Not registered to vote? Do it now

It's a crowded ballot facing voters in November, with choices for everything from U.S. president to county commissioner and ballot issues ranging from new schools to marriage amendments.

But if you want to make your voice heard in the election, you have to be registered.

And Monday is the deadline to register to vote in the Nov. 2 election.

All new and updated registration forms must be in at the county election department office in Kalispell by 5 p.m. on Monday.

The stakes are high in this year's election; every vote - and every voter - is important.

Monday is not only the deadline to register - it's also the beginning of absentee voting.

Those who want to get an early start on voting can get absentee ballots starting Monday.

They pulled it off - 200 hard-scrambling backcountry grunts managed to complete a grueling summer of collecting bear hair for an ambitious, unprecedented grizzly bear population study.

Some 33,000 hair samples were collected from rub trees and scent-baited sites surrounded by barbed wire in some of the most remote and inhospitable corners of an 8-million-acre study area stretching from Lincoln to the Canadian border.

Understandably, the genetic analysis of those samples will take several months, and making statistical sense of the findings is expected to take at least a couple years.

We are anxious to see the results that will answer a question that has been a topic of conversation at Montana bars and coffee shops for years: How many grizzly bears are in those mountains?

The results will be worth the wait.

The grizzly study produced some notable numbers this summer, and another set of impressive statistics came out of Glacier National Park.

From January through August, the park tallied a visitor count of 1.64 million. That's up almost 27 percent from the fire-damaged tourist season a year ago and even an increase of 5 percent from 2002.

In August alone Glacier had a whopping 604,733 visitors - more than double the numbers for that month in 2003.

Numbers from other sources ranging from Big Mountain to Glacier Park International Airport also point to a banner summer for visitors to Northwest Montana and a return to "pre-9/11 levels of travel," according to AAA Montana.

And this visitor surge occurred despite record-high gasoline prices, so all in all it's encouraging news for the local tourism industry.