EDITORIAL: Time to tame your inner dragon
Lakeside is ready to put its hospitality on full display this weekend as the Montana Dragon Boat Festival takes place along the west shore of Flathead Lake.
It’s a new location this year for the popular event, and organizers have promised the switch from Bigfork to Lakeside will make it easier for both spectators and racers. Several parking lots within walking distance are being set up so spectators don’t have to be shuttled.
The lovely Volunteer Park, a county-owned gem of a facility on the shore, will be the epicenter of dragon boat fun. Weather forecasters are promising sunny, warm weather this weekend, perfect for watching the colorful dragon boats gracefully skim across the water as teams try to best their competitors.
See you there!
Visit Glacier Park this fall
Good weather also should beckon visitors to Glacier National Park now that the park’s signature mountain vistas are no longer shrouded in wildfire smoke.
Despite a slowdown in visitation during August, Glacier still is on pace for another record year of visitor counts.
For the first eight months of the year, more than 1.9 million people have visited Glacier — 2.1 percent ahead of last year, which turned out to be the all-time busiest year in the park’s history (2.3 million visitors for all of 2014).
The full length of Going-to-the-Sun Road will be open until Oct. 4 with west-side access to Logan Pass available until the third week of October (weather permitting). That means there’s still time to enjoy Glacier during its crisp transition from summer to fall.
A momentous transition
We also take note of the newest landmark in Western Montana — the Salish Kootenai Dam — which came into existence in one day.
No, the dam didn’t go up overnight, but when the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes took possession of the dam last Saturday, they also gave it a proud new name.
For the previous 77 years, the hydroelectric facility has been known as Kerr Dam. It was named after Frank Kerr, the president of the Montana Power Company at the time the dam was completed in 1938.
Most recently, the dam had been owned by NorthWestern Energy and jointly operated by the power company and the tribes. But on Saturday, the tribes paid the conveyance price of $18.2 million and ownership officially transferred to the tribally owned Energy Keepers Inc.
Although there is a legal challenge to the tribes’ acquisition of the dam, we acknowledge the momentous significance of the transfer and hope that the change will be good for the tribe, energy consumers and Montana.