Edra Blixseth and the other top owner of the Yellowstone Club near Big Sky have retained an Arizona-based company to manage the private club and complete its long-overdue construction projects, according to an item on PR-inside.com.

Over the past year and more, the Yellowstone Club, the world's only private skiing and golf community, has been in and out of the news, thanks to the public divorce of owners Tim and Edra Blixseth as well as legal battles between owners and Tim Blixseth. Also, the club missed loan payments to creditor Credit Suisse and teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. Earlier this year, Edra won control of the club and vowed to get its overdue construction back on track and to keep its business out of the public eye. [more]

Western Book Roundup

The first One Book-One Bozeman joins a number of other regional community reading programs when it kicks off this week, featuring Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracey Kidder. The program, organized by "A host of volunteers and community partners, including the Bozeman Public Library, the Bozeman Public Library Foundation, Hopa Mountain, MSU, and Yellowstone Public Radio," according to its website, will include a series of varied events now through October 15, such as book discussions, a photo exhibit (opening September 5 at the Bozeman Public Library), cooking lessons, and storytelling and writing workshops for kids.

One highlight: on October 9, Dr. Michael Iseman of Denver's National Jewish Medical Center will discuss his research on multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, and the work of Paul Farmer, the subject of Kidder's book.

Watch for Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper's announcement of the next One Book, One Denver selection next week. They've been accepting book nominations from the community on their website, so it will be interesting to see this year's pick.

Also in the Roundup: The Democratic Convention gave a boost to the Tattered Cover, and the University of New Mexico Press launches a fall reading series. [more]

By far the most comprehensive and insightful political convention coverage this year has come from the National Journal, usually considered a thorough but boring insider's record of Beltway politics.

Now is the time to shine, though, for those reporters and editors who have been at the politics game long enough to know the ins and outs but still fresh enough to approach the coverage with energy and to do so broadly. OK. My point is this: If you're interested in what it's really like at the Republican National Convention this week -- beyond the tabloid-driven revelations about Sen. John McCain's running mate's daughter -- or if you want an honest account of what impact the news has made at the convention, go to the National Journal. [more]

From Colorado's KUNC

In this interview with KUNC's Brian Larson, Jody Hope Strogoff, the editor and publisher of the Colorado Statesman, says Colorado delegates to the Republican National Convention -- going on this week in Minneapolis -- are united behind Sen. John McCain, despite the large majority of the state voting for Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in the primary election.

Strogoff also gives us a peek into the delegates' first days at the RNC, how they're responding to news of VP pick Sarah Palin's daughter's pregnancy and why the McCain and Palin have scheduled their first campaign stop together for Colorado Springs.

Strogoff tells KUNC, "He just wants to wrap up the conservative vote in Colorado and Colorado Spings is probably the place to go if you want to do that."

Click here for the full interview on KUNC.

Breaking News

A firefighting plane from Missoula-based Neptune Aviation crashed near Reno after taking off to make the day's final drops on a fire burning in the Sierra Nevada. All three crew members died in the crash.

Names of the victims have not been released and FAA investigators were headed in to investigate the crash.

The tanker was one of Neptune P2-Vs, aircraft that had been grounded in 2004 when the Forest Service revoked firefighting contracts on several tankers for safety review -- after three crashes, including one that killed a crew of three near Reno in 2002. In 2005, the Forest Service, after doing more research, renewed the contracts and deemed the tankers safe to fly. [more]

News of Note

As the GOP convention in Minneapolis kicks off, Montana delegates and party leaders are fired up about Sarah Palin.

They say she's a good play for conservative and independent voters in the state -- and she knows the issues and complexities of policy in a rural state.

Party chair Erik Iverson tells John S. Adams of the Great Falls Tribune that the pick "makes a lot of sense from the standpoint in winning the election" and Rep. Denny Rehberg says in a release, "As a rural western state, Alaska has much in common with Montana, from rural schools and gun rights to tremendous natural resources and Native American issues. Sarah Palin was born in Idaho where she attended the University of Idaho and has spent most of her life in Alaska so she knows her way around the Mountain West and the I-90 corridor. The selection of Washington D.C. outsider Sarah Palin was inspired and will serve as a welcome asset to John McCain's campaign.”

More from Adams' story here.

Presidential Politics

This one is sure to stir up the morality debate a little further: Republican Vice Presidential pick Sarah Palin's 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is pregnant, and plans to marry the father. The announcement came in response to persistent blog rumors alleging that Palin's recent baby, born last April 18, is actually her daughter's. Bristol is said to be five months pregnant. Will the religious right's love-fest with Palin come to abrupt end in light of the pre-marital sex, or will it be reinforced by the decision to marry and have the baby?

Convention Coverage: Reporter's Notebook

These questions are from email received during the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Plus I made a few of them up.

Q. What was it like?
A. The whole town was a big party around the clock. Street music, hawkers with every kind of Obama product you can name, Denver “hosts” in official tee-shirts directing people everywhere. The 16th Street Mall is like a long Main Street with open space in the middle, which was occupied by vendors selling everything from political memorabilia to on-the-spot neck massages. You had to walk this mob scene every day to get to the Pepsi Center, but it was great fun.

Q. Did you meet anybody famous?
A. I shook Caroline Kennedy’s (who is very short) and Michelle Obama’s (who is very beautiful) hands, and got ten feet from Jimmy Carter (who is looking frail) who turned and smiled at me when I stupidly called out, “Mr. President!” (what was I going to say next? Come over here and talk to little old me? I was without a master plan.) I met Clinton's Secretary of Labor Robert Reich (who really is 4'5"). I sat next to either Judy Woodruff or Leslie Stahl on a press bus, but she was asleep so I’m not sure which one it was. And around the press halls it was hard to miss Diane Sawyer (who is tiny) Keith Olbermann (who wears very expensive clothes) Joe Scarborough (who is skinnier than he looks on TV) and Rush Limbaugh (whom it’s really hard to miss.) And I met quite a few Congresspeople, but I’ll be danged if I remember who.

[more]

Guest Column

Wasson Creek now flows all summer long. That’s cause for celebration because the upper section of the small creek, located near Helmville, Montana, is home to a vital population of pure-strain westslope cutthroat trout that had been cut off from the lower section by seasonal irrigation diversions. For the first time in decades, cutthroat can migrate down to Spring Creek, which eventually joins Nevada Creek, which in turn empties into the Blackfoot River above a stretch where fisheries have been in decline. Keeping water in Wasson Creek increases the likelihood that the celebrated river that, thanks to Norman Maclean and Robert Redford, runs unimpeded and unpolluted through the American imagination will continue to be inhabited by real native trout.

That Wasson Creek is free-flowing again is due to the efforts of Trout Unlimited’s Montana Water Project (MWP), which was set up ten years ago to test an unusual strategy for increasing in-stream flow—leasing private water rights. Along with the Montana Water Trust (MWT), established in 2001, the MWP believes that one of the most effective ways to resolve disputes over water use is to employ incentives—ranging from outright cash payments to providing improvements like new wells and more efficient irrigation equipment—to persuade ranchers, farmers, and other landowners to voluntarily return water to streams. Both groups specialize in developing arrangements that serve conservation ends while in no way challenging or encroaching upon private property rights, a hybrid approach that not long ago few would have thought possible, especially in the historically contentious arena of water ownership.

And although leasing has its share of critics, the results have been encouraging. [more]

Public Lands

The Bush Administration and conservation groups have reached a compromise agreement on rules governing roadless areas in the state, reports the New York Times. The deal involves the much-contested rules that Clinton Administration put in place banning road-building and other development on federal lands that don't already have roads - rules that were then reversed by the Bush Administration and have been the subject of a convoluted legal battle ever since. The Idaho compromise allows some road-building to log burned areas, and opens up some acreage for development in exchange for continued protection of most roadless areas, according to the Times.