Buffalo Herds Spread, Sometimes on Their Own

Buffalo at the Navajo-owe Wolf Springs Ranch. (Photo: Ranch Marketing Assn.)

Look at the banner photo on this blog, and you will see at lower right a bull buffalo (bison, if you prefer).

That pasture is part of a big ranch purchased in 2017 by the Navajo Nation. (Technically, Colorado Ranch Enterprise, Dept. of Fish & Wildlife, PO Box 1480, Window Rock). Think of it as the Kaliningrad of Dinétah. 

Its previous owner, Tom Redmond of Aussie and Onesta hair-care products, started raising buffalo, and thus far, the Navajo Nation has continued on that path.

Last month, a friend was visiting from Australia, so I took her up to the upper Huerfano River drainage to see the ranch, hoping we would see some buffalo. You never know where they might be, but luck was with us, and half a dozen individuals were in that pasture, within passable binocular and camera range.

It's in our gene: we enjoy just watching large grazing animals. To borrow a phrase, they are "good to think about."

Meanwhile, up north, buffalo politics are "messy." 

On the other side of Montana, at the Blackfeet Reservation, Joe Kipp, chairperson of the Blackfeet Nation Stock Growers Association, also has a longstanding connection to the reintroduction effort. In the 1980s, he’d been involved with bringing the first wild buffalo — surplus animals from Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota — to the Blackfeet Reservation. These days, he and his wife make the drive south to Yellowstone every winter to hunt the animals; Kipp’s wife is diabetic, and the only meat she eats is bison. (Compared to beef, bison has more protein and minerals, and much less fat and cholesterol.) 

Still, Kipp is unhappy with how the tribe has managed its herd in an austere landscape where many make their living raising cattle. Ranchers deal with ferocious wind storms, bitter winters, crippling droughts: Business margins are tight. He’s heard from plenty of disgruntled ranchers like Danny Barcus, who rent grazing lands for their livestock — the current rate for a cow-calf pair is around $40 a month — only to have the tribe’s buffalo break in and eat the grass intended for their cattle. “It gets to be a sore point pretty fast,” Kipp said.

Kipp worries what will happen now that bison are being considered for protection under the Endangered Species Act, a move he fears would undermine his treaty hunting rights. He’s also content with Yellowstone’s current management and doesn’t see the need to expand the park’s herd. “People envision, ‘Oh, we want bison that are running across the landscape like before,’” he said. “But we didn’t have 50,000-pound trucks and trains running and cars and all these things. It’s a beautiful concept, but I don’t think it’s based upon reality.” 

This spring, Kipp, Barcus, and other Blackfeet cattle ranchers met with their tribal council and asked them to make changes to the herd’s management. After years of frustration, they felt the council had been receptive to their concerns, and this summer, the tribe began a new culling program to manage its herd.

 The whole article is "Bison’s Complicated Return: Growing herds in the Yellowstone area are adopting ancient migratory behavior causing logistical issues for ranchers and Montana state officials."

Worth a read. Good to think about.

Wolverines! They Might Be Coming Back to Colorado

Wolverine in Glacier Nat. Park (NPS)

Fictional southern Colorado high schools may no longer be accused of using an almost non-existent animal (in this state) as their mascot.

The last confirmed wolverine sighting — and it was a rare one—  was in 2009. A tagged male wolverine left northwestern Wyoming, wandered intp Colordo, and then headed for North Dakota.

Indeed, from his starting point near Jackson Hole, M56 took less than a month to arrive in the Centennial State, where his kind was last reported in 1919.

The venture confirmed what was believed of wolverines’ tendency to cover vast ground. Still, researchers were astonished by the speed. And more than that, they marveled at watching in real time the animal of mythological lore that had always evaded their view. (Recent estimates suggest low densities, small numbers in big places — between 250 and 350 moving across rugged, remote fringes of the Lower 48 states.)

Colorado Parks & Wildlife (back then the Colorado Division of Wildlife) formulated some reintroduction plans, but did not carry through. Now, wolverines are back on the table, so to speak. (You would not want a live one on your table.)

Wolverine reintroduction has not come up in Colorado Wildlife Commission meetings for more than a decade. The agency began a wolverine reintroduction process in 2010 and created “an extensive plan for how reintroduction could be accomplished,” said CPW spokesman Travis Duncan. 

Recently, the agency has been reviewing that plan and process to find possible update and what remains workable, Duncan said. 

“We will be working with a wolverine expert who is going to take on updating and providing greater detail on a wolverine restoration and management plan,” he said. “The contract isn’t in place yet, but we hope to be able to say more on this soon.”

Meanwhile, in Lewistown, Montana, urban wolverines? We're not there yet. 

UPDATE: And in Utah this month, a wolverine killed or wounded 18 sheep in one morning before being captured, radio-collared, and released.

An Alaskan Speaks about Bear Spray

Bear spray canisters and holsters
(Udap brand).

A spate of incidents in Alaska (and the Northern Rockies) have some people asking, "Does bear spray work?"

Alaska news-blogger Craig Medred has posted on this repeatedly. The main issue seems to be that minority of black bears (not griz) who turn predator, but grizzlies are always of concern as well.

Twenty-seven-year-old Erin Johnson from Anchorage died June 19 after she and a coworker were attacked by a predatory black bear while doing environmental studies in brushy forest about five miles from the state’s largest underground gold mine. . .

Sean Farley, a bear researcher and wildlife physiologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, emphasized that bear spray has proven hugely effective on charging bears, especially charging grizzlies.

But he noted the physical state of those bears. They charge with eyes wide open, nostrils flaring and often huffing air into their lungs. They are fully exposed to the active ingredient in the spray – oleoresin capsicum, an oily extract from the pepper plant.
Unlike tear gas, which appears to work poorly on bears, capsicum causes more than just irritation to the eyes. Inhaled, it inflames airways making it temporarily harder to breathe and from what is known about research on humans, it might do even more than that.

A charging grizzly is likely to get a big dose of capsicum. That is not necessarily the case for a predatory bear. . . . Farley describes predatory bears as approaching with eyes squinting, mouths shut and  nostrils narrowed. They come in like bears approaching beehives ready to suffer a bit to get the food they want. Their physical preparations would serve to minimize the dose of spray hitting the bear.

The post goes on to talk about risk-assessment: "Statistically, you are orders of magnitude more likely to die in a motor vehicle or boating accident in Alaska than to be attacked by a bear, let alone killed by one." But fear of bears is more primal than fear of motorboats.

And there is speculation on the changing nature of predators world-wide. Read it all.

The big about bears approaching beehives reminded me of when my late brother-in-law was raising hogs on his farm in southeastern Missouri. His was a small operation, maybe a dozen or so at a time, partly for the family and partly for sale.

He told me about one particular hog that would bust through an electric fence. The pig knew that it would get shocked, so it started squealing before it hit the fence, but it still wanted to break through more than it did not want to be shocked. There is no reason why some bear might not take the same attitude toward bear spray.

I still carry it at appropriate times, however. It also works well on overly aggressive dogs. And I see that Medred still carries it too.

How to Write a Northern Rockies Mystery Novel

After reading a lot of mystery novels by Peter Bowen and Keith McCafferty (Montana) plus Craig Johnson and C. J. Box (Wyoming), I have assembled enough ideas for a decent undergradate paper with a simple compare-and-contrast methology.

Although her novels are set in Wyoming, Margaret Coel lives in Colorado. Still, much of what I will say applies to her works too.

1. The Protagonist. The idea of the "wounded  detective" is common. Fictional dectectives are often divorced, widowed, deeply depressed (especially in Scandanavia), using or recovering from too much booze & drugs, or fired from a job in law-enforcement, among other possibilities. Coel's Catholic mission priest, John O'Malley, a recovering alcoholic, is isolated by both his clerical vocation and his location on the Wind River Reservation.

Often they are marginalized in some respect.  Bowen's Metis brand inspector-deputy sheriff, Gabriel Du Pré, is Métis, descended from the French/indigenous mixed-blood ethnic group who originated around the Great Lakes, but some of whom moved to eastern Montana in the 1860s–70s, before and after the Red River Rebellion. Father O'Malley is a white priest on the reservation, while Box's Joe Pickett is frequently in conflict with his superiors in the Wyoming Game & Fish Department.

2. The Milieu. A low population is essential. Gabriel Du Pré operates in a fictional locale somewhere north of Miles City. Johnson's Sheriff Longmire patrols the thinly populated fictional Absaroka County, somewhere in northern Wyoming, not far from the district where Box's game warden protagonist, Joe Pickett, enforced wildlife laws.

The Wind River Reservation's population exceeds 40,000, thinly spread, but you do not feel their presence in the novels. Sean Shanahan, McCafferty's artist-fishing guide amateur detective, pops into Ennis, West Yellowstone, and other towns, but spends more time on the rivers.

All seem allergic to cities. Gabriel Du Pré hates going to Bozeman, while Joe Pickett regards Cheyenne as just slightly better than Mordor. 

3. The "Animal Helper." Although several protagonists often have a dog riding with them, what I mean here is the old folkloric theme of the animal who establishes a special relationship with the hero — for example, the hero is a hunter pursuing a fox, but he spares the fox who then protects him or helps him to secure wealth.

I extend the term "animal helper" to include people who are bonded to the hero somehow yet also appear to be closer to nature — even feral. (The Hollywood equivalent is the Magical Negro, another version of the Noble Savage.)

• Gabriel Du Pré has Beneetse, an elderly Crow (?) shaman who appears and disappears mysteriously and who brings past and present together. (His name probably comes from someone mentioned in Dan Cushman's The Great North Trail, one of Bowen's source books.)
• Joe Pickett's feral helper is the falconer Nate Romanowski, a mysterious ex-special operations soldier who lives in isolated places and has no visible means of support, but who pops up in the nick of time of save Joe, dropping bad guys at 800 yards offhand with a .454 Casull revolver or something similar. For a time Romanowski lives with an Arapaho woman until she is murdered.
• Father O'Malley has Vicky Holden, the Arapaho lawyer who connects him with the reservation and its people.
• Sheriff Walt Longmire's closest friend is Henry Standing Bear, a Cheyenne. Although Lou Diamond Phillips ably portrays Standing Bear in the TV series, in the books Standing Bear is more like Beneetse — in touch with ghosts and ancestors and also seemingly able to materialize, like Nate Romanowski, when Longmire is in desperate straits.
• McCafferty's detective, Sean Stranahan, has no Indian helper, but possibly the fishing outfitter  Rainbow Sam, Sean's sometime employer, could fit the bill, for by comparison to the past-haunted hero, Sam is hard-drinking, pleasure-seeking, and present-oriented.

4. The Plots. Many of these are recognizable from the last thirty years' news. At least two of these authors have used each one of these.

• The Cult. Clearly inspired by the Church Universal and Triumphant's operation north of Yellowstone Park in the 1980s, this plot has some mysterious but well-financed group building a headquarters in an isolated area. Murder usually ensues. See also "The Anti-Government Group." C. J. Box in particular  shows some degree of sympathy with small-L libertarian types, however, which leads to some plot twists.
• The Evil Energy Company. Enough said. See also "Evil Rich People."
• The Scheming Archaeologist. No, Tony Hillerman did not own this one. Suppose that an archaeologist had a major, career-capping find that somehow places him in conflict with the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act. . .
• Ecoterrorists and Animal Rights Extremists. They mean well, but people get hurt and they are trying to shut down the struggling local ranchers.  
• The Dinosaur. Inspired by the story of the T-Rex skeleton called Black Hills Sue, this one involves a spectacular fossil find with disputed ownership — various people want to profit from it. It puts the "skull" in skullduggery.
• The Outsiders.  All these people want to ruin Wyoming or Montana, and the hero fights a rear-guard action. Peter Bowen is the strongest here, sending a message to his readers that might as well read, "You readers are a bunch of Subaru-driving, Patagonia-wearing recreationists who just ought to keep the hell out of eastern Montana. Don't come here. Don't look for a real Gabriel Du Pré. Just stay on Interstate 90 and keep going to Bozeman. Oh yeah, buy my books."

Well, there you have it. Just add more examples and analysis. A guaranteed A-.

Look What Smokey Bear Left in my Stocking!

The Fiddlin' Foresters

Am I opening presents early, when Smokeymas is still a week away? Not really, I found this CD, "In the Long Run" by the Fiddlin' Foresters, at ARC today.

I had no idea that (a) the US Forest Service had an "official old-time string band" and (b) that their website had been presidentially singled out by Barack Obama as an example of government waste. Was that a taxpayer-funded banjo too?

Thank heaven we have saved $10 annually on domain registration fees. The deficit will melt like snow in May if we keep this up.

The album is still available.

I played it on the long drive home from Colorado Springs. They do a tricky thing in the middle, moving from the campfire-singalong jollity of "Smokey the Bear" through another cut and then into "Cold Missouri Waters," which is a song I rarely listen to because it interferes with my vision, and that's not what you want at 65 mph. Jane Leche gets into Joan Baez territory with the vocal track (YouTube).

"Is that about a wildfire?" M. asks.

"Mann Gulch," I manage to say, although my voice sounds funny.

But let's be real. The song is a weeper, but I was not even born yet when the events took place.

I am thinking more of a sunny dining hall at the Wheaton College science station/summer camp in the Black Hills National Forest of South Dakota. A boy sits off in a corner while his father, the Pactola District ranger, gives some students a quick version of what would be today the S-190 and S-130 "red card" wildfire-training classes, in case they have to fight a fire on or near their 50-acre site.

Sheet music to "Smokey the Bear" sits on the rack of the upright piano in the dining hall, and the ranger is telling the students how you should never run uphill from a fire, how something bad happened in Montana not too many years before.

The Conspiracy to Take Away Public Lands

John Gale from Backcountry Hunters and Anglers speaks to a rally
at the Colorado State Capitol in February 2015 (Durango Herald).

There is a threat to public lands in the West, and the mainstream media are largely igoring it. Even HighCountry News is ignoring it, but then HCN more and more  focused on California — that must be where the big donors are).

Unlike the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion of the mid-1980s, this is stealthier.

State legislatures in places like Colorado and Montana are seeing bills introduced urging that public lands administered by the federal government — Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, maybe even National Parks Service — be turned over for the states for management.

Doing so would be “more efficient,” “closer to the people,” whatever. The states, of course, would not be able to take care of them.

Can you imagine Colorado footing the bill for a bad forest fire season? Even my state representative, Jim Wilson, R-Salida, who strikes anti-Washington poses (“Personally, I would like to see the Feds out of the picture”) admits it:

If the Federal government were to give the land to the state of Colorado, how would we be able to afford the management costs?  I doubt that the Federal government would give back to the Colorado all the public tax dollars that are spent annually on those lands.  Not to mention the PILT (Payment In Lieu of Taxes) dollars that are used by Colorado counties to fund essential services as well as education.  And, to sell and/or develop the land to afford to manage the land is like eating your seed corn...not a sustainable practice!

But this stealth movement keeps puttering along.

You can imagine the scenarios if a state with a lot of public land, such as Utah, got ahold of it. Everything would be wide open — even more than now—to leasing for drilling and mining. Wildlife, water quality, etc., would not be be merely in the back seat; they would be clinging to the rear bumper of the development-mobile.

Since the state always is short of money (roads! schools! Medicaid!) the pressure would be on to start selling. The buyers would line up:

(a) energy companies
(b) mining companies
(c) rich people wanting huge ranches (doubling as private hunting grounds
(d) other land developers

So who is bankrolling this movement. My bet is (a).

There has been some media coverage, but it is isolated. No one is connecting Montana with Colorado, for example.

Some sample headlines:

Colorado Wildlife Federation's "Public Lands Update":

Throughout the 2015 legislative session of the Colorado General Assembly, CWF defended public lands managed by the US Forest Service and BLM from two bad bills: Senate Bills 15-039 (an attempt to confer concurrent state jurisdiction over federal lands) and 15-232 (to study how the state could manage these lands). Both bills were rejected. Colorado, as well as other western states where similar bills have been proposed, does not have the financial resources or personnel to take over management of a huge additional 23-million acre portfolio of public lands that are managed by BLM and US Forest Service. The likely outcome from such transfers would be sales of some of these irreplaceable lands to private interests.

 "[MontanaGovernor Steve] Bullock Vetoes Federal Land Task Force Bill”

"A careful reading of the bill … reveals that the transfer of public lands is still very much in the sights of the task force,” Bullock’s veto letter says. “My position on this issue is crystal clear: I do not support any effort that jeopardizes or calls into question the future of our public lands heritage.”

If you backpack, hike, hunt, fish, look for mineral specimens, collect mushrooms, take photos, or do anything else on public lands, imagine losing that access. You would be no better off than a Texan.

"The Big Burn" Coming to PBS

Based on Timothy Egan's excellent book The Big Burn, an upcoming episode of PBS' The American Experience,  "The Fire That Changed Everything," is devoted to the largest forest fire complex in the history of the United States, which rampaged through northern Idaho and western Montana in 1910.

In the summer of 1910, hundreds of wildfires raged across the Northern Rockies. By the time it was all over, more than three million acres had burned and at least 78 firefighters were dead. It was the largest fire in American history, and it assured the future of the still-new United States Forest Service. 

Rocky Mountain PBS has it scheduled at 8 p.m. on February 3.

I have already seen commenters on a wildfire-related site say, hey, that man is using a pulaski too, which postdates the fire and assistant ranger Ed Pulaski's heroic actions. Well, yes, I don't think there was any movie footage in 1910, so the filmmakers probably substituted footage from the 1920s–1940s (the pre-hard hat days).

Bill Gabbert here offers some "behind the scenes" images, including the firefighters trapped in the Pulaski Tunnel, a/k/a the War Eagle Mine.

Blog Stew on the Scenic Railroad

¶ After the June 2013 fire, the Royal Gorge Bridge & Park is reopening for limited hours. Meanwhile, the scenic train that goes from Cañon City up the gorge and back is upgrading and hoping to get its tourist riders back.

[Owner Mark] Greksa believes his yearly passenger counts will increase as he continues to add amenities. Last year, he let passengers pay to ride in the locomotive next to the engineer. He also eliminated the train's "concession car," which offered only vended foods to coach customers, and created a dining car where they can order hot food, and a "bar car" with bistro-styled tables. Food offerings include beef and buffalo items, organic chicken and a crafted pale ale, Royal Gorge Route Rogue, Greksa said. In the summer, the train will offer dishes made from rattlesnake, antelope and ostrich.

¶ Managers at the national wildlife refuges in the San Luis Valley are wondering if groundwater pumping rules will affect the areas flooded for sandhill crane habitat.GQ

¶ GQ magazine runs another art-of-manliness story on being introduced to deer and elk hunting in Montana. Actually, it's not bad; it has a Chesapeake Bay retriever in it. (Hat tip: Suburban Bushwacker)

¶ Most water from the Fraser River in Middle Park gets sent under the Continental Divide and into Denver's water system. Trout Unlimited, however, has worked out a new deal to protect flows for fisheries by regulating when the water is removed and how much.

The deal announced Tuesday could make the Fraser the most-watched river in Colorado – and maybe in the West. It sets out an innovative, science-based plan that seeks to balance increasing urban needs for water with an imperative to restore crucial habitat for river trout.

Me, I see the Fraser only when looking out the window of Amtrak's California Zephyr and thinking, "That looks really fishable in there." Maybe I should do something about that.

Blog Stew, a Little Burnt

Items that might deserve longer individual posts but will not get them. . .

• Speculation about the closure of the Royal Gorge Bridge and park (now reduced to the bridge and a tollbooth, as in 1929) and its effect on southern Colorado tourism, with a telling photograph.

• Unlike Bloomberg, I would not all the American Prairie Preserve project a "land grab." Its rich backers are buying the land. But true, once the number of cattle and/or sheep ranchers falls below some critical point, there might be domino effect on the rest.

• A piece from the Nature Conservancy magazine on "water wars" in the San Luis Valley. Speaking of rich guys buying up big chunks of the West, I don't care how many monks his wife brought in, I never trusted Maurice Strong at all. This was the issue that dominated the 1990s there and led, ultimately to a new map of the valley's west side.

Up the Line to Death

Years ago, I read Norman Maclean'sYoung Men and Fire (1992), which is an old man's book. He was in his eighties when he wrote it, and it is full of observations of how, for instance, some days the universe is just against you, no matter how strong and determined you may be. I copied out a few passages. (Where is that notebook?)

I remember Dad, the district ranger, indoctrinating some seasonal firefighters (no S190 class then—much more informal), telling them never to run uphill from a fire, that men died doing that. He must have been talking about Mann Gulch, still relatively fresh in the Forest Service's institutional memory, but it never came together in my mind until I read Young Men and Fire.

(I did not know until today that Canadian songwriter James Keelaghan had composed a song about it, "Cold Missouri Waters.")

More recently, having heard so much about them, I started on some of the books by John Maclean, Norman's son, beginning with the Colorado one, Fire on the Mountain (1999), since I had at least seen the location.

It's about the 1994 South Canyon (a/k/a Storm King) Fire near Glenwood Springs, where 14 firefighters died for a patch of scrub oak and PJ, thanks to various sorts of miscommunications, bad judgment, and hubris. A true tragedy as my eighth-grade English teacher defined it—when people do what they think is the right thing and bad stuff happens anyway.

John Maclean himself writes elsewhere of drama where "the sense of inevitable disaster builds until it overpowers the participants, who are swept along on a pathway to destruction. The audience watches with compassion and horror, aware of what's coming and as powerless as the actors to stop it."

The book audience is also muttering, "Get in your truck and go look at it, you idiot," and so on, but the end point is still the same.

I let a little time go by, went back to the library, and checked out The Thirtymile Fire (2007). I read a few pages and sat it down — I just was not ready to deal with another hand crew, full of confidence, setting off to fight a "minor fire" that would finish some of them.

But now I have started it, watching with compassion and horror.

Lines like this in The Thirtymile File remind me of Maclean senior: "For the Hagemeyers, the day would bring one missed portent after another, which added up to one huge miscalculation: that the natural world they counted on for spiritual solace cared in turn for them."

Eventually, I will get to the new one, The Esperanza Fire : Arson, Murder and the Agony of Engine 57. In due time. Meanwhile (because it is set in southern California?), a movie version is in the works.

↬ Wildfire Today

Yes, there is a literary allusion in my title. I wonder if Norman Maclean owned that book; he might well have.

A Ponderosa Forest Time-Lapse — Watch It Change

A series of photos of the same stand of trees in the Bitterroot National Forest, taken over 88 years. Sure, it's Montana, but ponderosa pine grows from Canada to Mexico. The first two pictures show a real "ponderosa parkland," the remaining seven do not.

The slide show comes from an NPR series on "megafires," such as last year's Las Conchas fire in northern New Mexico, that state's largest to date. Lots of interesting reading there.

(Originally linked on Wildfire Today.)

Montana Corgi Survives an Avalanche

A couple from Bozeman were cross-country skiing near Cooke City, Montana, when an avalanche carried away Dave Gaillard, 44. His wife survived by clinging to a tree, but their dog was presumed lost.

Only he was not.

Traces of Yellowstone Grizzly Bears

Wapiti Lake access blocked (MSNBC, July 2011).

On Monday, Sept. 12, which was a rainy day, M. and I car-toured the eastern side of Yellowstone National Park. (I had never seen some of its famous sights, such as the view of the falls from Artist's Point.)

When we passed the turn-off to the Wapiti Lake Trail, it was blocked every kind of barricade and tape in the Park Service warehouse.

Electric signs on the main road warned drivers not to stop and to stay in their vehicles. (And what about the many bicyclists? Are they just bear bait?)

Why? Because of the grizzly bear attack that killed a California hiker, Brian Matayoshi.

At the time, the bear that killed Matayoshi was not hunted down, but treated as a sow with cub exercising a legitimate right of (perceived) self-defense.

Now the Powers That Be are blaming Matayoshi and his wife for running and triggering the bear's predatory instincts.  

Authorities concluded that the couple's reaction - running, yelling and screaming upon the bear's approach - might have escalated the severity of the attack, according to reports.

Bear safety experts recommend people talk in a low, calm tone and stand their ground when encountering grizzlies. They say bears will sometimes "bluff charge" toward a perceived threat.

 Well, that settles it. 

In August, a visitor from Michigan, John Wallace, was killed on the Mary Mountain Trail, which we noticed was also barricaded at both ends.

"We recommend people carry bear pepper sprays," wildlife biologist Kerry Gunther told ABC. "It gives people a lot of the confidence to stand their ground." 

Yes, we carried  bear spray. On our one backcountry hike, we encountered an excited Canadian couple coming the other way who said that they had seen a sow grizz and a cub.

(I think they were Canadians because the guy used "half a mile" and "200 meters" in the same sentence.)

They were wearing bear bells. Personally, I don't think that bear bells do any good unless you chant Om Mani Padme Hum as well. Then if a bear eats you, you have a beneficial rebirth.

A German (?) man was walking out the trail behind them calling "Bär bär!" at intervals.

I decided just to fish a little more where we were, because the brookies were hitting a bead-head nymph pretty regularly.

Eventually we hiked in to the lake and back out again. I carried the bear spray canister in one hand. Saw nothing. I noticed that the older hikers tended to have bear spray, while the younger ones did not. Make what you will of that.

It's always interesting being in the (possible) presence of a superior predator. Sharpens your senses. But the truth is that although I have had many black bear encounters, I have never seen a grizzly bear in the wild (unless I did on my childhood trip to Yellowstone—can't recall).  That comes of living in the Southern rather than the Northern Rockies. Ours were eliminated a century ago, except for the puzzling grizz killed in 1979 in the Southern San Juans.

UNRELATED POSTSCRIPT: Amazon warrior on a big Percheron-cross horse saves boy from grizzly attack in Montana.

Whoosh, Back to the Pleistocene!

It looks like you will soon be able to hunt big game with spears and atlatls in Montana.

Just remember that the old-timers usually went out in groups--unless they were defensive ends for the Minnesota Vikings (YouTube video.)

(Via Outdoor Pressroom.)

Weather, Wildfire Forecast for Northern Rockies

A  Preliminary Fire Season 2010 Outlook for the Northern Rockies currently forecasts a dry summer.

Although the narrated slide show is focused on the Rockies from Grand Teton NP north to the Canadian border, you can also pick up some Southern Rockies information from the slides as well.

El Niño has been good to the mountains of Arizona and New Mexico, and pretty good to us in southern Colorado. At my house in the foothills, March brought at least three feet of snow, interrupted by melts, with April still to go.

Via the Wildfire Today blog, which also points out that the massive stands of beetle-killed pine in the Rockies are less likely to support catastrophic crown fires than are living trees.

While it may seem intuitive that dead trees will lead to more fires, there is little scientific evidence to support the contention that beetle-killed trees substantially increase risk of large blazes. In fact, there is evidence to suggest otherwise.

That was the "Katrina of the West," prediction, you may recall.

The Rabbi and the Police Dog

Your doggy Montana Hanukkah story here.

Two Flawed 'Nature' Films

M. and I recently watched This is Nowhere, a film with no particular narrative or point to make.

I suspect that the filmmakers went down to the Wal-Mart in Missoula, Montana, looking for the awful sickening rot at the heart of AmeriKKKa and found -- fairly ordinary, pleasant, middle-class people?

For instance, the widower who tired of rattling around in his big house, sold it, bought a motorhome and who now travels with his cat around the US and Mexico. (He was talking of driving to Costa Rica next.)

(Sickening! Wasteful!)

Yes, they know that Wal-Mart permits them to camp for free, knowing that they will stroll across the parking lot and spend money. And they don't care.

Unfortunately for the filmmaker Doug Hawes-Davis, his subjects just seem ordinary. Or maybe that fact is supposed to scare you.

One academic reviewer called it "a theater of the absurd acted out in surreal Wal-Mart-scapes and highway strip developments, vehicles and people jiggling in fast motion staccato, going nowhere"? Yeah, whatever.

Another nature-and-culture film that could have been good but took itself too seriously was Darwin's Nightmare.

What does it say when the real ecological issue at the documentary's heart is only shown for a moment in a video that is being watched by some of the people being filmed?

That is taking the idea of a "movie within the movie" too far and too literally. Instead, sensation overcomes information in Darwin's Nightmare

It is still worth seeing, but you will only understand if if you do your research first. That conclusion is no praise for the filmmakers.

Too bad. Both could have been better.

Meanwhile, here is a blog for full-time RV-ers.

Or you can live in a van and be an "independent contractor," like the Hobo Stripper. I wonder how long that lifestyle choice will last. At least she is doing better than Chris McCandless.

'Transitioning' into Montana

I mentioned Larimer County, Colorado's, online Code of the West.

But some find such documents a little ... harsh.

Counties throughout Montana have long published Codes of the West for newcomers, which basically warn them not to expect the same level of government services they received back East and not to be shocked if, say, they wake up one morning to see a rancher driving cattle through their yards.

“When you read them, they sound almost punitive,” said William Bryan Jr., executive director of the Rural Landscape Institute.

Instead, new Montanans can view the Path to Eden DVD, narrated by anchorman Tom Brokaw and designed "assist landowners in transitioning into Montana’s rural way of life." Renters and students are on their own, I guess.

(Via Mary Scriver.)