montana

Winter is off to a dry start across the West, with wide swaths of the Rocky Mountains seeing lower-than-average snow totals for this time of year. But scientists say there’s still plenty of time to end the “snow drought” and close the gap.

Happy New Year! As we all hope 2024 will be a better year than 2023, we look back at similar hopes 100 years ago. The editor of The Madisonian newspaper (Virginia City) at the end of 1923 wrote: “The old year fades away and the God of time ushers in the infant of 1924. The years come, and they go, and are seen no more, but they leave a heritage that even time itself can not efface.”

Tales of Montana Christmases past show years of sadness and struggle, joy and celebration.

A Montana Supreme Court decision last week siding with the state in its push to levy more education mills than most counties believed was right now has local treasurers across the state taking a wait-and-see approach on what their next step will be.

“There are, I think, undeniably, new winds sweeping across America. They are indeed gusty and changeable, but they are new - and they will alter what happens in Montana ... (either for) better or worse, (depending) on Montanans and how they, or you, read those winds.” The quote is from one of my favorite historians, K. Ross Toole, a Montana rancher who accepted the Hammond Professorship at the University of Montana in 1965 – a post he held until his death in 1981.

A new national climate report warns that increased wildfires, extreme heatwaves and drought will have widespread impacts on the people, industries and ecosystems in Idaho and across the Northwest.

Flashback to 1934, when The Washington (D.C.) Star newspaper reported the American Automobile Association (AAA) had called on “city authorities throughout the country to outlaw raucous automobile horns in a campaign of noise disarmament.”

“The Halloween nuisance annually recurrent in Helena, if known to the people of biblical times doubtless would have been included among the plagues of Egypt!” The editor of the Helena Record Herald had had enough!

Montana has released the draft of its first updated gray wolf conservation and management plan in 20 years, along with a draft environmental impact statement, and is asking for public input on the plans and holding regional public meetings in December.

Missoula is one of the wickedest, most raucous, meanest towns in America! As I noted in my book, “The Sneakin’est Man That Ever Was/Headline Stories of Montana’s Early Days, Vol. 1,” one local resident shared that view of the Garden City with a newspaper reporter in 1883.