Columns
Searching for opinion based articles? Below we'll share opinion news articles on a wide variety of topics.
Northern Pike: Love or hate?
Before we get full time into outdoor columns about hunting, let me do a final end-of-summer column about fishing.
Kayak yak
I finally got my kayak out on the water this month for the first time, the latest in any season I’ve had my boat out.
Good pay and good fishing
Here it is, mid-July, and we aren’t breathing unhealthy air from forest fires. We can be thankful for a cool wet spring, so lots of forest vegetation is still mostly green, not yet burnable.
Human nature hunts for sweet life
A couple of weeks after I moved here last fall, a Kalispell resident buttonholed me at an event to ask if people had been kind to me, as a newcomer to the valley.
A tale of too many cities
We recently returned from our niece’s wedding in Florida and, though the events were over-the-top beautiful and the fun factor off the charts, getting there and home again was a tad harrowing.
Delicious kokanee
For those of us that like to fish or eat fresh fish, July is the ideal time in Northwest Montana to enjoy a fish fry of delicious kokanee salmon.
Music sets stage for wellness
In my first column, I wrote about how much I loved music, especially live music. That was before I learned how good it is for us.
A sundry history with Yellowstone
The recent news of the devastating flooding in Yellowstone National Park and the surrounding towns had me thinking back to the summer of 2007 when I rode my bike into the park on the same highway that suffered cata…
New sawyers cut it up
When our dad suspected my brother and me of late-night carousing, he’d wake us up early to go get firewood.
Much ado about mulching
Anyone who’s lived in Northwest Montana for more than a few years is familiar with its typical rainy season — June. So far this month, that “wrings” true like a wet rag.
Ronan, C-Falls, Glacier and ‘a good time’
Kris Salonen reiterated this week that she loved basketball more than track as a high school athlete at Great Falls High. “But I was better at track, so I did that,” she said.
After the pen comes the pitch
As the minutes speed by until my turn, I am alternately amused and jealous of the quicker wits in this classroom at Flathead Valley Community College, the host venue for monthly gatherings of the Montana Screenwrit…
Stellar jumps, sprints — and hoodies
Covering track and field is not supposed to hurt, but here I am nursing a swollen knee and it wasn’t for any sort of, you know, effort.
The Recession Queens
In 2009, when my daughter Talia was going to college in Seattle and living in a dorm, my sister and I concocted a scheme (Actually, my sister Barb recollects the getaway was solely my idea and that I was the one wh…
Marker effort drives for safety
“Someone said, ‘We need to get with this white-marker program,’” Bob Bigler remembers of that American Legion meeting in 2005. “Well, I could help with that.”
Spring water safety
During the last couple of weeks there have been three tragic drownings of local folks enjoying some of Northwest Montana’s rivers and lakes.