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The New West Festival in May brought together an eclectic group of Rocky Mountain enthusiasts and entrepreneurs who examined the quality of life, work and play in the region. From an opening keynote about climate change, with practical solutions for reducing carbon footprints, to a closing session about entrepreneurism and the funding of new businesses, the day was packed with interesting ideas for personal and professional growth.

New West Series

I was a young and naïve adventurer when I first left Montana for the Big City years ago. I was afraid but I was much more curious, and it didn’t take much encouragement for one summer internship at San Francisco Magazine to turn into a professional life spending more than two decades away. During those years, I lived in two major cities (San Francisco, San Diego), a few storied towns/suburbs (Tiburon, Sausalito, Los Gatos, La Jolla), one house, many apartments and a cabin in the Santa Cruz mountains. I had a few roommates, male and female, and I finally found happiness living alone with cats. (Lots of city people find happiness living alone with cats: epic and/or epidemic, you be the judge.)

Through it all, I missed my Rocky Mountain people.

It was an undercurrent, and the missing of them took many guises (denial among them), but the truth is that I always felt a little bit way down deep that I had run away from home. To some wonderful places, places with some wonderful people, no question about that, but it was always quite clear to me that I was not at home. While I was happy to tell people that I mostly lived in San Francisco, because it truly is a fantastic place to live, I always added a note: But I am originally from Montana.

New West Series

The green energy revolution continues to spread across the country with more people choosing to install their own wind or solar power operations. But even with tax credit programs, the cost is often out of reach to many.

Installing these systems can cost tens of thousands of dollars and, in order for them to be effective, wind and solar power require just that—wind and sun. 

However, for retired couple Bill and Katharine McLaughry, converting their home was a no-brainer.

“As proponents of conservation for many years, we knew we had to consider energy conservation above all else,” Katharine said.

The couple moved from the second cloudiest area of the country in western Pennsylvania in August 2006 to their current home in Centennial, Colo.

Rural Issues

Walk in to a town council meeting in Pinedale, Wyoming, and you’re likely to find as many as three local reporters scribbling notes and asking questions.

That news in a town of 2,030 residents is covered by two newspapers and a website is partly explained by the abundance of mineral wealth in surrounding Sublette County, which produced $3.6 billion in natural gas last year. Add to that the urgent concern about breaching a local dam threatened by record snowmelt coming from the Wind River Range, and you’ve got a recipe for a small-town media frenzy.

This scene is also illustrative of how rural journalism is surviving, even thriving, in the rural West and across the United States, in an era of precipitous decline for major metropolitan newspapers.

In the United States, some 7,500 community newspapers – papers with under 30,000 in circulation – still hit the streets, front porches, and mailboxes at least once a week. A 2010 survey conducted by the University of Missouri, Columbia for the National Newspaper Association produced some enviable statistics: More than three-quarters of respondents said they read most or all of a local newspaper every week. And in news to warm the heart of any publisher, a full 94 percent said that they paid for their papers. 

Adventure Journal Post

On one level, this video of creatures captured by a single webcam in Banff National Park, Alberta, over the course of a year is incredibly cool. Bears, elk, mountain lions…mountain bikers, hikers, ravens…the spot is like Grand Central Station for wildlife. True, the images were edited together, and no doubt there were long periods of a whole lotta nothing going on. But the variety and volume is astounding.

Which leads one to a sense of awe and a glimpse into the notion that what goes on generally out of sight of man is pretty incredible and pretty important. We know there are critters out there, but they’re so often shy and we’ve pushed so many of them off into corners far from the sprawl of our houses and roads that it lets us forget the world is populated by far more beings than ourselves. We know this, but we don’t retain it.

Guest Column

Dear Governor Schweitzer:

The Exxon pipeline rupture shows that pipeline leaks can and do happen, and that it is a disaster when landowners, emergency responders and community officials are not adequately prepared for such an occurrence. We are landowners along the proposed Keystone XL pipeline route and downstream from the Missouri and Yellowstone river crossings who are concerned about the impact that another spill would have on our families’ health, water quality, and ability to make a living on the land in Montana.

The Keystone XL will be nine times the size of the Exxon pipeline which recently ruptured – with exponentially larger impacts should there be a spill. The Keystone I pipeline, which runs through North Dakota, has had 12 leaks in its first year of operation.  Because the Keystone XL pipeline needs a permit from the state of Montana, we call on YOU to protect Montanans along the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers by:

New West Series

When I first moved back home to Montana last year, people encouraged me to write about the experience. A year later, I finally understand why I couldn’t do that at the time.

It has taken a full year – a cycle through four very distinct seasons – to combat the writer’s block that paralyzed me from this simple task. It’s a strange thing, this connection to the land that drew me home. It informs everything I think, and it informs everything I do. It has such a hold on me that it required a year of penitence (for ever leaving in the first place) before it loosened its grip and my pen. What I finally realized is that, in order to leave in the first place, I had to shut off a part of my spirit to find the courage to go.

But it has worked on me, this year and this land, and now my finally-addressed heartbreak of the first leaving, the first loss, so many years ago, has begun to heal. I am not sorry I left and yet I now understand the full toll that the leave-taking exacted on my psyche and my spirit.

Mountain Biking

Colorado’s Canyons of the Ancients National Monument is a place where you can still explore without having to step over the ropes. Designated in 2000 as a monument to cultural and natural history, CANM allows and encourages its visitors to wonder through time, with little more than curiosity to guide them.

The 164,000 acre monument spills over into Utah, a treasure of flora and fauna. It’s a rare glimpse into archeology, dating all the way back to 10,000 B.C. Scientists studying the area have learned the habits of populations from 2000 B.C. to 700 A.D. and found evidence of westward expansion, even into the recent past. Ancestral Puebloan, or Anasazi, ruins still stand from 700 years ago, as pot shards and hand-worked stone litter the grounds.

Wondering eyes will find much more, and a little poking around usually turns something up from the dust. Countless alcoves hold cliff dwellings, as acrobatic canyon wrens twirl about overhead. The delicate yellow flowers of common greenthread sway in the breeze, and Whipple’s fishhook cactus can be seen in bloom every spring. The monument is also home to mountain lions, tarantulas, collard lizards and who knows what else.

New West Feature

It’s too early to tell how much Saturday’s oil spill on the Yellowstone River will ultimately affect aquatic wildlife, Bruce Farling, the executive director for Montana Trout Unlimited, said Tuesday.

The spill took place in “a transitional reach where coldwater species start giving away to cool- and warm-water species,” he said in an e-mail. No federally listed endangered species live within the spill zone, and that section of river is not part of the pristine “blue ribbon” section prized by trout anglers. That’s the good news. But in addition to goldeye, sauger and channel catfish—all native game fish—the area is home to popular non-native sportfish such as rainbow and brown trout, smallmouth bass and walleyes, as well as non-sport species, including minnows, longnose dace and Flathead chub.

More worrisome, the pallid sturgeon, which is endangered, and its relative, the shovelnose sturgeon, are found downstream from Miles City. Should the oil reach that far, it could prove problematic, Farling noted.

Mountain Biking

The first Kettle House Wednesday Night Beer League mountain bike race at Marshall Mountain in Missoula went off without a hitch this last week. There were around 75 racers, according to registration extraordinaire Cindy Schultz, and nothing but smiles at the finish line.

The smiles were due to two things: a fun and challenging course and free Kettle House beer and brats. Race organizers wanted to provide a fun and easy atmosphere, and race promoter Jed Dennison said it was right on. That was thanks, in part, to Tim O’Leary and the huge sponsorship he is providing through the Kettle House. “Tim and the Kettle House have been awesome as sponsors, and they provided a great vibe,” Dennison said. 

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