Montana Untamed

The 16th Biennial Scientific Conference on the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem held at Big Sky recently covered a wealth of topics about the region, which includes southwestern Montana.

Brett French, outdoor editor at the Billings Gazette, attended one day of the three-day event.

From that, he’s written stories regarding the pressures facing the region that national park and forest officials are seeing, as well as talks about grizzly bear management.

For at least a decade, a pair of great gray owls have made their nest each spring in the top of a broken cottonwood tree trunk on the Blackfoot-Clearwater Game Range northeast of Missoula. They fledge chicks almost every year, and they’ve become increasingly popular with wildlife photographers — including professionals — who appreciate the nest’s easy access and visibility from the ground. 

So it made sense that some photographers were upset this spring when they learned that the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks planned to remove the nest.

Why would FWP do that?

Mainly because of the photographers themselves. And because the nest wasn’t actually natural. 

With me today is Joshua Murdock, outdoors and natural resources reporter at the Missoulian. He visited the nest with an FWP biologist and met with photographers.

Next year, for the first time in more than 100 years, farmers and ranchers across Montana’s Hi-Line region will face a summer without irrigation water.

Normally, water from the St. Mary River is diverted into the Milk River, which runs through north-central Montana towns like Havre and Malta. 

But the infrastructure that moved the water failed in June, and it won’t be repaired until the 2025 irrigating season is over. Agricultural producers say they face devastation. 

By mid-August this year, the Milk River above Havre had run completely dry. That could be the norm for all of next summer. 

With me today is Joshua Murdock, reporter for the Missoulian, who visited the St. Mary Canal to inspect damage, and who traveled the entire length of the Milk River affected by the loss of water. 

Pronghorns, also called antelope, are one of the coolest animals in Montana.

They have lived in North America since the last ice age when woolly mammoths and cheetahs roamed the region. Those animals are gone, but the pronghorns remain.

For four years Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks scientists, aided by graduate students, conducted a study of eight pronghorn populations across the state. 

Here to tell us more about what the study revealed is Billings Gazette outdoor editor Brett French.

On July 18, Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks reported a member of its staff had killed a male grizzly bear that had been raiding homes, businesses and garbage cans in the Gardiner area for weeks.

Repeated attempts to trap the 15-year-old bear were unsuccessful. The bear was shot while in the Yellowstone River, about 4 miles north of Gardiner and the North Entrance to Yellowstone National Park.

One of the raids the bear made was at Chester Evitt’s house. Here to tell us more about that encounter and the situation in Gardiner is Brett French, outdoor editor for the Billings Gazette.

On July 10, the Montana Supreme Court heard why state leaders think a climate change legal victory by a group of young people should be overturned.

Held vs. Montana found that the legislature violated the state constitution when it blocked environmental agencies from analyzing greenhouse gas emissions in fossil fuel projects. 

In their appeal, state attorneys argued the case should be thrown out because the youths weren’t pointing to any specific project that was hurting them. The state also claimed Montana didn’t produce enough greenhouse gas to have an impact on global warming, so a court victory wouldn’t fix anything the youths were asking for.

The youths drew on a long list of scientists to show how state policies encouraged fossil fuel development, which was ruining the climate they depend for health, business and recreation. A district court judge ruled that violated their right to a “clean and healthful environment” as specifically listed in the Constitution. That meant the state greenhouse gas limitation was unconstitutional.

But this case is about a lot more than legality of one environmental law. Let’s check out what the rest of this iceberg of a lawsuit looks like.

Just as Montana, Idaho and Wyoming politicians prepared to sign a three-state agreement on grizzly bear management, grizzly protection advocates sent a warning they plan to sue over a crucial part of the states’ plan.

They don’t like the idea of trucking grizzlies from one recovery area to another as a solution to the bears’ genetic diversity.

Grizzly bears remain a threatened species under federal Endangered Species Act protection. State wildlife officials say the bears are recovered and should be turned over to local state management.

Grizzly defenders counter that will open the door for trophy hunting and unsustainable predator shooting. It would also put grizzlies in conflict with a different kind of advocate – black bear hunters.

On this episode, Rob Chaney, Lee Montana's statewide enterprise editor and author of 'Grizzly in the Driveway' makes sense of recent grizzly bear related headlines.

The fifth night was the coldest, and Thomas Gray worried he might freeze to death if he stopped moving. 

The 73-year-old boater from North Fork, Idaho, was huddled inside a pitch-black trailer just outside the remote Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness on May 21. He was near an empty campground and silent airstrip; the only road there was snowed in and the highway was miles away and over a mountain pass. 

Gray’s story is harrowing and improbable, not only because of his own feat of backcountry survival, but because his brother died two years earlier, almost to the day, in almost the same place, when they attempted the same float that year. 

With me today is Joshua Murdock, outdoors and natural resources reporter at the Missoulian. He extensively interviewed Thomas Gray, his wife Lori, the people who found him and the people involved in searching for his brother two years ago.

Scot Bealer loves to tell stories. And it turns out his love of fishing works well for this. Because a life spent fishing results in many adventures and misadventure that become fodder for good stories.

That’s all wrapped up in his new book “Most Trout Don’t Read” published earlier this year by Farcountry Press in Helena. 

Bealer has always been drawn to teaching the ways of fishing. A bulk of that knowledge came from the L.L. Bean Fly Fishing Schools and casting into trout waters across the west. 

When he’s not on the water fishing, Scot works as an instructor for the Hooked on Fishing Program through Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

He’s here with me to share the lessons he has learned from his time pursuing trout on the fly.

Since Intake Diversion Dam was completed on the Yellowstone River in 1905, pallid sturgeon have faced a blockade during their annual upstream spring spawning runs.

The dam is located between Glendive and Sidney and became a popular place for paddlefish snagging since the fish stacked up below the dam in spring.

In the spring of 2022, after three years of construction, a 2-mile long bypass channel was opened. This short waterway allows pallid sturgeon, paddlefish and other native species to swim around a dam that has long blocked their passage. The bypass channel was a $44 million investment to see if pallid sturgeon, which were listed as an endangered species in the river in 1990, will now have enough room to migrate upstream and successfully spawn.

To learn more about pallid sturgeon and efforts to save the fish, Brett French, outdoor editor of the Billings Gazette, is here to talk with me today.