A good summary of the county’s plans for the North Fork Road, if they can get the money . . .
A $1.6 million federal grant proposal to improve the North Fork Road from Polebridge to the Canadian border will likely be submitted by April 4, Flathead National Forest officials said last week.
In a presentation to the county commissioners, forest staff officer Gary Danczyk said that if the grant is awarded, the project likely would not begin until 2018 or 2019.
Officials from the U.S. Border Patrol and Glacier National Park, which are also included in the application, also spoke in support of the grant proposal.
Unlike the U.S., Canada is getting serious about renovating its national parks . . .
WEST GLACIER – Less than 50 miles north of here, as the crow flies, officials at Waterton Lakes National Park announced this week they had chosen a location for a new $7.6 million visitor center inside the park. It will replace an old (1950s-era), tiny (600-square-feet) visitor center that park officials call “wholly inadequate to meet the needs and volumes of today’s visitors.”
It’s a big deal for Waterton, Glacier National Park’s next-door neighbor and, since 1932, half of the world’s first international peace park.
Perhaps even more noteworthy, however, is that the visitor center is just one of 17 major infrastructure upgrades or replacements being completed in Waterton over a five-year period.
With a mild end of the winter, some of Montana’s hibernating black bears and grizzly bears are beginning to stir.
Adult males usually emerge first from winter dens in mid-March, but some bears have been sighted in Yellowstone National Park. When bears emerge from their dens they are physically depleted and food is a priority.
Bears are often tempted to go where raccoons and domestic dogs are getting into garbage. If these animals are already causing problems nearby, consider it an early warning that food attractants are available and need to be removed.
Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks’ bear experts stress that conflict prevention steps can greatly reduce the chances of attracting black and grizzly bears.
FWP recommends bear resistant bins in communities and on ranches; electric fence systems to protect bee yards and sheep bedding grounds; random redistribution of livestock carcasses each spring; and educational programs in schools and communities.
FWP’s Be Bear Aware website at fwp.mt.gov is an easy way for homeowners and landowners to assess what they need to do now to prevent bear conflicts. Go there for tips and tools on obtaining and using bear spray, safe camping and hiking, access to bear resistant products and a guide to other items that attract bears to a property.
Strip mines are pretty nasty and this was going to be a very big one . . .
Arch Coal suspended its application for a major mine in southeastern Montana on Thursday, two months after the mining giant filed for bankruptcy protection and amid broader struggles for the coal industry that have reversed its once-bright prospects in the state.
The St. Louis-based company cited a weak coal market, a shortage of capital and an uncertain permitting outlook in announcing it was suspending the proposed Otter Creek mine.
The move marks a major blow to longstanding efforts to expand mining in the Powder River Basin along the Montana-Wyoming border, the nation’s largest coal-producing region. Arch had invested at least $159 million to acquire coal leases in the area.
The USFWS is about to get sued to make them keep a tight eye on the wolf population for another five years . . .
A coalition of wolf advocates has warned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that they plan to sue if the agency doesn’t extend its supervision of wolf populations in Montana and Idaho another five years.
“When the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks is offering five tags to every wolf hunter and Idaho Fish and Game is putting sharpshooters in the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness and funding aerial gunning in the Lolo Zone, we feel renewing another five years of federal monitoring is warranted,” said Matthew Koehler of Missoula-based Wild West Institute, one of five groups putting FWS on notice. “Given the situation on the ground and the ways state policy is changing, we think the prudent thing to do is keep monitoring wolf populations so they’re not hunted and trapped back to the brink of extinction.
The Center for Biological Diversity, Western Watersheds Project, Friends of the Clearwater and Cascadia Wildlands joined Wild West Institute in the notice. By law, groups objecting to a federal agency must give it 60 days advance warning to offer time to craft a solution before going to court.
Some mountain bikers want to be able to ride in wilderness areas . . .
No mechanical transport in the wilderness — not even a wheelbarrow.
A ban on wheels in the wilderness has long stood as a principle of the Wilderness Act, but one mountain bike advocacy group is gaining attention for its effort to change the hard and fast rule that impacts millions of acres of forest in Northwest Montana.
The Colorado-based Sustainable Trails Coalition is peddling the Human-Powered Wildlands Travel Management Act of 2016. The bill aims to undo the 1984 blanket ban on bicycles in the wilderness and give local land managers more flexibility in deciding whether treaded tires should be allowed on some wilderness trails.
Grizzly Sow with Two Cubs – – Wikipedia en:User Traveler100
Here’s a lengthy, rational discussion of the concerns many conservationists have about the looming removal of grizzly bears from the Endangered Species List.
Kudos to Bill Fordyce for finding this one . . .
The federal government’s imminent release of plans to let states manage Yellowstone-area grizzly bears — including by hunting — rekindles debate about whether gunning down grizzlies will undo years of conservation work.
Federal officials are on the cusp of releasing and seeking public comment on draft rules and regulations that would remove Endangered Species Act protection from more than 717 Yellowstone–area grizzly bears. As officials propose the dramatic change, conservationists wonder whether hunters’ bullets might upend 40 years of advances.
The Wilderness Speaker Series presents a lecture by Harvey Locke entitled From the Flathead to Yellowstone to the Yukon: Nature Needs Half — a Hopeful Agenda for the Future of Wild Nature and Humanity.
A specialist in transboundary, large-scale habitat conservation, Locke is founder of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative and former vice president of the WILD Foundation. In 1999, Time Magazine Canada named him one of Canada’s “Leaders of the 21st Century.” He was also honored with the Fred M. Packard Award for Outstanding Service to Protected Areas at the World Parks Congress in Sydney, Australia in 2014.
Thursday, March 3
7 p.m.
Flathead Valley Community College
Room 144 A/B, Arts & Technology Building
777 Grandview Dr., Kalispell
Seating will be limited to 80 audience members, so please arrive early.
The Wilderness Speaker Series is a free community lecture series sponsored by the Bob Marshall Wilderness Foundation and Montana Wilderness Association.
Logging Lake in Glacier National Park, USA – National Park Service
Logging Lake is stuffed with invasive lake trout . . .
Glacier National Park’s Logging Lake is brimming with non-native lake trout, biologists have found. In 2015, biologists from the U.S. Geological survey netted 2,158 lake trout from the remote North Fork water.
“That’s a lot of fish,” Vin D’Angelo, fisheries biologist with the USGS said.
Initial netting last spring brought worries that the entire lake was full of lake trout and little else. They only caught 10 suckers, but hundreds of lake trout. The lake trout are killed and their air bladders are punctured so they sink back to the bottom of the lake, which avoids any conflict with bears and other scavengers.
But fall netting caught 864 suckers, D’Angelo noted. The idea isn’t to catch suckers, which are a bait fish, he noted, but at least biologists know they’re in the lake in healthy numbers. In fact, Logging Lake has turned out to be a fairly diverse body of water compared to other North Fork lakes. In addition to suckers species, it has a healthy population of westslope cutthroat trout, northern pike minnows and mountain whitefish. The lake trout don’t eat many cutts, because lake trout generally live in water that’s 50 to 70 feet deep, while cutts are a surface feeding fish.
