Off in the shadowy halls of government offices, public lands have been stripped of key protections. When a bureaucrat somewhere in the system deems a proposal worthy, there's no worry-it will find a way to sail through the approval process. That's exactly what's taking place in the Helena National Forest in Montana. 

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Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

Well, I finally got around to taking down the Christmas lights from the house last Saturday. I laid them all out in the driveway, then plugged them in and checked every bulb on each string. Then I carefully coiled them all up, sealed them in a plastic bag, and tossed them into the garbage.

I’ve been burned enough times to know that, when I put the lights back on the house in two weeks, half of the strings won’t light up. I could never see the point in replacing nine flimsy bulbs in a $3.00 string of crappy lights, so I always get mad, yank down the dead string, and replace it with a new $3.00 string. This year I figure I’ll just save myself the anguish and replace it all before I start. Hey, I’m happy to help boost the economy. Of China. 

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Guest Commentary: George Wuerthner's "On the Range"

In the November 17th Science Section of The New York Times there was an article by Jim Robbins about the current pine beetle event occurring in the West.

There was a lot of good factual information in the piece about pine beetles and their basic ecology, and on the whole, Robbins did a good job of describing some of the concerns that people have about the beetle situation. Nevertheless, the tone and implied message conveyed an overly pessimistic and negative picture of beetles as well as wildfires. It was not so much that it had a lot of false statements as much as the way it was written. Taken together the various quotes, and background in the article leaves one with the perception that somehow beetles, as well as wildfires are “out of control” in the West's ecosystems. 

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Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

Nothing like a brand new used guitar to light a fire under a performing musician.

Friday afternoon I walked into my favorite local pawn shop, with $235 unfettered (read: birthday) dollars burning a hole in my wallet. I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking for as I scanned the dozens of guitars hanging from hooks on the wall. There were several Strat knockoffs, a couple of pointy Jackson and ESP metal guitars, and a mishmash of various sticker-covered six-stringers that were suited more for a high school shredder, not for a discerning practitioner of maximum honky tonk such as myself.

It’s the same thing every year. I receive a modest windfall, and before the birthday candles have even cooled off, I come home with a new pawn shop prize. One year it was a bass. The year after that, an Epiphone Dot. After that, a mandolin (there should be a five-day waiting period on those things). The next year it was a Strat. The bass and mandolin are still hanging in the studio downstairs, and I sold the Strat last year to help finance the kids’ new laptop. So my guitars, as with most guitar enthusiasts, come and go. That’s why pawn shops are so popular with us musicians. These instruments are like currency, and on any given day, you might stumble upon some treasure that a desperate guitar slinger had to unload in order to get the money to pay for his addiction/bail bond/ex-wife. 

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Winter, to me, means skiing or at least memories of skiing, sledding and four-wheeling in southern Utah, when I seem to have most of the wilderness to myself. But I tell my wife, “Winter is death.” 

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Missoula Notebook

Considering that hunters are supposed to be a dying breed, there sure were a lot of pickup trucks jammed into the pullouts along route 200 east of Missoula last Tuesday, and a lot of men in camouflage-patterned orange vests standing around next to them.

It was Veteran’s Day, and my neighbor Vin and I were headed out to some Forest Service land near Nine Mile Prairie Road to hunt for deer. 

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