News photo ...

I suppose the good thing about always carrying a camera around is the fact that once in a great while you might get the chance to witness something truly dramatic. That happened to me in Butte back in October 2003, when I looked out a window one morning and saw this.

Butte's had more than its share of fires over the last few decades, of course ... caused both by accident and by intent. And almost always when it happens, something historic and irreplaceable is lost.

Maps and computers ...

I've confessed to my fondness for maps more than once before here, I think ... both old ones and new ones. As a group, there's no doubt that they're the greatest form of recreational reading ever.

Montana maps are especially important to me, both because they're lots of fun to mentally wander through, and because they're practical guides to my ongoing roadtrips. They come in all sorts of forms -- I've got a small collection of old state highway maps; a set of big old maps of the National Forests; a few old railroad maps; some of Glacier topos; a whole bunch of odds and ends, and a couple of big paperbound atlases that I take with me on drives. (For that, I strongly recommend the volume that Benchmark Maps issued a year or so ago.)

The best close-up maps of the state, of course, are the 1:25,000 quads produced by the USGS, and a full collection of those would be a thing to have ... but both the money and the storage space would be a little much for me. You've been able to view them on the internet for a few years now, but they were hard to find and awkward to navigate. Recently, though, the Montana Historical Society made available a new website that has by far the best online map of Montana I've ever seen.

The site is at mtplacenames.org, and it's just made for browsing. When you start out, the data you see is that found on the official state highway map, but as you zoom in you begin to see more and more topographic data, and at the maximum zoom you're looking at scans of the USGS topo maps. The whole state is there, and it's a great resource ... and if you're like me you'll be able to spend endless hours wandering around.

(The site has another feature, too ... all of the text from the Historical Society's recent Montana Place Names book, each entry linked to the appropriate spot on the map. That's definitely fun, too ... but I have to confess the place names book was disappointing to me, and here the map itself is definitely the great attraction.)

Shortest day ...

Well, we've finally reached the day that I look forward to the most each year: the Winter Solstice. After today, Montana's tragically short winter days will start getting longer again, and our insanely long winter nights will start getting shorter. Now there's nowhere to go but up ... at least for the next six months.

In honor of that, and of the upcoming holiday, here's a nighttime shot I took in uptown Butte a little over two years ago. I don't know the exact time of this photograph, but it was well before the dinner hour.

One Hundred Stories ...

There are an awful lot of books about Montana being published nowadays ... and as always, Glacier Park is a favorite topic. The park is getting more literary attention than ever thanks to its upcoming centennial, and the results are typically mixed: some are quick and shallow coffee-table exercises designed to turn a buck, and others are wonderful labors of love.

Last week, I received my copy of a new book that definitely falls into the latter category, and though there's a bit of self-promotion involved I wanted to mention it here. The volume is titled, A View Inside Glacier National Park: 100 Years, 100 Stories, and it's an anthology of personal reminiscences of Glacier, compiled in honor of the centennial. The list of contributors reads almost like a Glacier Who's Who, and if you've been around the park for a while you'll likely recognize a good many of the names. A number of the individual stories are really wonderful, and the entire book is a great read. Collectively, the essays are able to convey what makes Glacier such a special place to so many people ... and that's something that no other book I've seen is quite able to do.

The book is available from the Glacier Association ... and as for the self-promotion part, I'll confess to being one of the story contributors. But you should buy it for the other 99 stories.

A complaint ...

Those of you who know me in person know that I'm inclined to complain every once in a while ... and well, I want to air a complaint today.

My post about The Big Sky mentioned Montana's long history of tourism promotion slogans, and I confess I'm perfectly happy with some of the old ones -- "Land of Shining Mountains," for example, is pretty hard to beat. Nonetheless, the state tourism folks somehow feel the need to invent new slogans every once in a while. The current one being hyped by Travel Montana is "There's Nothing There," which has apparently been getting good reviews from advertising guys ... though it just makes my eyes roll.

The thing that I really want to complain about, though, is this: a big chunk of the current Montana ad campaign focuses on Yellowstone, as in the sample below. Travel Montana has been doing this for years, blithely ignoring the fact that the Yellowstone photos they use are all shot in Wyoming! In fact, roughly 96 percent of the park is in Wyoming ... making ads like this seem pretty disingenuous at best. It's embarrassing for the state, I think, and if I were a Wyomingite I'd be a little ticked off.

Besides, we don't need Yellowstone! The real Montana is way cooler, anyway.

Rivals ...

So today is the day of the annual Cat-Griz football game ... the University of Montana versus Montana State. I'm not going to weigh in on the thing, because as I've said I think big-time sports fandom is pretty silly. I think I'll just get the heck out of town for a few hours to escape some of the nonsense.

That said, I suppose I could compare the two schools in some other way ... though for my own safety I won't go so far as to say which of the universities is the better one. Instead, as an historian and an architecture fan I could compare the campuses. Both have a number of extremely handsome old buildings and thoroughly nondescript newer ones, and both have coldly destroyed some of their landmarks ... though overall I think UM has both the best architecture, and some of the worst.

Both of the schools originally had campus plans designed by Cass Gilbert, one of the most noted of twentieth-century architects ... and both schools have thoroughly erased many of those lovely landscapes with really unfortunate new construction. MSU's behavior has been particularly egregious in this regard.

But the most telling thing is a look at the focal points of the two campuses. Montana Hall at MSU barely stands out at all, with the new buildings overshadowing it and the erratic landscaping ... and the fact that the school's awful-looking pedestrian mall runs along the back of the building, so that's all that most people ever see. The UM campus couldn't be more different -- their Main Hall is the keystone of a huge grassy oval, and is backed by a mountain with a giant "M" on it. And at the other end of the oval there's a giant bronze grizzly. It's all gorgeous, and couldn't be more perfect.

Though they'll never admit it, the MSU people have been insanely jealous of the oval and that grizzly for a very long time ... so this year they set up a big metal bobcat on a nondescript plaza at the Bozeman campus. It's a pale and obvious imitation, and actually kinda sad.

So even if you don't care about football, now you know which campus wins.

Right here in River City ...

Some of you might remember an old production called "The Music Man," about a con artist who sweeps into a small, hapless town to fleece the place. Well, similar stories occasionally take place in real life, too, except without Robert Preston and all the singing. When it's happened at a community level in Montana the favorite target has probably been Butte, that most hapless of places ... but I think this year's prize for being duped will undoubtedly go to the little town of Hardin.

A few years ago, some Texas promoters showed up in Hardin and told them that their economic woes would be over if they just built themselves a prison ... and so the town did, but nobody bothered to figure out where to find inmates for the place. So the prison sits empty, the construction bonds are in default, and the Texans have gone home. And now another Harold Hill has shown up in town, the head of a mysterious company called "American Police Force" that has promised to open the prison, pour millions into the town, and be Hardin's savior in a hundred other ways. The company has a ludicrous website but no paper trail, and now it turns out that its president has a long history of fraud convictions and personal bankruptcies. But Hardin still has faith. It's going to be fun watching all this play out, and it's going to be a heck of a story ... it's too bad Hunter S. Thompson isn't still alive to write it.

Anyhow, I haven't taken a current photo of Hardin for you, so here's an historic image of the place. This probably dates from about 1920 or so.

Marching ...

The Fourth of July is a time for patriotic reflections, of course, but in Bozeman this year it was also a venue for political expression. There were two marches down the town's Main Street yesterday morning ... one was sponsored by an angry, far-right group, but the other was far more good-natured, designed to poke a bit of fun at the right-wingers.

My dog and I marched with the latter group, a very genial bunch united under the satirical name, "The Green Coalition of Gay Loggers for Jesus." It was a fine time, and the perfect way to celebrate the Fourth. I took this photo a few minutes after the march ended, and it seemed like a good reflection of the holiday.

Shame on Northwestern ...

Yesterday's post mentioned Bozeman's news story of the year -- the explosion last March that destroyed half a block of Main Street businesses. The explosion was apparently caused by a natural gas leak coming from a broken pipeline in the alley. The pipeline was owned by Northwestern Energy, the state's major public utility, and the incident has cast a very unwanted spotlight on them over the past few months.

A couple of decades ago, the state's utility provider was Montana Power, a local company with a network of mostly hydroelectric plants that provided power cheaply and efficiently. And then two things happened: the state decided that free enterprise should be king, and deregulated the company; and Montana Power got greedy, and bet the farm on a speculative expansion into high tech. Not long after that, of course, everything collapsed in a spectacular fashion. Soon the company was bankrupt, and investigative reporters from 60 Minutes were chasing its executives through the back alleys of Butte.

Much of the old Montana Power ended up being sold to an unimpressive out-of-state provider called Northwestern Energy, and now our rates are a lot higher and there's a fair amount of mistrust all around. And of course it's worse in Bozeman these days, both because of the explosion itself and because the utility's response to it was seen by many to be less than supportive. So you're seeing signs like this scattered through our downtown nowadays:

The explosion ...

Here's a photo I took of one of Montana's more dramatic events in 2009: the explosion and fire that destroyed half a block of downtown Bozeman last March. The blast killed a person, destroyed four lovely old historic buildings, and traumatized the community in a way that few events have.

This photo shows the remains of the infamous Rocking R Bar, which had been a second home to generations of Bozeman college students. Two days after the explosion, and the ruins are still smoldering.

More on this in tomorrow's post.