Bozeman News

New West Book Review

The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt & The Fire That Saved America
by Timothy Egan
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 324 pages, $27

In August of 1910, the largest fire ever to sweep across forests in the United States claimed trees, buildings, and lives across a stretch of three million acres in the Rocky Mountains.  Timothy Egan writes in his follow-up to The Worst Hard Time, his National Book Award-winning exploration of the Dustbowl, that this blaze was known as “The Big Burn,” and it stretched “from central Idaho, east into Montana, west into Washington, north into British Columbia.” The smoke drifted as far away as Chicago.  “It was as if a volcanic blast had disgorged the airborne remains of the forested northern Rockies into disparate parts of the United States.” Besides destroying several towns in the region, this fire had a lasting effect on the course of the country’s conservation movement, initiated by Theodore Roosevelt and his close confidant Gifford Pinchot, first head of the United States Forest Service.

Egan shows that many of the lessons derived from the Great Fire of 1910 were still followed by foresters a century later.  People on both sides of the conservation movement tried to use it to achieve their political ends.  To demonstrate the larger set of circumstances in which this fire played out, after a vivid opening chapter set in the midst of the fire, Egan steps back to February of 1899, when the 34-year-old Gifford Pinchot visits the Governor of New York, Teddy Roosevelt, who invited him to engage in a wrestling match and a boxing bout.  This afternoon of roughhousing cemented their friendship. 

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OLYMPIC FEVER

Skiing and snowboarding aren’t exactly the TV spectacles that baseball and football are in this country, but every four years when the Winter Olympics roll around, they have their moment in the spotlight.

Resort operators hope the Olympics will inspire more people to get out on the slopes this winter, and more traveling skiers to avoid Vancouver’s crowds to come to ski areas south of the border.

“The Olympics coming up are going to bring so much attention to the sport of skiing and ski resorts,” says Billy Kidd, a former Olympian and director of skiing at Colorado’s Steamboat Mountain Resort, as he signs posters for fans wearing his trademark Stetson hat at the annual Denver Ski & Snowboard Expo.

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New Conflicts arise

Montanans living along the winding Teton River, well east of the Rocky Mountain Front were quick to notice their new neighbor this summer. As early as the beginning of July, ranchers and other landowners along the prairie began intermittently spotting a solitary grizzly bear journeying east away from the mountains.

Residents of the rural grasslands, including Mike Madel, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Park’s Region 4 Grizzly Bear Management Specialist based in Choteau, were even more surprised in mid-July when members of a local ranching family captured photographs of the lone bear on their land along the Teton north of Fort Benton, ambling through open prairie nearly 100 miles from the mountains, where Ursus arctos horribilis is expected these days.

For Madel and other bear managers in the state, the bear’s arrival so far beyond the range of today’s grizzlies and into historic habitat was a revelation – and one that would be the first of many throughout the summer and fall. Madel, a 23-year veteran of working with grizzlies along the Front, called 2009 an “unprecedented” year for bears wandering back on to the prairie, and says the bears’ presence there is only likely to increase in coming years.

That means an entire population of humans will now have to learn how to cohabitate with grizzlies. While the plains are historically grizzly country, for many living there now, the return of the grizzly is – to put it lightly – a surprise. 

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Flu News and Blues

As flu pandemics go, H1N1 sometimes seems hard to compute, given all the information flooding our way. Is it a panic? An impending storm? A party theme?

Yes, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports that some people are hosting “swine flu parties” where people who know someone with H1N1 purposely hang out and try to get infected. Their goal is to get a mild case and gain natural immunity, so they won’t catch a more dangerous version later on. Health officials, not surprisingly, say this doesn’t work and isn’t smart. “While the disease ... has been mild for many people, it has been severe and even fatal for others,” the federal health agency says. “There is no way to predict with certainty what the outcome will be for an individual or, equally important, for others to whom the intentionally infected person may spread the virus.”

Meanwhile, as news about the flu continues to spread at viral speed, a Montana health official offers a few facts to help put things in perspective. Elton Mosher is the influenza surveillance coordinator and an infectious disease expert with the Department of Public Health and Human Services. Here’s his view of the flu, plus statistics from the World Health Organization and CDC:

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Resort Bankruptcies

Moonlight Basin, the troubled Big Sky, Montana ski resort, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Wednesday, just a day before a foreclosure hearing that could have put the property in the hands of its primary lender, Lehman Bros. Moonlight took a loan of $100 million from Lehman Bros. in the fall of 2007 with the intention of quickly selling the resort, but the real estate meltdown scotched that plan, and the bankruptcy of Lehman Bros. itself in the fall of 2008 has left the six-year-old resort in limbo.

In the bankruptcy filing, Moonlight seeks permission to obtain $21 million in interim financing from Trilogy Capital, a Connecticut based hedge fund, which would enable Moonlight to remain open and have a ski season as planned. Lehman Bros. indicated in the foreclosure case that it also intended to keep the resort open, but the investment bank wanted to gain full control and appoint a receiver in the place of current management before it provided the funds needed to continue operations. The foreclosure proceeding, which is a state court action, is automatically put on hold by the bankruptcy filing.

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FOLLOWING MY SHOTS 2

I used to play basketball, but not too much since the day my coach took me aside, patted me on the head, and said, “Bill, you’re short, but you’re slow, and you really need to follow your shots.”

Well, that was a long time ago, and I admit to never doing anything about the shortness or the slowness, but I have learned to follow my shots. And sometimes, they’re worth following. When I write my columns, I frequently hope something happens, and guess what sometimes it does. Check out these updates to past columns.

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