Clips

We love to watch wildlife in spring. Wolf cubs are venturing from the den and bears are eagerly searching for food after a winter of fasting. To get an up-close look at some of our native wildlife without standing in the rain or sleet, take a day trip to West Yellowstone.

At the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center, families can get face to face with bears, wolves and birds of prey without having to keep the bear spray handy. The animals at the Discovery Center cannot be released into the wild. Instead they give visitors an opportunity to observe, learn and appreciate grizzly bears and gray wolves.

The new Naturalist’s Cabin located between the two wolf habitats let’s you view both packs while enjoying a roaring fire or watching a National Geographic film.

The Discovery Center has several educational programs for children. Kids 5-12 years old will enjoy “Keeper Kids”, a program that allows them to hide food in the bear habitat (the bears aren’t there at the same time as the kids). Participants learn about bear feeding habits and how bears sniff out and find food. Check the website to find out more about Discovery Center programs.

There are picnic tables and a playground onsite, or walk a couple blocks to town for lunch or dinner.

The Yellowstone IMAX Theater sits next door the Discovery Center and provides an opportunity to learn more about the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, while being thoroughly entertained.

Three films: “Yellowstone”, “Bears” and “Lewis and Clark” gives you an inside view of Yellowstone and western history. Swooping shots make your stomach drop and the huge screen makes you feel like you are in the movie. The fourth film “Hurricane on the Bayou” tells the tale of Louisiana before and after Hurricane Katrina.

Know Before You Go

Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center
Hours: through April 16, 8:30 am-4:30 pm; starting April 17, 8:30 am-8:30 pm
Program times vary; call ahead to make a reservation
Rates: Adults (13 and older) $9.75, Seniors (62 +) $9.00, Child (5 - 12) $5.00, Child under 5 free.
Print out a coupon for $1.00 off each admission—through April 30—at their website.
Effective May 1: Adults $10.50, Seniors $9.75, Child $5.50, Child under 5 free
201 South Canyon, 406.646.7001 or 800.257.2570, www.grizzlydiscoveryctr.com

Yellowstone IMAX Theater
Hours: April—Wed.-Sun. shows hourly 2:00 pm-7:00pm, check the website for specific movies.
Rates: Adults (12 and older) $9.00, Seniors (62+) $8.50, Child (3-12) $6.50, Child under 3 free
101 South Canyon, 406.646.4100, www.yellowstoneimax.com

Montana Parent

On a dark winter morning I’m sitting in the living room chair waiting for the sun to come up—or the earth to turn towards the fiery orb. Too tired to do anything, but kept awake by the incessant kicking in my belly. Not even born this kid is demanding, waiting to get into the light, as impatient as his mom.

The wind is rushing around the house—it’s winter in Livingston. I listen to the plastic tumbling of the trash can in the alley. The shed door is blown open, exposing our rakes and shovels to anyone who might blow by on this dark, windy almost-morning. Our Labrador paces in the bedroom, waiting to get out, but if let out, will pace in the living room, wanting to get back in.

This winter is all about waiting for me. Waiting to fall asleep at night. Waiting for the sun to rise. Waiting for the baby to be born. Waiting for the wind to calm so I can walk the dogs along the river without worrying about their 70 and 100 pound bodies being blown to Big Timber. I’m not a Buddhist; I like things to happen and for life to get going. Patience, meditation, acceptance or peaceful serenity has never been my strong suit. I want to make things happen—now.

To bide my time I work, of course, and take long walks up a narrow valley in the Absaroka Mountains where I can get out of the wind and into the snow. Despite pleas from an about-to-be grandpa to avoid solo trips to the woods, I walk alone, introducing the baby to the ice-edged creek and chickadee songs. I point out snow laden Douglas-fir boughs and the remnant of a late summer harebell beneath kinnikinnick leaves.

Out here I’m not waiting. I’m walking. I’m observing. I’m dipping my fingers into the cold creek. I’m taking careful mental note on what is different and what is the same as the last time I was here. I’m relishing the stillness of the air and the contrast between the wind-swept Paradise Valley and this little draw in the mountains.

Leaving the forest and stepping into the meadow near the trailhead, I’m hit again by the wind. I don’t really mind it when I think about its origins (in fact, I think the wind defines who we are as Livingstonites—tough, persevering and a little crazy). The rapidly moving air is a direct link between Yellowstone and Livingston. The same bouncing molecules that circulated through bison nostrils, nourishes me as I pant my way up the hills.

The baby book says our unborn can hear the outside world; can hear me calling the dogs or my husband singing funny songs. I imagine he can also hear the wind whooshing just beyond the watery sounds of amniotic fluid. The wind may be a comfort to him. It’s is something he’s known from the moment he was created; it might be stillness that seems strange.

In elementary school we learn that hot air rises and cold air sinks. Fifty miles down the valley in Yellowstone National Park cold air gathers and sinks in the Yellowstone caldera. That cold air eventually fills all the space there is and then pours over the sides like water, following the Yellowstone River into the Paradise Valley where it explodes and roils sweeping the valley clean.

Just before reaching town, the wind squeezes through Rock Canyon and bursts into Livingston whipping plastic grocery bags into cottonwood trees and knocking over semis on the highway before sliding around the side of my house, gathering leaves and Dairy Queen trash into an eddy by the front door.

The wind connects me to the Park in the same way the river does. The wind connects me to wilderness the same way these nine long months of pregnancy connect me to a baby that I don’t yet know but who will soon be the center of my world.

I keep sitting in the chair, gliding back and forth, staring into the darkness outside the house. Waiting for the sun to come up. Waiting for the day to start. Waiting for the wind to slow down and waiting for a baby to be born. Despite the waiting, the wanting to get on with it, I know these moments are important. Perhaps that is the lesson of this pregnancy. Life is about right now; it’s about the red willow branches and the undulating surface of the river as the wind blows from left to right. There’s always tomorrow—when things will be different—but there is also right now, pregnant, in the dark with the wind howling outside.

Montana Parent
March 05, 2007

Name: Bob Harmon
Hometown: Bozeman, Montana
Vocation: Chief preparator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies and crew chief
Known For: Finding the first dinosaur bones with soft tissue

Bob Harmon is not an excitable man. His face isn’t animated as he points out the sauropod leg he is building out of fossils and plaster for a Museum of the Rockies exhibit that will open this summer. He doesn’t jump up and down describing the Tyrannosaurus rex fossil he found in the Montana badlands, which — when sawed open and put under a microscope — revealed the first soft tissue found in dinosaur bones.

But the slight grin on his weathered face and the way his brown eyes laugh as he shares his stories make it clear that wandering around in the hot sun looking for dinosaurs electrifies this 50-something Montana native. As he puts it: “Prospecting and finding bone is a kick for me.”

Harmon is the right-hand man of Jack Horner, who is perhaps the world’s most famous paleontologist, the man who discovered that dinosaurs care for their young and also served as technical advisor to the Jurassic Park movies. Harmon is the chief preparator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies and crew chief for a three-to-four-month field season each summer. Harmon is also something of an anomaly: Though his colleagues mostly have master’s or doctoral degrees, he never graduated high school.

“In a way, I don’t have any right to be here,” he says. “I quit school at 16 and never went back; I’ve just bluffed my way through it.”

Harmon grew up fishing and hunting around Cut Bank, Mont. As a kid on family outings, he collected fossilized snails. Then one day, 26 years ago, he stubbed his toe on a dinosaur bone. He didn’t know it was a dinosaur bone at the time, but the fossil intrigued him enough to prompt him to do a little research at the Cut Bank library. Unfortunately, he chuckles, “all they had were little kids’ dinosaur books.”

Not long after the failed library expedition, Harmon met the people who could satisfy his growing curiosity. One day, as he was out roaming the riverbank looking for fossils, Harmon spotted a paleontology field camp. Knowing the crew would be curious about someone wandering through their prospecting territory — and hoping they could identify the bones he had found — Harmon made sure to get noticed. “I kind of set myself up on a hill with my big Samoyed dog, and they came running,” he recalls.

This encounter led to dinner and Rainier beers with Jack Horner and his field crew. By the end of the evening, Harmon had been hired, giving up his career as an oil rig roughneck to become a professional bone collector.

Every summer, the hunt for fossils takes Harmon and his crew to some of the most inhospitable parts of Montana and Wyoming. With the sun blazing down, the crew spends all day prospecting for bones.

And sometimes the bones almost fall right out of the hillsides. Harmon was eating lunch one day in 2000, near the Fort Peck Reservoir in eastern Montana, when he turned around and noticed a T-Rex bone jutting out of the anticline above him. There was still soft tissue in the cracked femur of this 68 million-year-old dinosaur. It had been previously thought that organic material couldn’t exist in fossil material over 100,000 years old.

The dinosaur was named “B-Rex” for (Bob) Harmon, and today it sits in the museum upstairs from his lab. Harmon enjoys working in the lab, preparing fossils for researchers or museum exhibits. Still, it’s the fieldwork he loves. “It’s really something to see an animal come out of the earth,” he says, a grin spreading across his face. “You see a T-Rex skull come out of the ground, and it jacks you up.

“The prospect of discovery is the coolest thing. You never know what’s in the dirt until you start digging. Ninety percent of the time it’s nothing good; the good ones are so rare, but that’s what keeps it exciting.”

High Country News
April 30, 2007

Janelle Holden is in the business of changing minds — including her own. Holden, the coexistence director for the nonprofit Predator Conservation Alliance, grew up on a cattle ranch on the Great Plains, just east of the Rocky Mountain Front. When grizzly bears began moving into the area in the 1980s, her father was far from delighted.

Holden, the daughter of two Republican legislators, followed her parents’ political path. During college, she interned with Montana Sen. Conrad Burns, and later served as assistant communications director for Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho, both Republicans and longtime opponents of predator recovery. After a year in Washington, D.C., Holden made her way back West, eventually moving to Colorado to work for two small-town newspapers.

Holden soon realized that the West was no longer the place she remembered or imagined. Oil and gas drilling and mining were changing the public lands, and while she still agreed with Republicans’ fiscal values, she began to question the party’s recent resistance to environmental laws and regulations.

In 2000, while she was working as the agriculture and public-lands reporter for the Cortez Journal and the Durango Herald, her political convictions received a serious jolt. Holden’s managing editor invited her to see then-presidential candidate Ralph Nader speak in Durango.

Holden found that several of Nader’s positions, such as legalizing the production of hemp for paper and clothing, made sense to her. "I’m a Republican, and I agree with this guy," she thought. "How can this be?" After the speech, she concluded, "I’m probably not in sync with Republicans on conservation anymore."

A few years later, Holden came upon an advertisement for a position with the nonprofit Predator Conservation Alliance in Montana. She thought it might be a way for her to work on the environmental issues she cared about. "I grew up on a ranch with grizzly bears," she thought. "Maybe they’ll hire me." She was right.

The alliance had noticed that, although conservationists were winning a lot of battles on behalf of predators in the courtroom, they weren’t gaining many new allies on the ground. The Range Riders Project, one of several that Holden manages, aims to do just that, working in partnership with the Madison Valley Ranchlands Group, an association of ranchers in southwest Montana.

The project has hired riders to patrol the sagebrush and stay near the livestock 24 hours a day, in hopes that the presence of humans and horses will deter wolves.

After only two field seasons, it’s too early to claim success, but no Madison Valley cows were killed by wolves this summer or the last. The project has been duplicated in the Boulder Valley south of Big Timber, Mont., with similarly encouraging results.

And Holden can take part of the credit for local ranchers’ enthusiasm. "She works for an environmental group with a big, scary name," says Todd Graham, ranch manager for the Sun Ranch in the Madison Valley, "but she plays her cards really well in front of a group of ranchers. Those are her ranch smarts coming into play."

High Country News
November 14, 2005

NAME
Cathy Whitlock

VOCATION
Montana State University paleoecologist

AGE
51

HOME BASE
Bozeman, Montana

NOTED FOR
Discerning ecosystem changes over the last 20,000 years

SHE SAYS
"It’s a great puzzle trying to figure out how an ecosystem works."

"For me, it’s about solving a big mystery," says Cathy Whitlock, describing her work as a paleoecologist at Montana State University. Whitlock studies the environments of the past, using pollen and charcoal remains from deeply buried lake sediments to understand how plant communities and climates have changed through time. Information about how ecosystems looked and operated thousands of years ago, she hopes, will also help society prepare for the future.

Whitlock has long been intrigued by the recent geological past. An avid hiker, she often uses her time on the trails to ask herself, "How did the ecosystem get to be like this? What explains the mosaic of trees?" She studied geology as an undergraduate at Colorado College and as a graduate student at the University of Washington, where she focused on "the younger side of geology" — the 20,000 years following the last ice age. After 14 years as a professor and researcher at the University of Oregon, Whitlock moved to Montana State University last July.

To understand the past, Whitlock and her graduate students wade into present-day wetlands, bogs and lakes, located throughout the coastal rainforest of Oregon, the Northern Rockies and the northern Great Plains.

They take samples at these longtime study sites by maneuvering a long sediment-coring "barrel," which looks like a metal pipe, into the muck and mud. Then, they muscle the barrel out of the sucking lake sediment, securing a sediment core just a meter long and 5 inches wide.

The cores are taken into the lab, sliced into sections about as thick as Oreo cookies, and examined under a high-resolution microscope. Each section represents approximately a decade of deposition, and contains a mixture of lake sediments, including charcoal and pollen from a variety of plant species. Whitlock’s practiced eye readily picks out pine pollen, which is shaped like miniature Mickey Mouse heads, and she can also distinguish the pollen of white pines from that of two- and three-needle pines.

By identifying pollen and dating charcoal deposits, Whitlock pieces together vegetation and fire patterns. For example, her research indicates an abrupt and widespread arrival of lodgepole pine in the Northern Rockies 11,000 years ago. "It suggests a rapid warming, and a shift towards more fires," she says. At the same time, Douglas-fir was appearing across the Pacific Northwest, spreading throughout the region in a matter of a few centuries. "When the climate warmed, it was suddenly everywhere," she says. "It is remarkable to think that our most common trees were once so sparse that we can’t locate their whereabouts during the glacial period."

High Country News
May 30, 2005