Last Best News (https://montana-mint.com/lastbestnews/category/diversions/page/21/)
It turns out that stupid-people tricks in Yellowstone National Park—you know, people petting bison, taking selfies with bears, walking on thermal features—are not strictly a modern phenomenon. As Mike Stark makes plain in his new book, “Wrecked in Yellowstone,” things were even worse in the earliest days of the world’s first national park. (more…) Continue Reading →
“Yellowstone Ranger,” a memoir by former park ranger Jerry Mernin, has all of the ingredients of a boring book. It’s a book by and about a man who was by no means a professional writer and who spent most of his career out of the public eye. It is long and episodic, and the humans it mentions are among the least interesting critters in the whole book. But if Mernin set out to write a boring book, he failed miserably. Instead, he wrote a book that should appeal to just about everybody who loves bear stories and to anybody who has ever dreamed that being a park ranger must be the best job in the world. Continue Reading →
For most of her life, British-born Anne Kania had what she called a typical aversion to guns—typical among opera-singing, liberal-minded Englishwomen, anyway. She thought that guns were a barbaric throwback and that hunting was only for rednecks. When she first visited Montana to see Bruce Kania, the man she would eventually marry, her views began to change. (more…) Continue Reading →
On the Friday before the Fourth of July, as the camper trailers started rolling by on the Boulder River Road where it turns to gravel about 30 miles south of Big Timber, Carl Ronneberg performed a decade-old ritual. At the Main Boulder Ranger Station, a log structure that’s one of the oldest Forest Service facilities in the country, he’d spent the morning sweeping the floor and tidying up. Then he went out, raised the American flag on a wooden pole and opened the station’s doors for another summer season. (more…) Continue Reading →
If you think young adult fiction is something to be looked down upon, or that the people who write young adult fiction are to be condescended to, I invite you to match wits, or sentences, with Blythe Woolston. Woolston is a Billings author, a late-bloomer whose first book, “The Freak Observer,” was published six years ago, when she was 53. She has published three other books since then and she is almost done with another. (more…) Continue Reading →
Potential customers of and investors in a downtown Billings cooperative bookstore got a sneak peek at the space Thursday night. The two-hour open house at This House of Books, in the old Wendy’s at Second Avenue North and North 29th Street, attracted a steady flow of people. The event no doubt got a bit of a boost from the Pita Pit-hosted Alive After 5 concert, which drew hundreds of people to the stretch of Second Avenue between North 29th and Broadway. (more…) Continue Reading →
For most Montanans, flies probably fall into two groups: 1) Things you swat, often with lunatic gusto and 2) Things you cast, often (in my case) with lunatic glee. And if asked to visualize a “fly,” most people probably picture something that resembles the familiar, if drab, house and cluster flies that shelter—or become trapped—in homes. Or, perhaps, they envisage the metallic bluebottles that amass in droning clouds around garbage cans and dog poop. (more…) Continue Reading →
I had a dream last week that I was driving a semi-truck. In the dream I had just topped a steep pass to start my descent when I realized that I didn’t know the first thing about semis and that I was probably doomed. I forgot all about the dream until a few days later, when I received an email from the American Trucking Association, the subject line of which read: “Have you ever taken a ride in a big rig?” (more…) Continue Reading →
Red Lodge Ales is on the verge of a major expansion into Billings, which includes opening a taproom, making fresh-pressed hard cider and hiring Jason Corbridge as the chef. “I think it’s really an exciting project,” said Sam Hoffmann, president of Red Lodge Ales. “It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.” (more…) Continue Reading →
Among guests at the opening of a new art gallery in downtown Billings Thursday night was Bob Durden, senior curator at the Yellowstone Art Museum. Standing in the long, narrow, high-ceilinged Stapleton Gallery on the second floor of the Stapleton Building at North Broadway and First Avenue North, Durden said that what he liked most about the new gallery was that it brought art back to a building that used to be teeming with it. (more…) Continue Reading →
