The Wild Sheep Foundation (WSF), with world headquarters in Bozeman, Mont., has announced the launch of its first-ever virtual convention to raise millions of dollars for the betterment of wild sheep populations throughout the western US, western Canada, and northern Mexico, and beyond. For over 45 years, WSF has held its annual fundraising convention and associated events live in major metropolitan venues, primarily Reno, Nev., where over 10,000 typically attend over three days. Because of the Covid-19 outbreak, WSF’s board and staff in summer 2020 began planning to take the January event virtual to comply with health mandates and to protect the health and safety of its members, vendors, and supporters.

“The WSF board of directors and staff actions over the last ten months have reinvented and retooled WSF business units while keeping our eyes on our mission to put and keep wild sheep on the mountain,” says WSF president and CEO Gray N. Thornton. “An exciting manifestation of this reinvent and retool mandate has been the recent launch of our online/hybrid January 11-16, 2021, v-convention that we have named Sheep Week® The Experience at www.sheepweek.org.”

Even though WSF began a “dual path” pivot mid-summer of planning both a virtual event as well as its typical in-person convention, Thornton says that the groundwork of researching, evaluating, contracting and building out a completely new v-convention has been a heavy lift. WSF staff and contractors have had new platforms to learn, build and release, then remarket this novel concept to its exhibitors, membership, and broader global audience.

“Frankly, it has been a complete re-do of a huge annual event in less than three months,” Thornton says.

For the January 2021 virtual event, WSF has expanded its traditional four-night, three-day show into a six-day and -night immersive experience. In recent decades, WSF has consistently raised upwards of $6 million for wild sheep conservation work. These funds are generated by various convention-based activities, such as auctions, raffles, and ticket sales. Auction items have included highly coveted permits to hunt the world’s most sought-after Rocky Mountain bighorn, desert sheep, Dall’s and Stone’s sheep rams, and more exotic wild sheep and goat species in Central Asia. Money raised is directed to programs to enhance wild sheep and wildlife health, disease research, herd monitoring, habitat enhancements, and other initiatives.

For the past eight years, WSF has been offering its auctions online during live stage events each day at the convention so that bidders not in attendance can still participate and win prizes, from hunts and travel to artworks and jewelry. “Our platform is tried and true, but over the summer, we worked with our vendor to improve and expand the product with more visual functionality,” Thornton says. “WSF debuted timed auctions starting this December, which will close on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights of Sheep Week® in January. Then, we go hybrid. From our remote auction stage and studio in Reno, we will feed live auctions to anyone who registers and logs in online during the Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights of the virtual convention.”

Each evening auction will include 20 to 25 items, the most anticipated of which are sales of state, provincial, territorial and tribal/First Nation permits and other premier offerings. Thornton adds. “These live auctions feature our familiar auctioneers and ring-men to encourage and take your bids.”

The general public and all WSF members can register to bid online at www.bid.wildsheepfoundation.org.

Meanwhile, one of the highlights of past Sheep Weeks® is the highly popular raffles, which will be hybrid live and online at www.wildsheepraffle.org. The drawings will feature sheep hunting adventures and outdoor gear prizes. The Saturday, January 16, raffle winners will be drawn and streamed live from WSF’s Cody, Wyo., raffle command center.

Educational outreach and recognition of conservation leadership are a mainstay of WSF conventions. The Sheep Week® virtual platform will feature educational seminars, live presentations, conservation awards, webinars, featured films and global “live” forums. These will be streamed online from two virtual auditoriums. All this is available to Sheep Week® registrants inside WSF’s virtual platform at www.sheepweek.org.

“No one wants to be online for hours and hours on end. You don’t have to,” Thornton says. “Sheep Week® presentations, both live and taped, will be provided in easy, pithy, and fun-to-view segments. Being a virtual event also allows us to keep it accessible online much longer than a three-days or week-long show. The platform will be available for a total of five weeks, until February 16.”

Thornton says WSF’s most daunting challenge was to create and market a virtual expo hall to showcase the world’s foremost outdoor adventure outfitters, clothing, gear, and services.

“We found a mature platform used internationally for large agricultural expos, giant tech conferences, and career fairs. It is a tried, true, and tested platform in use for a decade,” Thornton says. “The WSF virtual expo hall has a Sheep Shop store and other amenities. When you enter the Exhibits Hall, you can visit and shop with exhibitors in five sub-halls. We have daily and weeklong games to encourage engagement within the hall. You can live chat either individually or as a group with an exhibitor or just set an appointment for a later call or Zoom visit.”

“And you can experience this hall with zero travel costs, zero hotel, and food costs, and zero health risk,” Thornton adds.

All-inclusive registration is available for $50 at www.sheepweek.org. All registrants will be entered into a drawing for a 2021-2022 free-range desert bighorn sheep hunt in Sonora, Mexico, valued at $65,000, a Gunwerks rifle package valued at $10,690 and you can enter to win a 10-day Yukon Stone’s sheep hunt valued at $60,000!

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The Wild Sheep Foundation (WSF), based in Bozeman, Mont., was founded in 1977 by wild sheep conservationists and enthusiasts. With a membership of more than 8,500 worldwide, WSF is the premier advocate for wild sheep and other mountain wildlife and their habitats. WSF has raised and expended more than $135 million on wild sheep habitat and population enhancements, education, and conservation advocacy programs in North America, Europe, and Asia to “Put and Keep Wild Sheep On the Mountain”®. These and other efforts have increased bighorn sheep populations in North America from historic lows in the 1950-60s of 25,000 to more than 85,000 today. www.wildsheepfoundation.org.

The results are in, January 1!

For the 6th year in a row, we asked our readers to vote for all-things-Bozeman in the Bozeman's Choice Reader Poll. Over 200 choices range from arts & entertainment to chomping & chugging to media & info, it's all voted on here. The top 3 vote-getters are listed here and in a print annual guide available at key locations in the greater Bozeman area.

How it works: Each October we ask our readers to vote in the Bozeman's Choice Reader Poll. Start by creating an account on our website, log in, and choose a category to begin voting. You can vote for as many options as you'd like, but not more than once for each. If you don't see what you came to vote for you can add it.

Congratulations to all the 2021 winners! If you would like a 2021 certificate order one here. *2021 Guide advertisers will receive certificates for FREE. 

Wine is very delicate and needs to be stored in a certain manner to ensure it doesn’t get destroyed. Overlooking these storage guidelines is usually the main reason behind wine spoilage. If you have over three or more wine bottles on your rack, this is the last thing you’d want to happen.

If you’re a wine enthusiast, you need to learn how to store your wine correctly. By observing the correct storage measures, you’ll be able to preserve the wine’s quality and value. Read through the tips below to ensure your wine is stored properly.

1. Store Your Wine At The Ideal Temperature
One of the most crucial factors to consider when storing wine is the temperature in the storage room. This is usually the case because wine tends to be very sensitive to very warm or cold temperatures. Because of this, you should always store your bottles, including any single-serve wine, at a temperature of between 12 to 19ºC. This is also true for any wine you’ve placed into decanters.

You should also avoid constant temperature fluctuations or risk destroying your collection. Avoid taking bottles in and out of the wine cooler to ensure the temperatures don’t fluctuate greatly. Otherwise, the cork’s continuous expansion and contraction might let in the air inside and destroy the wine.

2. Ensure Proper Humidity
You should always store your bottle of wine in the right humidity levels. Ideally, your storage area’s humidity should be around 70 percent. Remember, dry air will cause the corks to dry out over time, leading to the entry of air into the bottle. As a result, your wine might get destroyed due to the effects of oxygen.

Wine bottles shouldn’t be stored in highly humid environments since this makes the labels come off from the bottles. If you’re looking to sell your wine in the future, issues like this would make it harder to sell. Likewise, extremely humid conditions promote the growth of molds due to the excessive moisture. To address this issue, you should invest in a dehumidifier.

3. Invest In A Wine Refrigerator
For long-term storage of your wine, a wine refrigerator, also popularly referred to as a wine cooler, is the ideal storage option. Compared to a regular fridge, a cooler is the ideal storage space for your wine because:

• It guarantees proper humidity and optimal temperatures since its temperatures range between 10 to 15ºC. In contrast, the fridge is very dry and cold, and this can severely degrade or spoil your wine.

• It prevents cross-contamination from food and other beverage odors, which might destroy the wine’s quality.

• It prevents the wine from freezing, pushing out the cork, and exposing it to oxygen.

4. Store Your Wine In A Convenient Location
While it’s vital to ensure that your wine is stored in a safe and conducive environment, you also need to make sure that it’s easy to access. Wine is typically a great conversation starter, so it’s a good idea to store where it’s easily visible and accessible. Find an area where you can quickly and effortlessly access your wine and enjoy your favorite drink.

5. Assess The Wine You’re Planning To Place In Storage
Before you even store your wine, there are several things you need to consider, including:
• The type of wine you’re looking to place in the storage.
• Are you planning to store the wine in a wine cellar or a wine cooler?
• How long do you looking to store the wine?
• What quantity of wine are you looking to store?
• It’s important to ask yourself these questions to understand which storage option is more suitable.


6. Store The Wine Bottles Horizontally
If you have unopened wine bottles, the best way to store them would be to place them horizontally. This long-term storage method is advised since it prevents the cork from becoming dry. Storing your wine bottle horizontally is more space-efficient, making it an excellent choice if you only have limited space. This method also makes it easy to access your bottles.

7. Store Your Wine Far From Direct Sunlight
You should always store your bottle of wine in a dry and dark place to protect its superb taste. Doing this is crucial because direct exposure to fluorescent lights and sunlight leads to the oxidation of sulfur-causing amino acids. This leads to the wine having a weird odor.

Storing your wine away from direct sunlight is especially vital for white wine. This is because they come in bottles that aren’t dark; hence, they’re more exposed to incandescent light which can ruin the wine’s integrity. To ensure your wine is protected from light exposure, make sure to store it inside a cabinet with UV-resistant doors. You can also choose to wrap it with a cloth or place it inside a box.

8. Protect Your Wine Bottles From Vibration
When considering the perfect storage area for your wine, make sure to opt for a place that’s not near vibration sources such as a stereo system, a washer, or dryer. This is because even the slightest vibration causes sounds and movements that can affect your wine’s aging process and ruin it. It’s best to store your wine in a cellar since this area is usually safe from vibrations.

However, if you live close to a highway or subway, the cellar doesn’t completely prevent vibration. In such scenarios, you should get a bubble wrap or Styrofoam to cover your wine before you place it in the cellar.

9. Storing Opened Wine Bottles
If you want to store a bottle of wine that’s already been corked, make sure to recork it immediately. Before doing this, place a wax paper around the cork. This wax paper helps prevent external things from falling into the wine and allows the cork to slide into its original position effortlessly. A rubber with a stopper is also a viable option if the cork is already destroyed and can’t be reused.

Takeaway
Properly storing wine is something that many people often struggle with and, due to this, end up ruining or spoiling their collection. If you don’t want to experience a similar issue, make sure to follow the tips above on storing your wine safely. With proper storage, you never have to ever worry about compromising the integrity and quality of your wine.

Using years’ worth of data collected from ice-covered habitats all over the world, a Montana State University team has discovered new insights into the processes that support microbial life underneath ice sheets and glaciers, and the role those organisms play in perpetuating life through ice ages and, perhaps, in seemingly inhospitable environments on other planets.

Doctoral candidate Eric Dunham of MSU’s Department of Microbiology and Immunology in the College of Agriculture, along with mentor Eric Boyd, published their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week. The work examines the ways water and microbes interact with the bedrock beneath glaciers, using samples of sediment taken from glacial sites in Canada and Iceland.

“We kept finding organisms in these systems that were supported by hydrogen gas,” said Boyd of the inspiration for the project. “It initially didn’t make sense, because we couldn’t figure out where that hydrogen gas was coming from under these glaciers.”

A team of researchers, including Boyd, later discovered that through a series of physical and chemical processes, hydrogen gas is produced as the silica-rich bedrock underneath glaciers is ground into tiny mineral particles by the weight of the ice on top of it. When those mineral particles combine with glacial meltwater, they let off hydrogen.

What became even more fascinating to Boyd and Dunham was that microbial communities under the glaciers could combine that hydrogen gas with carbon dioxide to generate more organic matter, called biomass, through a process called chemosynthesis. Chemosynthesis is similar to how plants generate biomass from carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, although chemosynthesis does not require sunlight.

To learn more about what those chemosynthetic microbes were doing, Dunham used samples of sediment from the glaciers in Canada and Iceland. He grew samples of the living organisms found in the sediment in a laboratory, watching them over several months to see if they would continue to grow in the simulated environment.

“The organisms we were interested in rely on hydrogen gas as food to grow, and most are also anaerobes, meaning oxygen will kill them,” said Dunham, who is originally from Billings and is entering the final semester of his doctoral studies. “One of the most critical steps in preparing these experiments, and easily the most stressful element, was getting those samples into bottles and flushing out all the oxygen as quickly as possible, so I didn’t kill the organisms I was trying to study.”

Over months of preparing and observing the microbial cultures, Dunham found that not only was it possible to track the communities’ growth in the lab environment but also that the type of bedrock underlying a glacier influenced how much hydrogen gas was produced, which in turn led to the presence of microbial communities that were better adapted to metabolizing hydrogen. Samples taken from the Kötlujökull Glacier in Iceland, which sits atop basaltic bedrock, produced much more hydrogen gas than the samples from Robertson Glacier in Alberta, Canada, which has carbonate bedrock beneath it.

As they use that hydrogen gas to generate energy, said Boyd, the microbes also pull carbon dioxide out of the air to create biomass, replicate and grow. That ability to “fix” carbon is a critical climate regulation process, another similarity to photosynthesis in plants.

“Considering that glaciers and ice sheets cover about 10% of the Earth’s landmass today, and a much larger fraction at times in the planet’s past, microbial activities such as the ones Eric measured are likely to have had a major impact on Earth’s climate, both today and in the past,” said Boyd. “We’ve known for a while that microorganisms living beneath ice sheets or glaciers can fix carbon, but we never really understood how. What Eric’s pioneering work shows is that not only are these organisms completely self-sustainable in the sense that they can generate their own fixed carbon, they also don’t need sunlight to do it like the rest of the biosphere that we’re familiar with.”

Looking further afield at the other planets in our solar system, Boyd notes that two of the critical elements scientists look for when evaluating habitability are water and a source of energy. The newfound knowledge that self-sustaining microbial communities can flourish in icy environments through the generation of hydrogen gas is a critical step toward identifying potentially habitable environments on other planets.

“There’s lots of evidence for ice and glaciers on other planets,” he said. “Are they habitable? We don’t know. Could there be microbes living under ice sheets on planets with bedrock similar to those that Eric studied? Absolutely. There’s no reason to think otherwise.”

For Dunham, whose undergraduate and postbaccalaureate research focused on health sciences and virology before shifting to biogeochemistry, the most rewarding part of the new discovery is exploring how various Earth processes fit together and influence one another in ways that the scientific community is only beginning to unlock.

Tippet Rise today announced a new section of its website offering beautiful, interactive eBooks inspired by the land, poetry, and music, all available to enjoy for free.
 
The Tippet Rise Library offers:
·       Program books from past seasons at the art center. They include interviews of musicians, insights on each concert, and a wide range of essays exploring classical music history and the art, nature, and history of Tippet Rise.
·       Books that are a result of the art center’s collaboration with the musicians and composers featured in its Music Downloads Library, featuring biographical information about each artist, lush photographs and essays.
·       A collection of interactive books of music, poetry, photography, and narrative by Tippet Rise co-founder, Peter Halstead.
 
The Tippet Rise Library with its collection of free eBooks can be found at https://tippetrise.org/library
 
About Tippet Rise Art Center
Tippet Rise Art Center is located in Fishtail, Montana against the backdrop of the Beartooth Mountains. Set on a 12,000 acre-working sheep and cattle ranch, Tippet Rise hosts classical music performances and exhibits large-scale outdoor sculptures. Tippet Rise is anchored in the belief that art, music, architecture, and nature are inextricably linked in the human experience, each making the others more powerful.

 
For more information about Tippet Rise, please visit www.tippetrise.org