Beetle Battle

Coming soon, to a pine tree near you! He’s a tiny little feller, about the size of a grain of rice, but boy is he hungry. The Mountain Pine Beetle Dendroctonus ponderosae is a Rocky Mountain native and we had learned to live with occasional outbreaks. We are now in the middle of a full [...]

Coal ash conundrum

Last week, the Bugle published an article concerning a recent National Research Council study on the hidden health and environmental consequences of power production in the U.S. The study found that we pay, as a nation, about $120 billion per year, mostly in increased health problems and early deaths for our reliance on fossil fuels.
Along [...]

Thanks for the help

Just what’s up with all those out of state tourists catching all my fish and killing all my elk? Why don’t we just tell them all to go home so we can have Paradise all to ourselves? Well, as you might expect, there are folks studying just those questions. The Institute for Tourism and Recreation [...]

$3 Billion Hose Pipe

About a month ago, we talked about a fantastical idea by Colorado developer, Aaron Million, (apt name) to build a ten-foot diameter hose pipe to suck water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir and shoot it 600 miles down to Denver so the Rocky Mountain Front could continue to grow at current unsustainable rates.
Well, it seems that [...]

“Nearly Flawless Effort”

In 1998 folks began catching invasive lake trout in Swan Lake and the Swan River. Lake trout are large top-tier predators who have a tendency to out-compete existing fish populations when they become established. In Flathead Lake, lake trout have added to the myriad threats to native populations of Bull Trout. As threatened Bull Trout [...]

I’ll Have The Chicken

A recent USGS study found mercury contamination in every fish sampled in 291 streams nationwide. Mercury concentrations in fish at more than two-thirds of the sites exceeded the value of 0.1 micrograms per gram (μg/g) of mercury  that is of concern for the protection of fish-eating mammals. 27% of the sites exceeded 0.3 μg/g, which [...]

Major Conceptual and Factual Errors

Amid all the hoopla and invective of the current health care debate, the Bugle failed to report on an important report recently released on the Otter Creek coal tracts near Ashland. The report; “The Value of the Otter Creek Coal Tracts to the State of Montana: The Dangers of Relying on the Norwest Corporation Appraisal” [...]

Mining Law Reform

In 1998, Pegasus Gold, a Canadian mining conglomerate, opened the Beal Mountain mine just above German Gulch. After extracting over $400 million in gold
over the next nine years, the company filed for bankruptcy. They left behind hundreds of acres of unreclaimed, stripped hillsides and a 70-acre leach pond that sits on a geologic fault line. [...]

Lest We Forget

This week, eight internationally-known photographers are encamped in the Transboundary Flathead creating images of the area threatened by coal development. The camping trip is sponsored by the International League of Conservation Photographers (iLCP) as part of what they are calling the Flathead RAVE, or Rapid Assessment Visual Expedition. The photographers will “be working closely with [...]

Remembering Lonesome Larry

Back in 1991 a single Sockeye Salmon constituted the entire run of fish to Redfish Lake in the Stanley Basin of the upper Snake River. That fish was nicknamed “Lonesome Larry“. The lake was named for the red spawning colors of these salmon and the species was then considered functionally extinct. Yesterday, biologists trapped the [...]