MICROBREW MONTANA
Yellowstone Valley Brewing: Is This a Big Racket or What?
I'm sure if you work at Yellowstone Valley Brewing, you're always wondering if there'll ever be a dull moment. It's probably not part of the business plan, but owner and head brewer George Moncure seems to prefer that never-a-dull-moment style. For him, it comes naturally, you could say.
Moncure, aka Brewin' Geo, aka Brew Dude, who has a master's degree in geochemistry and lists two of his favorite pastimes as "yucking it up and love planning" owns the place--and brews the beer, books the bands, and appears to live the life of a taproom loyal. For this guitar-strumming, tennis-playing, dinosaur-digging brewer, it's always Hoppy Hour.
If you ask, for example, he'll show you his big racket, which is a real, oversized tennis racket he claimed when the Yellowstone Racquet Club gave in to condos and closed. As he swings it around in his packed taproom, he uses one of his favorite lines, possibly overused for the regulars: "Is this a big racket or what?"
You have the distinct impression he isn't talking about tennis.
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Real Estate News
Missoula’s Market: Worse Than You Think
If you're thinking the housing bubble in Missoula, and Montana, will somehow remain full of air, think again. The situation is probably worse than you think. Median home prices, as recorded by real estate organizations, have been relatively stable, but some indicators suggest a downturn could be just around the corner.
Why? Because homes have been sitting on the market for months and months, while sellers have begun to slowly lower their asking prices. A rash of foreclosures may force prices down, which will greatly increase the downward pressure on all home prices.
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blog: ON RIVERS AND RANCHING
In the Deer Lodge Valley, Ranching and Restoring a River
The ranch is green and the roads are potholed from spring rain. Coming to work from the little house I rent outside of Deer Lodge, I drive a county road that looks down across the western end of the property—a floodplain ditched for haying and bisected by the linked bows of the Clark Fork River. Unplowed strips grow thick with willow and cottonwood. Whitetail deer graze on new shoots in the meadows. Their heads come up as I pass and drop again before I am out of sight. Hawks drift above it all, and though I know they are hunting I never see them dive. Our small bunch of heifers grazes together, strikingly red against the rest of spring.
Down by the river on a clear June morning, this place seems simple, pastoral and beautiful. Irrigation hides the land’s scars, making it easy to get the wrong impression of the ranch, or at least an incomplete one.
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Sense of Place
Plant Trees, Create Habitat and New Neighbors Will Come
My husband and I looked at each other in bewilderment. What have we done? We thought we were putting in a windbreak. We planted three rows just like the extension booklet said – lilacs and caraganas, hybrid poplars, and blue spruce. In subsequent plantings, we filled in with Siberian crabapples and Nanking cherries After 20 years, we claim our windbreak is a success, but for whom?
Unintentionally, we created new wildlife habitat. Provide cover with access to food and the critters move right in.
Our windbreak is now a wildlife super highway and an apartment complex for birds. Have we made it easy for them to plunder our garden and fruit trees and murder our chickens?
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New West Book Review
“Here There Nowhere”: Michael Brophy’s Haunting Landscapes
Here There Nowhere: Paintings by Michael Brophy
Oregon State University Press
49 pages, $25
The first painting I saw by Oregon's Michael Brophy was "Night Truck." Although its subject matter might be considered ugly, it's a beautiful painting, with a silver semi front and center, charging through a dark night, illuminated by the headlights of the vehicle behind it like a stage performer awash in footlights. It's an evocative image that cast me, and surely many who look at it, back into memories of long night drives across the West. There's something about it that reminded me of an Edward Hopper painting: maybe the name, which recalls "Nighthawks," Brophy's skillful use of empty space and artificial light, or perhaps its feeling of brooding isolation that invites viewers to question exactly how they came to spend a sleepless night following this steel behemoth, the natural world surrounding the road erased in darkness so that they might be anywhere.
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Real Estate News
“Echo Effect” Slows Region’s Real Estate
Dave Eacret calls it the "echo effect."
That's his term for what's softening the real estate market in the quality-of-life zones of the Mountain West, including Montana, North Idaho and other non-urban markets in the region. Home prices have leveled, and in some cases declined slightly, as in Missoula, where recent numbers from the Missoula Organization of Realtors shows price declines in April and May, compared to the same months a year ago.
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Diary of a Mad Voter: Joan McCarter
Cowboys, Mythical and Otherwise
He simply did what had to be done ... It would be easy, he told himself, to throw everything overboard and disclaim any responsibility. All he had to do was saddle up and ride out of the country. It sounded easy, but it was not that easy, even if a man could leave behind his sense of guilt at having deserted a cause. To be a man was to be responsible. It was as simple as that. To be a man was to build something, to try to make the world about him a bit easier to live in for himself and those who followed. You could sneer at that, you could scoff, you could refuse to acknowledge it, but when it came right down to it, [Conagher] decided it was the man who planted a tree, dug a well, or graded a road who mattered.
That's Louis L'Amour, describing Conagher, the title character of one of his novels. That description, argues Jeffrey Lockwood in the cover story for the current edition of High Country News exemplifies why we still need the Cowboy Myth to solve not only the problems facing us in the region, but the nation.
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WYOMING ELK FEEDLOTS THE REAL PROBLEM
Debunking Brucellosis Myths
Montana just lost its brucellosis-free status, just as Idaho and Wyoming have in recent years. Whenever this happens, stockgrowers and politicians rush to blame the bison and elk herds living in Yellowstone National Park and the government for not doing enough to eradicate the disease.
When they should be blaming themselves.
Ranchers, especially in Wyoming but not only in Wyoming, have done more than anybody, even the federal government, to keep the brucellosis threat alive. And you could even argue that they want to keep it alive.
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New West Book Review
‘Mustang’: Defending Wild Horse’s Place in West, and in History
Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West
By Deanne Stillman
Houghton Mifflin
348 pages, $25
Some 55 million years ago, the ancestor to the modern-day horse, the “dawn horse,” appeared on what would become North America, writes Deanne Stillman. Four million years ago, Equus, the first creature we would recognize as a horse, appeared in what would be the American West. Long after vanishing from the region along with many fellow prehistoric mammals, the horse returned to the continent with the Spanish conquistadors and found its home again on the Western landscape.
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MICROBREW MONTANA
Bitter Root Brewing: Maker of the Last Best Brew
If you live in or travel to Montana, the Last Best Place, you need to sample the Last Best Brew, right? But you won't find it just anywhere.
To find the Last Best Brew, you have to travel to western Montana and find a pub and eatery specializing in real good beer and therefore serving Montana microbrews. Or better yet, go to the source, over to downtown Hamilton, at Bitter Root Brewing, where they make it and serve it every day of the week.
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