Last Best News (https://montana-mint.com/lastbestnews/category/montana/page/20/)
The centerpiece of a new exhibit at the Yellowstone County Museum is a Ghost Dance shirt made for a son of Sitting Bull, but Kathy Barton’s favorite piece in the exhibit is a pair of Arapaho moccasins. Barton, the museum’s curator, said the soles of the moccasins are clearly marked with a series of horizontal scratches, vivid testimony to the side-to-side shuffling motion that marked Ghost Dance ceremonies. (more…) Continue Reading →
We humans like to name things, quite often for what they look like or sound like. It’s also useful for finding your way about. Natives referred to this region as the “Country of the Mountains” or “Shining Mountains.” (more…) Continue Reading →
Mike Booth and Cory Johnson started the Red Lodge Songwriters Festival last year, hoping it would become an annual event that got bigger every year. It looks like they’re on the right track. The second annual festival starts next Thursday, June 22, and this year will feature two members of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, with 12 shows at six Red Lodge venues scheduled during the three-day event. (more…) Continue Reading →
How I missed visiting Bannack for all these years I can’t really say. I spent four years in Butte and Anaconda in the early 1980s, during which time I did manage to explore Virginia City and Nevada City, those two other early gold camps, but somehow I never got to Bannack. Blame it on my youth and my heedlessness, and the fact that I had a young child at home. I was also nearly always broke and the owner of unreliable cars. (more…) Continue Reading →
One week after President Donald Trump shunned the world’s leading scientists and pulled the United States from the global pact on climate change, more than 1,200 U.S. business leaders, governors, mayors and college presidents signed an open letter to the world. Despite the president’s decision, they wrote, America would continue to support climate action in hopes of meeting the goals of the Paris Accord, even “in the absence of leadership from Washington.” (more…) Continue Reading →
In a tense and often clumsy hearing in Helena on Monday, a handful of taxi companies tried to convince the Montana Public Service Commission to deny an operating permit for a national rideshare company looking to expand to the state. Members of the commission took nearly four hours of testimony from multiple parties regarding a request by Lyft Inc. to begin operating in Montana. The commission approved a similar application by Uber in late 2015, giving a reluctant nod to changing technology and the demands of the traveling public. (more…) Continue Reading →
On Aug. 3, 2014, late in the afternoon, Dr. David Lehnherr lay in a shelter near Black Canyon Lake, high in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, all alone. He had had a nasty fall and a long tumble down a rocky slope earlier in the day, and he had sustained several serious injuries to his legs, his ribs and his head. His hiking companion had left him there while he walked out in search of help, but it was getting dark and the weather was taking a turn for the worse. (more…) Continue Reading →
Finally, springtime is in full swing and summer is just around the corner. This invigorating seasonal shift signals the revival of two key insect-related events:
1) The transformation of our house’s western exposure into a Bacchanalian bone zone for randy swarms of box elder bugs recently sun-flushed from their winter hideaways and onto our front stoop. The result is like something out of a John Waters film: excrement-stained walls and windows, a mailbox filled with copulating foursomes doing it in the dark, and let’s not forget the dribbled gobs of abandoned egg clusters that, when crushed, dissolve into a smear of blood-hued vitals. (more…) Continue Reading →
A legislative scorecard released this week by one of the state’s major conservation groups paints a stark picture of the partisan divide in Helena. The Northern Plains Resource Council, based in Billings, tallied votes on seven pieces of legislation considered important by its members. With the state House and Senate both controlled by Republican majorities during the recently concluded 2017 Legislature, it perhaps wasn’t surprising that the NPRC was on the losing side of all seven bills. (more…) Continue Reading →
Montana Gov. Steve Bullock led a chorus of state and regional environmental groups in condemning President Trump’s decision Thursday to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord. In a written statement, Bullock called the move “short-sighted and dangerous” and out of step with what Montanans from all walks of life know to be true. (more…) Continue Reading →
