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In The New West magazine

If you didn't know any better, you might think William Patrick (Bill) Foley II was just another retiring baby boomer looking for golf courses, open spaces and the chance to recapture an idealized childhood of summertimes on the family ranch. A frank man with an almost goofy charm, he speaks of his love for Montana, his concern for the landscape -- and the joy he gets bombing around the backcountry on an ATV or a snowmobile.

But the truth is, Foley isn't very good at leisure. He's got the fancy log home on Whitefish Lake, five West Coast wineries, the huge cattle ranch near Deer Lodge, and the requisite private jets, but he can't seem to help turning everything into a business.

Foley appears to be in a much better spot than most of the Wall Street moguls, Silicon Valley financiers and high-rolling property developers who see the surging "amenity economy" in the Mountain West as the next great capitalist frontier. In some ways, he's representative of the breed: a very rich man who's become enamored with the West, and whose first instinct is to buy it. [more]

Western Book Roundup

The Boulder Farmer's Market will open for its first Wednesday afternoon of the season today, kicking off with a book signing and talk by Lynn Rossetto Kasper, host of NPR's The Splendid Table. She'll be discussing her new book, How to Eat Supper. (Free, 5:30-6:30 p.m.)

The Bluff, Utah-based Ellen Meloy Fund for Desert Writers announced that this year's winner of their annual award is Joe Wilkins. Wilkins plans to study and write about the eastern front of the Rocky Mountains from Texas to Montana.

Also in the Roundup: Margot Kahn tours behind Horses That Buck: The Story of Champion Bronc Rider Bill Smith, and WyoFile.com excerpts Alexandra Fuller's new book. [more]

Idaho and Washington Feel the Pain

Ask Tom Welch, president of Pioneer Federal Savings and Loan (offices in Dillon and Deer Lodge, Mont.) about his mortgage portfolio: "Great," he says, "As good as it's been. I can't tell you the last time I've had a foreclosure."

Even as risky national lending practices and the collapse of the housing bubble have pulled the national economy into recession, lenders in Montana remain largely unaffected by mortgage losses. Banks in the state haven't been hurt much by the credit crunch, either, because few swing big leveraged financial deals, bankers say.

"Montana has some foreclosure hot spots," said Helena branch president Paul Drake of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. "But we haven't seen the kind of issues like Arizona or Nevada, not even close to it." [more]

book review

Reading The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Searing Wall Street and Washington, by David Sirota, is a bit like a cross-country road trip with an insistent guy who talks the whole time.

The thing is, Sirota's saying stuff you should probably hear, and he goes to places you need to go, but he's tough to follow at first. He starts in Helena, Mont., with a barrage of information about the partisan political machinations of the state's most recent biannual legislature, and he tosses other stuff in at a dizzying pace and with a good dose of populist outrage: from vermiculite poisoning in Libby to Vice President Dick Cheney's shooting of his hunting companion to century-old labor wars to an aside about how some Helena locals referred to him (Sirota) as a "city mouse."

His story gains traction when it becomes clear that he's not finding a uniform populist movement in America where there isn't any. Sirota reports on the outrage felt by working people, whether it is channeled toward big business or misdirected at Mexican immigrants. [more]

CLASS ACTION SUITS TO BE FILED TUESDAY IN ARIZONA, COLORADO

Enough is enough, say the owners of our national forests. And they may have finally found a way to spike the Recreation Access Tax or RAT.

After years of working through cumbersome administrative channels and several rounds in criminal court, people interested in reasonable and free access to their public land have dragged the Forest Service (FS) into civil court. In addition to asking for injunctions against collecting "illegal" fees while the case is being litigated and if successful the fee program terminated, the plaintiffs in the class action complaints--to be filed tomorrow morning in Arizona and Colorado--want all fee collection signs removed and all fees collected through the years under the program returned to the people who shouldn't have had to pay them.

Suffice to say, it's panic time in the FS offices back in Washington, D.C. [more]

New West Missoula Event

If you're reading this story, you're probably Internet-savvy enough to know that the hottest thing online is "social networking." Facebook and MySpace are the kingpins of this phenomenon, but social networking happens in all kinds of ways and in all kinds of places on the Web. And if you think social networking is mostly about flirting and dating, well, you'd be surprised.

Here in Missoula, Hank Green of EcoGeek, Steven Sundheim of Modwest and Grupthink, and our very own Courtney Lowery have been at the forefront of the social networking phenomenon. In addition to the highly successful EcoGeek blog, Hank has created a hugely popular social network called Nerdfighters. Steven and his compatriots at the Web hosting company Modwest have built a unique social Web site called Grupthink. Courtney, for her part, is in charge of all things community here at NewWest.Net and has dipped her toes in almost everything new on the Web.

Please join Hank, Steven and Courtney for a discussion and, yes, networking reception on what online social networking can mean for you, your business, and your social circle. It happens May 13 at 5:00 p.m. at the Missoula Art Museum. Please call 406-829-1725 for more information, or email We look forward to seeing you there. [more]

community conservation

A 7,500-acre expanse of land in the Blackfoot Valley, holding working agricultural lands, wildlife habitat and tributaries crucial to spawning cutthroat and bull trout, has been protected for perpetuity with a conservation easement.

This week, the Sunny Slope Grazing Association finalized plans to sell the easement on 4,682 acres of its grazing land, allowing it to buy an adjacent 2,888 acres The Nature Conservancy had purchased from Plum Creek Timber Co., also put under an easement.

The land is in the foothills southwest of Lincoln abutting the Helena National Forest, and the easement, held by Missoula-based Five Valleys Land Trust, will limit development on three and a half miles of Blackfoot River frontage and more than fourteen miles of its tributaries. It's Five Valleys Land Trust's largest easement to date. [more]

mICROBREW mONTANA

When I'm interviewing brewery owners for the Microbrew Montana series, I always ask the same question: What's different about your operation compared to the other 26 Montana breweries?

When visiting Tamarack Brewing in Lakeside, a rapidly growing berg on the west shore of expansive Flathead Lake, I thought I knew the answer as soon as I walked through the front door. But when the co-owner Craig Koontz brought out the brandy snifters, I realized I knew only part of the answer. [more]

Missoula Notebook

Seeing the mail arrive every day as I do, I could of course rush out and collect it immediately, except why would I want to? Up at the beginning of this essay, I started to write “letter” in front of “carrier,” then crossed it out and wrote “mail” instead. My reason is probably obvious to anyone old enough to remember back when people still sent each other letters.

Now the mail is basically a daily garbage delivery, with identity-theft-ready credit-card offers mixed in like pieces of broken bottles to cut you if you’re not careful. One of today’s vital life skills is learning to spot and toss these offers without wasting time opening them, sort of the way pioneers had to get good at distinguishing the medicinal plants from the poisonous.

Do children still pout when none of the mail is for them? It’s hard to imagine growing up these days thinking of the mail as anything but a bother, but I am just old enough to have seen the last years of the age of the letter and I remember making fervent complaints that no one ever sent me one when I was little. “The only way to get mail is to send mail,” my mother told me, and so I adopted the habit and kept at it through my early twenties. [more]

Largest Gift in History of UM

Billionaire couple Dennis and Phyllis Washington announced the largest gift in the 115-year history of the University of Montana at the campus Friday: $10 million for a new education building.

Education is important, Phyllis said. "We can't afford to let it fall off the chart." She delivered her comments at a glass podium before a 40-foot sign with a rendering of the structure. Phyllis graduated with a degree in education from UM and supported her family for the first years of her husband's construction business. He eventually took one company public and owns others, including Washington Corp., a Missoula-based holding company that owns the copper mine at Butte, a railroad and shipping interests, as well as other businesses. Forbes estimated the Washington net worth at $2.5 billion.

UM President George Dennison lavished praise on the couple and on the building's designers, OZ Architects, for its environmentally friendly aspects. The building, promotional materials say, will be the first of its kind, replete with all the latest technological gadgetry for distance-learning, math and science. [more]

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