The Big Sky Community Organization (BSCO) was awarded $45,000 from a recently submitted Recreational Trails Program grant which is administered through the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks. The funds will be used for Beehive Basin trailhead improvements.
 
With the purchase of 7.5 acres to become open space parkland, on which the Upper Beehive Basin trailhead is located, BSCO is designing improvements to add additional parking and needed trailhead amenities like a bear proof trash can, a toilet facility and an updated trailhead kiosk. These improvements will enhance the existing trailhead facilities and safety by protecting the land and reducing the number of vehicles parking on the roadway, allowing better access for emergency services and the public.


BSCO is also pleased to report raising over $5,400 from 48 donors during this year’s Give Big Gallatin Valley fundraising event, which will support this project. Thanks to LUXE Sprits & Sweets and Compass Café, the BSCO was able to host two tremendously successful donor lounges highlighting our plans for the trailhead. The BSCO increased the amount raised by 200% this year, thanks to increased exposure and awareness about what the funds would be used for. Prior to these two funding successes, BSCO had raised $219,275 from private donors for this project. We thank all our supporters for their generosity and believing in our mission.

The final funding piece for this project to be completed is in BSCO’s annual Big Sky Resort Area Tax District grant request. Please help support our request by sending a letter or email to the BSRAD Board at PO Box 160661, Big Sky, MT  59716 or info@resorttax.org or attending the question and answer session on June 4th at 1:00 p.m. at the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center to make a public comment in support. More information about our full BSRAD request, Beehive Basin and ways to be involved with us can be found on our web site www.bscomt.org.

June Art Walk Featured Artist: David Lustig
Opening Reception:  Friday, June 8th 6-8pm

Mixed media artist David Lustig has quite literally come back to his roots. When still a young boy he discovered a love of nature and art as he played in and sketched the woods around him. He attended Montana State University and graduated with a degree in landscape design, which gave him both the language and the skills to work with the local flora. He tried his hand at many different types of art media over the years, but it wasn’t until recently that he attempted a long-pondered idea that became the art he creates today.

Using natural elements like roots, twigs and branches, David emulates the organic forms found in nature. The materials for each piece are sustainably collected locally and then carefully manipulated into simple yet elegant forms. In one piece, gnarled roots intertwine to form the branches of a tree, and in another willow twigs in shades of red and yellow recreate the deceptively simple interplay of color and texture found along a creek bank. Each piece speaks of a long held respect for and love of nature, and allows the collector to bring a bit of the natural world inside their home. David’s sculptural, organic art pieces will be on display at Altitude Gallery during downtown Bozeman’s June Art Walk.

The reception will be held in Altitude Gallery, at 134 E. Main Street. Call 406-582-4472 or info@altitudegallerybozeman.com for more information.

In the fight against an invasive fish that has decimated Yellowstone National Park’s iconic cutthroat trout, a technology developed at Montana State University could help park managers more effectively locate fish for removal.
 
During recent flights over Yellowstone Lake in a small aircraft, MSU’s device was able to identify clusters of two or more lake trout to a depth of at least 26 feet, according to Joe Shaw, professor of electrical engineering in MSU’s Norm Asbjornson College of Engineering and co-author of a May 20 article describing the findings in the journal Applied Optics.

The lidar technology — so called because it operates similarly to radar by measuring reflections of harmless, non-visible pulses of laser light — could be used to more easily determine areas to target with gill netting, the main method that park managers use to capture non-native lake trout in an attempt to reverse the decline of native Yellowstone cutthroat trout, according to co-author and Yellowstone fisheries biologist Patricia Bigelow.

“It has the potential to be a great tool,” Bigelow said.

 
Lake trout, thought to have been introduced illegally into Yellowstone Lake in the 1980s, are efficient predators that eat a significant number of cutthroat trout, whose native range in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming has shrunk considerably in recent decades. Since lake trout were first observed in 1994 in the park’s largest water body — considered a stronghold of the remaining cutthroat trout population — the number of spawning cutthroat trout has declined nearly 99 percent in some areas.

The National Park Service spends $2 million annually to remove hundreds of thousands of lake trout from Yellowstone Lake. Boats position gill nets on the lake bottom and then haul entangled fish aboard, where the lake trout are killed and cutthroats released. The most effective time to cull the largest and most voracious lake trout is during spawning, when the fish group in relatively shallow water near the shore, according to Bigelow.

Currently, park managers locate the spawning areas using small transmitters surgically implanted into about 200 large lake trout. The transmitters emit distinct sound frequencies that park staff detect with boat-mounted acoustic sensors as they circle the lake. But because the lake is large and the boats must go slowly to operate the sensors, it can take days to survey the lake and locate the spawning fish and then relay the information to the gill netting boats, Bigelow said.

“Two big plusses of using he lidar tool are that we could fly the whole lake in a couple hours and that we could detect any fish in shallow water, not just the ones that have transmitters,” which could save time and money, Bigelow said.
 
Shaw said he was excited to see the project come to fruition after more than a decade of research and development. Prior to joining the faculty in MSU’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2001, he collaborated with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration physicist and co-author Jim Churnside on the use of lidar for detecting ocean fish. When Shaw presented the research shortly after arriving at MSU, someone mentioned that it might also be applied to lake trout in Yellowstone, he recalled.

In 2004, Shaw borrowed NOAA’s fish-detecting lidar device — which was so large that it had to be flown in a multi-propeller plane — and conducted a trial run over Yellowstone Lake. The results were promising enough that park managers decided to send gill netting boats to a remote part of the lake where they otherwise seldom operated, according to Bigelow. The boats captured many lake trout in a short time, she said.

Contracting the large plane was expensive, however. So Shaw began to design a much smaller version of the lidar device that would be more affordable and more appropriate for flying over the lake. “The goal was to build something that would fit in a single-engine Cessna,” he said.
 
Shaw’s team, which included then-MSU doctoral student and co-author Michael Roddewig, succeeded in doing that by using an efficient laser produced by local photonics company Quantel. During flights in a small aircraft over Yellowstone Lake in 2015 and 2016, the team demonstrated that the new device could effectively locate groups of spawning lake trout. The publishing of the results, Shaw noted, coincided almost to the day with the invention of the laser 58 years ago.

Shaw said the tool could continue to be improved and incorporated into Yellowstone’s operations. For instance, producing maps of the spawning locations currently requires sophisticated data processing, but a more user-friendly interface could be developed. The tool could also be adapted for other uses, including studying layers of plankton or sediments suspended in lakes or even rivers, he said.

“I’m delighted that we can do something useful for the Yellowstone ecosystem, because it’s a special place,” Shaw said.

Montana State University scientists have found a new lineage of microbes living in Yellowstone National Park’s thermal features that sheds light on the origin of life, the evolution of archaeal life and the importance of iron in early life.

Professor William Inskeep and his team of researchers published their findings May 14 in the scientific journal Nature Microbiology.

"The discovery of archaeal lineages is critical to our understanding of the universal tree of life and evolutionary history of the Earth," the group wrote. "Geochemically diverse thermal environments in Yellowstone National Park provide unprecedented opportunities for studying archaea in habitats that may represent analogues of early Earth."

Archaea is one of the three domains of life, the others being bacteria and eukaryotes. Like bacteria, archaea are single-cell organisms. The eukaryote domain contains more cellularly complex organisms, such as humans, other animals, plants and fungi.

The scientists called the new archaeal lineage Marsarchaeota after Mars, the red planet, because these organisms thrive in habitats containing iron oxides. Within Marsarchaeota, they discovered two main subgroups that live throughout Yellowstone and thrive in hot, acidic water where iron oxide is the main mineral. One subgroup lives in water above 122 degrees Fahrenheit, and the other lives in water above 140 to 176 degrees. The water is about as acidic as grapefruit juice. Their microbial mats are red because of the iron oxide.

"It's interesting that the habitat of these organisms contains (iron) minerals similar to those found on the surface of Mars," Inskeep said.

He added that microbes produce iron oxide, but the Marsarchaeota do not. They might be involved in reducing iron into a simpler form, "which is important from an early Earth standpoint. Iron cycling has been implicated as being extremely important in early Earth conditions."

The Marsarchaeota live fairly deep in microbial mats, but they still require low levels of oxygen, Inskeep said. The subgroups are so abundant that, together, they can account for as much as half of the organisms living within a single microbial mat.

The scientists studied microbial mats throughout Yellowstone. Microorganisms in these “microbial beaver dams” produce iron oxide that creates terraces, which, in turn, block streams. As water (only a couple of millimeters deep) runs over the terraces, oxygen is captured from the atmosphere and supplied to the Marsarchaeota.

"Physics comes together with chemistry and microbiology," Inskeep said. "It's like a sweet spot of conditions that this group of organisms likes."

In addition to learning more about life on early Earth and the potential for life on Mars, Inskeep said the research can help scientists understand more about high-temperature biology.

"Knowing about this new group of archaea provides additional pieces of the puzzle for understanding high-temperature biology," he said. "That could be important in industry and molecular biology."

The work that resulted in the Nature Microbiology paper was the culmination of research that took place over the past decade, said Inskeep, who has studied the geochemistry and microbiology of Yellowstone's high-temperature environments for the last 20 years. Inskeep is a professor of geomicrobiology in MSU's Department of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences in the College of Agriculture and co-founder of MSU's Thermal Biology Institute.

The lead authors of the Nature Microbiology paper earned their doctorates at MSU and were part of NSF's Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program while at MSU. Zackary Jay is now a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering in the Norm Asbjornson College of Engineering and the Center for Biofilm Engineering at MSU. Jacob Beam is now a postdoctoral researcher at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences at East Boothbay, Maine.

“In the end, after many years of work, it’s exciting, and a relief, to have our team’s work recognized and published, particularly in a high impact journal,” Jay said.

Other co-authors were Mensur Dlakic from MSU's Department of Microbiology and Immunology in the College of Letters and Science and College of Agriculture; Douglas Rusch from the Center for Bioinformatics at Indiana University; and Mark Kozubal from the Thermal Biology Institute, MSU's Department of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences, and Sustainable Bioproducts in Bozeman.

The Yellowstone research was a collaboration involving the Thermal Biology Institute, the Montana Agricultural Experiment Station (MAES) and the Yellowstone Center for Resources (National Park Service). Funding came from IGERT, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and MAES. The U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California, sponsored the genetic sequencing.

The Sandbox Project is one of many the Bozeman Kiwanis Club provides to give back to the community through various outreach programs.  Other projects include: Eliminate, which through Kiwanis International has made great strides to eliminate maternal neonatal tetanus. Local support is also provided for Eagle Mount Camp Braveheart, Hope and the Holidays, Kids in Crisis Backpacks, Fix-Up Festival, playground equipment for schools, park pavilions throughout the city, Thrive, and many others.  For more information about the Bozeman Kiwanis Club please go BozemanKiwanis.com or “Bozeman Kiwanis” on Facebook.

On July 4th, 2018 Reach Inc. will host their 11th Annual Race for Independence.  Reach is a local non-profit that provides residential, vocational, and transportation supports to adults with developmental disabilities.  This joyful celebration benefits the people Reach serves, and will include a 10K, 5K, 1K, and an assortment of exciting raffle prizes.  

The course is mostly on flat trails in the beautiful Cherry River Fishing Access and the East Gallatin Recreation Area.  These paths offer sweeping views of the breathtaking Gallatin Valley landscape.  Because the trail narrows in some sections, runners are encouraged to stay mindful of their surroundings, and allow faster participants to pass.  Walkers are welcome to join the fun.  No dogs, please.

The 10K begins at 8:00AM, the 5K at 8:15AM, and the 1K at 8:25AM.  Bib timing will be used.  In order to prevent vehicle traffic on the course, attendees are requested to arrive before 8:00AM.  The race begins and ends at the Reach Work Center, which is located at 322 Gallatin Park Drive, Bozeman, MT 59715.  Parking will be available at surrounding businesses.  

Registration is $25 for the 10K/5K, and $15 for the 1K. Optional, snazzy, short-sleeved, technical tee shirts will be sold for $10.  You can register online at www.reachinc.org, or in person at the Reach Work Center Monday through Friday, 8:00AM-5:00PM.  Reach Inc. is thrilled that the Race for Independence will be part of the first Big Sky Wind Drinkers Grand Prix Series.

A team of over 60 volunteers come together to make this event possible.  If you are interested in getting involved, please contact Community Relations Specialist, Jamie Balke, at jbalke@reachinc.org or (406) 587-1271 to learn more about volunteer opportunities.  You are also welcome to contact Community Relations and Development Director, Dee Metrick, with any questions at dee@reachinc.org or 406-587-1271.

Henry Sorenson still recalls vividly the energy he felt on campus when Montana State University unexpectedly won a Division 1-AA national football championship in 1984.

The architecture professor, who specializes in architectural drawing, was among the fans that followed the ‘Cats in their unlikely journey from the bottom of the Big Sky to the national title nearly 34 years ago. So, he commemorated the enthusiasm in the Bobcat community in the best way he knew how. He designed a T-shirt featuring a cartoon image of the MSU mascot wearing the number one.

That shirt, popular when it was first designed, has been reissued as part of MSU’s 125th anniversary celebration and is now available from the MSU Bookstore, according to Julie Kipfer, MSU’s director of marketing.

“What better way to celebrate the 125th anniversary than to highlight one of our professor’s iconic designs,” Kipfer said. “Re-launching this retro T-shirt is a great way to introduce today’s students to MSU’s heritage and engage with alumni who fondly remember that time.”

The reissue is particularly meaningful for Sorenson, who is known nationally for his hand-drawn architectural renderings as well as for his architectural photography. His rural landscape photograph taken near Fort Benton recently won first place in the American Institute of Architects Photography Competition, and he won a juror award for a watercolor painting in the Architecture in Perspective competition of the American Society of Architectural Illustrators.

A T-shirt designed by Montana State University architecture professor Henry Sorenson following the 1984 national championship has been reissued for MSU's 125th anniversary.  MSU Photo by Adrian Sanchez-Gonzalez

But as a hobby, Sorenson has designed T-shirts since he was an undergraduate at the University of Florida, a university with a great football tradition. So it was quite a contrast when Sorenson arrived at MSU in 1983 to implement the School of Architecture’s architectural graphics program and the Bobcat football team won just one game in the season. Sorenson said the Bobcats’ Cinderella season the following year “was unbelievable.” He can still remember sitting in the stands on an 18-degree-below-zero day when the Bobcats beat a visiting team from Arkansas State to advance to the national championship game.

“It was an amazing thing to win a national championship,” Sorenson said. “I thought I’d draw a championship shirt for fun.”

With the 125th anniversary this year, he suggested to the committee planning the yearlong celebration that the championship shirt might be a way to recall the university’s last football championship, and the committee agreed.

Sorenson’s shirt, which costs $17.95, can also be ordered online at http://www.msubookstore.org/MerchDetail.aspx?MerchID=1492677&num=0&start=1&end=20&type=1&CategoryName=T-Shirts%20and%20Tanks&CatID=27865&Name=T-Shirts%20and%20Tanks#.Wt-5INPwZTa

In the meantime, Sorenson is still teaching MSU architecture students the importance of hand drawing, which is a lost art in many programs but an important part of MSU’s curriculum.

“You can’t replace drawing,” Sorenson said. “You think differently when you are drawing than when you are sitting in front of a computer.”

To learn more about Sorenson’s Bobcat shirt, go to http://www.msubookstore.org/ and click on the Retro Cat T-shirt.