightssaloon.com. The correct address for the hostel is, of course, nfhostel.com and the Northern Lights Saloon has no web site. This generated a certain amount of commentary of the eye-rolling, "give me a break" variety.
Northforkhostel.com now takes you to Montanans For Multiple Use, while northernlightssaloon.com points at a Marine Corp recruiting site.
Sigh . . .
Karen Craver got a very nice write-up in the Monday, October 15, 2007 online edition of the Missoulian -- another one of Michael Jamison's excellent articles . . .
She calls him “homeland security,” this enormous gray wolf who hangs his head out the car window as she drives bumpy back roads up near the Canadian line.
“I don't think there's any other postal delivery people with wolves in their rigs,” said Karen Craver, and you've got to reckon she's right about that.
Strange enough that she's got a big black Newfoundland packed in there drooling on the parcels and postcards, but a wolf?
“He's just a big baby,” Craver assures, burying her nose in the stiff fur of her wolf's neck. “He loves to ride along.”
Their ride is a once-white Mitsubishi Montero - license plate “wolfmom” - dusted dirty brown with road grime. For three years now, Craver has used it to run one of Montana's most remote mail routes, north of Columbia Falls to the Canadian border, alongside Glacier Park's western wilderness, to the 100 or so folk who call this 60 miles of river bottom home.
“Some places up here,” she said, “it's 10 miles between mailboxes.”
Read the entire article . . .
The Saturday, October 13, 2007 online edition of the New York Times carried an article on increased sales to private individuals of property on the margins of federal lands. A great deal of the story focuses on Montana and the Flathead Valley, in particular . . .
William P. Foley II pointed to the mountain. Owns it, mostly. A timber company began logging in view of his front yard a few years back. He thought they were cutting too much, so he bought the land.
Mr. Foley belongs to a new wave of investors and landowners across the West who are snapping up open spaces as private playgrounds on the borders of national parks and national forests.
Read the entire article . . .
From the Thursday, October 11, 2007 online edition of the Whitefish Pilot . . .
The Whitefish City Council learned Oct. 1 about the idea of a joint resolution between Whitefish and Fernie, British Columbia, urging Gov. Brian Schweitzer and B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell to meet and discuss "transboundary issues" -- that is, potential impacts to the Flathead River by coal-mining upstream in Canada.
Mayor Cris Coughlin told the council she received a copy of the resolution from Will Hammerquist, a program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association.
Read the entire article . . .
This article appeared in the Monday, October 8, 2007 online edition of the Missoulian. A public meeting to present the study information mentioned here will be held at 7 p.m. October 9 in rooms 144 A and B of the Arts and Technology Building at Flathead Valley Community College.
High in the mountain wilderness of Glacier National Park, far from the modern world's smokestacks and industries, pristine has officially been downgraded.
Chemicals and contaminants have tainted the park's most remote corners, with some backcountry fish so toxic they could prove dangerous to the wildlife that eats them.
Such are the stunning results of a three-year field study exploring how airborne pollutants poison national parks by filtering down out of the atmosphere.
On Tuesday in Kalispell, Dixon Landers will share his findings in a presentation titled “Glacier National Park: Airborne Contaminants, Sources and Risk to Park Ecosystems.”
Read the entire article . . .
Posted on Wednesday, October 3, 2007 to the MSNBC news site . . .
U.S. and Canadian officials plan to meet this month in Paris to discuss how an international park on their border could be protected from a proposed coal mine nearby.
The Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park was designated by the United Nations as a World Heritage Site in 1995. The mine would be north of Montana's Glacier National Park, which abuts Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta, where the province meets British Columbia. The two parks make up the international park.
"Proposed energy development north of Glacier has the potential to be a big problem," said U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., who said the U.S. Interior Department told him arrangements will be worked out this week for the meeting during the World Heritage Convention on Oct. 24-25.
Read the entire article . . .
From the Wednesday, October 3, 2007 online edition of the Flathead Beacon . . .
Everyone from high school students to community groups are getting involved in air quality study in the Flathead Valley, as testing for one University of Montana [study] ends and another begins.
Tony Ward, a UM research assistant professor, made a dual-purpose trip last week, introducing Whitefish High School chemistry students to an air quality sampling program and collecting months of samples from the North Fork Road Coalition for Health and Safety. “The studies deal with different sizes of particulate matter, but both types contribute to air pollution and can be dangerous to your health,” Ward said.
Read the entire article . . .
From the Wednesday, October 3, 2007 online edition of the Missoulian . . .
The nation's top-level land managers are looking to meet with their Canadian counterparts in France later this month to discuss controversial mining projects planned upstream of Glacier National Park.
“A face-to-face meeting is a great way to begin working through these concerns,” said Montana's top Republican, Rep. Denny Rehberg.
Rehberg has long been interested in the transboundary controversy surrounding Canadian plans to tap coal and coalbed methane reserves north of Glacier and just west of Waterton Lakes National Park.
Together, the two parks are joined across the international boundary as a World Heritage Site, a protective designation made in 1995 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Every year, member nations gather for a UNESCO convention on World Heritage Sites. This year's meeting - in Paris on Oct. 24 and 25 - seemed to Rehberg a fine time for U.S. and Canadian delegates to sit down and talk about shared mining threats.
Read the entire article . . .
From the Wednesday, October 3, 2007 online edition of the Flathead Beacon . . .
The media storm by Montana’s U.S. senators opposing mining proposals in the Canadian Flathead has been difficult to avoid lately, but the third member of the state’s federal delegation has been conspicuously silent on the issue. U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., attributes his low profile – not to a difference in opinion on the mining proposals by British Petroleum and Cline Mining Co. – but to a difference in tactics.
“I am absolutely opposed to any environmental degradation caused by anything on the other side of the border,” Rehberg said in an interview last week. “I tend to work a little more quietly.”
Read the entire article . . .
The folks at How to Boil a Frog (yes, you read that right) have posted an absolutely hilarious and pointed video about the proposed Cline Coal Mine in the Canadian Flathead Valley. It's well worth a click.