EDITORIAL: Mill closures are devastating blow

State Sen. Dee Brown spoke for many of us on Wednesday when, after hearing that Weyerhaeuser was closing two lumber mills in her hometown, she declared, “They have punched Columbia Falls in the gut.”

Changes announced by the timber giant will result in the loss of at least 200 jobs locally. This is what many had feared after Weyerhaeuser announced it was acquiring Plum Creek last year, and it makes us wonder whether even worse is yet to come.

After all, Weyerhaeuser had reassured the public in November that the existing manufacturing facilities “will remain in Montana and the jobs associated with manufacturing will remain.”

Unfortunately, that didn’t prove to be entirely true, and for every timber family affected by this decision, the future is now uncertain. Reading about the reactions of shell-shocked employees in Thursday’s Inter Lake showed just how devastating the human toll is going to be of this “business decision.”

It is imperative going forward that our congressional delegation and everyone with a stake in the future of Columbia Falls works together now to make sure those displaced workers and their families have every chance to land on their feet.

Google’s scary glitch

If you trusted Google Maps to get you from Kalispell to Polebridge, you might have had more of an adventure than you counted on.

Before it fixed the glitch this week, the popular mapping service was routing visitors on a roundabout route through Olney and over the Whitefish Divide to reach the remote outpost in the North Fork area.

Polebridge via Red Meadow Road is not the usual first choice for travelers, but that’s exactly the route Google maps laid out — and that’s the way many travelers took.

“Harrowing” is the word people used when they arrived, shaken, at the Polebridge Mercantile, after traversing 36 miles of rough forest roads that took them over Red Meadow Pass before dropping into the North Fork drainage. They had quite an adventure on the way to getting the Merc’s trademark huckleberry bear-claw pastries.

The usual way is through Columbia Falls and up the North Fork Road, which is shorter, straighter and a lot less gnarly than negotiating the Red Meadow route.

Many of the Merc visitors said they were glad they were driving rental vehicles for the rough ride over Red Meadow.

This week, the map route was updated and the North Fork Road once again exists in the Google universe.

The lesson here is that in the wilds of Montana, technology cannot always be trusted.