AREA FIRE UPDATE
August 15, 2016
NO THREAT TO VISITORS ~ NO EVACUATIONS
 
NEW FIRE REPORTED INSIDE THE YELLOWSTONE PARK BOUNDARY  
NEAR DUCK CREEK & COUGAR CREEK
Late this afternoon the Forest Service reported a new fire approximately One-Quarter (1/4) Mile inside the Park boundary about 8 miles north of West Yellowstone. It is also burning to the Northeast (away from town) in the fire scar of the '88 North Fork fire. Yellowstone Park and Custer-Gallatin National Forest teams have responded.

ALL ROADS TO WEST YELLOWSTONE AND IN YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK ARE OPEN.
The other three fires burning within Yellowstone NP, are now being managed as a single complex, the Buffalo Complex. Buffalo Fire: 97 acres; Fawn Fire: 936 acres; Maple Fire: 1,100 acres.

Park visitors and neighboring communities should anticipate varying levels of smoke from these fires. Usually heaviest in the morning before the temperatures rise.
Updates are posted on the Chamber website: http://bit.ly/2aM60Zb
Additional information will be shared as we receive it from Yellowstone Park and USFS.
As a result of this fire activity, some backcountry trails and campsites are closed until further notice.
 
REMINDER: DRONES ARE PROHIBITED IN AIRSPACE NEAR WILDFIRES
If you are flying, then official fire-fighting aircraft cannot. Photos are not worth it!
 
Please, also discourage your staff and community members from posting photos and inaccurate information on social media - this alarms our current and incoming visitors.
 
For more details about the fires: http://inciweb.nwcg.gov
or   https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/management/currentfireactivity.htm

Air Quality Reports: http://svc.mt.gov/deq/todaysair/

JERRY'S THOUGHTS ON THE SONG

I / we have a long and magically sordid history with Big Sky country. We have been doing a three-night run in Virginia City, Montana for over a decade now…always a peak performance for the band…as well as an inferno of band drama.

3-7-77 is a number associated with the VC vigilantes in the 19th century. If you google the story I’m sure you will be left as confused as I am, but know it’s a pure reading of VC life. How the fuck Passover references got in here is unclear…perhaps watching the Disney cartoon version of Moses with my kids…or a little too much time in Pikesville.

The song is the first release from a series of tracks we recorded last January at Jackpot! Recording Studio in PDX. Dave Schools producing and Dex and Adam Lee mixing.

It’s just the trio.

Dex, Stevie and me…I thought Crosby was on it…apparently, however, he was at an open mic at the Laurelthirst recording a live record between guitar takes.

So it’s just the three of us doing that thing the three of us occasionally pull off like fucking gladiators…we wanted to have this available for the VC shows…as nobody actually buys music anyway…it’s free.

Enjoy and see you at Banditos…bring bullets.

Love and Kisses.

Jerry Joseph and the Jackmormons

The Bozeman Beautification Advisory Board is preparing for the 2016 Bozeman Beautification Award Ceremony slated to take place on Wednesday, November 2 in the Baxter Hotel Ballroom. The Board will be accepting nominations from the general public now through Friday, September 9.

Nominations can be submitted online at www.bozeman.net/beautification.

Nominations can include a variety of beautification projects that have been completed within the Bozeman city limits. These projects can include but are not limited to exciting residential design, neighborhood revitalization, new or improved commercial design, exceptional landscape, public art and much more. There are many categories listed on the online nomination form as a reference but new categories are always welcome.

For more information about the Beautification Award nominations or awards ceremony, please contact Jessica Johnson at JJohnson@bozeman.net or at 406-582-2274.

This week the Gallatin Valley Land Trust, in partnership with the Toohey family, have finalized their 100th conservation easement, protecting 959 acres of prime farmland from subdivision and development. The property is located just north of Bozeman off Springhill Rd., and stretches from wetlands along the East Gallatin River all the way up to mule deer winter range in the Bridger foothills.  The property also includes the access road to the popular Middle Cottonwood Trail.

The Toohey family has been farming in the Gallatin Valley since 1876, when the great-grandfather of the current owners emigrated from Ireland. After four generations of farming the land, the family decided that given the rapid development in the area, they wanted to ensure the property could remain in production for future generations.

The conservation easement protects scenic views from some of Bozeman’s most popular roadways and ensures the productive and unique soils, which make it prime for farming, will always be available for agriculture.  Its proximity to other conserved land and the Custer Gallatin National Forest make it a critical piece in an effort to protect elk and deer winter range, as well as other habitat.  

But more than anything, the landowners say they’re conserving their land to protect a way a life. “Despite considerable pressures, our family has been able to withstand the temptation for developing that land and has continued to operate the property as a family farm and ranch. We want to be able to preserve this land for generations to come because it represents a way of life that once was common in the Valley, but is unfortunately rapidly disappearing” says Tim Toohey.

Private land conservation in the Gallatin Valley is picking up speed in response to ever-growing development pressure. In many ways the Toohey property is representative of our community’s biggest challenges with growth. What happens to our open land when development reaches farther out into the valley? And what does that mean for agriculture?

GVLT has been working with farming and ranching families since 1990 to protect the open spaces and productive soils that have defined this valley for generations. Even with 100 easements totaling over 45,000 acres conserved, there is more work to be done to protect the scenic quality of the landscape, access to local food, and rich agricultural heritage.

The Toohey conservation easement was made possible with funding from the USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service, Gallatin County’s Open Space Bond, and Montana Travelers for Open Land. These funding sources allow conservation groups to significantly increase the pace of conservation by compensating landowners for a portion of the value of their land. With development pressure growing, and with little money left in the Gallatin County Open Space Bond program, it will be critical to renew the fund to keep pace with development in Gallatin County. The 100th easement is a major milestone for the organization, and for the community, but GVLT is keenly aware of the work that lies ahead.

What is a conservation easement? The Gallatin Valley Land Trust (GVLT) partners with private landowners to conserve working farms and ranches, fish and wildlife habitat, open lands and scenic views.  To protect these special places, GVLT uses conservation easements, which are voluntary agreements with landowners that limit development on a property while keeping it in private ownership.  Each easement is tailored to the specific property and runs with the title of the land in perpetuity. GVLT is responsible for upholding the easement’s terms.  Because a conservation easement limits development rights and therefore decreases the value of the land, landowners may be eligible to write off the difference as a charitable donation. In some cases, landowners receive financial compensation for a portion of the value of the conservation easement.  The public benefits from the protection of conservation values such as prime agricultural soils, wildlife habitat, river corridors and the overall character of our region.

About Gallatin Valley Land Trust
Gallatin Valley Land Trust connects people, communities, and open lands through conservation of working farms and ranches, healthy rivers, and wildlife habitat, and the creation of trails in the Montana headwaters of the Missouri and Upper Yellowstone Rivers. For more information, visit www.gvlt.org.

With attendance topping 16,000, the 6th Red Ants Pants Music Festival, which wrapped up on Sunday, was the largest to date. Proceeds from the festival benefit the non-profit Red Ants Pants Foundation, which has given more than $65,000 in grants to people and projects supporting our rural communities, working family farms and ranches and increasing women’s leadership. More than 200 volunteers helped put on the festival.

The Red Ants Pants Music Festival also announced the winner of their 2016 Emerging Artist Competition: Pollo Loco, of  Great Falls, Montana! The band includes Lonnie Johnson on the lead guitar, Chuck Fulcher playing upright acoustic bass, mandolin, harmonica, vocals and Jeff Christiansen on rhythm Guitar and vocals. The runner up was Feeding Leroy from Duluth, Minnesota.

 
The Emerging Artist Competition gives festival attendees the opportunity to vote for their favorite band playing the Side Stage – the winner earns the opportunity to play on next year’s Red Ants Pants Music Festival’s Main Stage.

“Music is a powerful tool for bringing people together and we are inspired by this banner year,” said Sarah Calhoun, Red Ants Pants Music Festival founder and producer. “We’re hugely appreciative of the support of the White Sulphur Springs community and the connection that happens when we all come together to celebrate.”

With a record attendance for the festival & campground, the 6th Red Ants Pants Music Festival is proud to also announce there were zero safety incidents and zero DUIs reported.  SAVE THE DATE for the 7th Red Ants Pants Music Festival July 27th – 30th, 2017 on the Jackson Ranch in White Sulphur Springs!

ADDITIONAL FESTIVAL HIGHLIGHTS:
2017 Montana Beard & Moustache State Championship, hosted by John Cordes of Roberts, Montana:
Moustache
1st    Pat Horvat - Lethbridge, Alberta
2nd   Sean Kochell - Missoula, MT  
3rd    Micheal Keator - West Yellowstone, MT
 
Partial Beard
1st     George Mcwilliams - Bozeman, MT
2nd    Bryan Holtz - Watford City, ND
3rd     Don Judge - Helena, MT  
 
Full Beard
1st     Taron Kifer - Helena, MT
2nd    Vinny Contreras - Martin City, MT
3rd     Gus Gustuson - Missoula, MT
 
Freestyle Beard
1st    Derik Austin - Helena, MT
2nd   Christopher Kirkwood - Bozeman, MT
3rd    Micheal McGuire - Richcrest, CA
 
Craft Beard
1st    Jessie Vaillancourt - Alberton, MT
2nd   Ellie and Cam - Billings, MT
3rd    Addison Oliver - Ennis, MT
 
Grand Champion - Jessie Vaillancourt - Alberton, MT
2017 Red Ants Pants Music Festival Crosscut Champions:
The winners of the crosscut competition for all events are a combination of two husband/wife teams from Red Lodge:
Men's division: Hans Howell and Ivan Kazorok with a time of 40.23 seconds.
Women's division: Jessica Howell and Anne Kazorok with a time of 47.8 seconds.
Co-Ed division: Hans and Jessica Howell with a time of 55.6 seconds. 

Years ago, Cathy Cripps found a mushroom atop Loveland Pass, Colorado. Hours later, she boarded a plane for Greenland and found the same mushroom species when she landed.

“I was amazed that the exact same species of mushroom I was holding in my hand 500 miles from the North Pole was one I had found a few days earlier above tree line across the Atlantic Ocean in the Rocky Mountains,” she said.

Now an associate professor in the Montana State University College of Agriculture's Department of Plant Sciences and Plant Pathology, Cripps said her research on mushrooms and their habitats has taken her all over the world. She recently published a book highlighting popular mushrooms found in the regions of the Rocky Mountains.

The book, “The Essential Guide to Rocky Mountains Mushrooms by Habitat,” has been trending locally on a top-ten book list. The book is geared toward the public, land managers, naturalists and mushroom enthusiasts, not specifically researchers or scientists, Cripps said.

“We wrote it so that it’s accessible to a lot of people who are observers interested in their own environment,” she said. “It’s a different kind of identification book because the readers are already interpreters of habitat.”

The book is organized by habitat, rather than traditional species taxonomy often employed in mushroom and plant guide books. The book includes bright images of more than 150 mushrooms species, many taken by Cripps herself. Mushrooms and their accompanying environmental markers are categorized by Rocky Mountain habitat zones. Also included are ecological indicators users are likely to find around various mushrooms species, including flowers, birds, animals and landscape features. The book includes notes on mushroom edibility, odor and medicinal properties as well as a mushroom checklist.

“We organized the book as nature, not scientists, would have intended, because it follows nature’s pattern,” she said. “I’m sharing what I might expect to see in a particular habitat.”

“The Essential Guide to Rocky Mountains Mushrooms by Habitat” is co-authored with Vera Evenson with the Denver Botanical Gardens and Michael Kuo, English faculty and amateur mushroom expert at Eastern Illinois University. It is published by Illinois University Press and can be purchased locally at the Country Bookshelf or on Amazon.

At MSU, Cripps studies the roles mushrooms have within their larger ecosystems, namely their relationship with trees in Montana and other high-elevation mountain systems. Fungi provide a critical role in plant-based ecosystems by decomposing and recycling a variety of plant materials, sequestering carbon in the soil and providing nutrients to plants through their roots.

In particular, Cripps focuses on the mycorrhizal fungi that support whitebark pine trees and alpine tundra plants by providing roots with essential nutrients, allowing them to live in harsh climates.

Cripps focuses a majority of her research on Suillus sibricus, a fungus that delivers critical benefits to whitebark pine seedlings in the wake of disastrous effects from beetles and disease in forests across the West. Her research is also supported by the United States Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service.

Cripps’ book contains a section on alpine fungi and on mushrooms found in whitebark pine forests. However, a warming climate is threatening arctic and alpine environments and the myriad benefits mushrooms bring to their ecosystems, Cripps said. Cripps – who received a National Science Foundation grant that provided funding for researching the role of alpine and artic habitat mushroom populations in the 1990s – is calling for attention to mushrooms as they become increasingly threatened in today’s warming temperatures.

According to Cripps, the tree line in cold-dominated environments is growing closer and closer to mountaintops, effectively expanding sub-alpine environments, eliminating the space for alpine ecosystems to survive and flourish.

“Eight percent of the earth consists of artic and alpine habitat that includes a host of fungi, flora and animals,” she said. “It would be an enormous loss to the world to lose these critical habitats.”

Cripps said still little is known about these small, yet highly critical populations of fungi in cold-dominated habitats.

“We have these mycological blank spots, we don’t even know what’s there, what species, who they’re related to and their greater ecological role,” She said. “These are very threatened habitats and we don’t really have a sound grasp of what’s currently there, so we’re working as quickly as possible.”

Local strategic design and brand management company Brickhouse Creative is seeking input from fishing enthusiast on a short survey to aid in the rebranding effort of an international non-profit.

This survey will take less than two minutes to fill out, and as incentive, Brickhouse Creative is raffling off this Simms Waypoints Sling Pack, valued at $100. Survey Link Here.

 The artwork of second-graders from Morning Star Elementary School in Bozeman was launched into space this week for a six-month stay on the International Space Station as part of a larger Montana State University research project into developing more durable computers for NASA.

Stickers bearing a mission patch logo created by students in Cheri Jakovac’s class were aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 resupply rocket that was launched Sunday night and broadcasted live on NASA TV. The stickers will remain on the ISS until December when they will be loaded onto a return capsule to be given back to the students.

The logo art activity was an outreach component of an ongoing research project at MSU to develop a new radiation-tolerant computer technology. MSU has been researching this technology for nearly a decade under the direction of Brock LaMeres, associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the College of Engineering and principal investigator of the project.

“Future NASA missions will require faster computers, but the radiation environment of space causes earthbound computers to fail,” LaMeres said. “MSU has been researching how to make computers that not only meet the computing needs of future missions, but that will be reliable in the harsh environment of outer space.”

MSU’s computer has been tested in radiation chambers, on high altitude balloons, and on rockets that reach the beginning of outer space. The current project to put the computer on the ISS will be its most rigorous test yet and will set the stage for the next level of development, LaMeres said.

“Our next milestone is to operate the computer in a real space environment for an extended amount of time,” he said. “The ISS is the perfect platform for the next stage of our development.”

The MSU computer will be flown to the space station this fall. There, astronauts will install it in an experiment locker owned by NanoRacks, a Texas-based company that facilitates access to the space station.

NanoRacks contacted LaMeres in January about flying a small amount of memorabilia related to his current ISS project. NASA provides scientists who are working on ISS research an opportunity to fly memorabilia to the station and be returned as keepsakes for the research team. LaMeres contacted Jakovac, his daughter Kylie’s teacher, about having her class design a logo for the project as a way to show them how the math and science they are learning is used in real world applications.

“Exposing students at an early age to the exciting things that people working in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) get to do is very important,” LaMeres said. “Hopefully having them hear about the research we are doing at MSU will leave a lasting impression that might lead to them choosing degrees, and ultimately careers, in STEM.”

Working with LaMeres on the project are Connor Julien, an electrical engineering graduate student, Daniel Mills, a senior in electrical engineering and Brandon Klise, a sophomore in computer engineering. They, with LaMeres, visited the class in February and explained the current mission. The students were shown examples of mission logos and asked to draw their own version that represented MSU’s work. The research team used the common themes in the students’ drawings to create the final mission logo, which depicts the process of going to and returning from the ISS through illustrations of a rocket being launched, the ISS, and the return capsule bearing Montana’s 406 area code floating down via parachute.

Also on the logo is the acronym RTcMISS, pronounced “Artemis,” which stands for “Radiation Tolerant computer Mission on the International Space Station.” “NanoRacks” also appears on the logo along with acronyms designating the Montana Space Grant Consortium, MSU’s College of Engineering, NASA EPSCoR and the MSU Space Science and Engineering Laboratory.

Student designers from Jakovac’s class are: Connor Baller, Jaden Bateson, Cooper Bourret, Grace Brandon, Claire Brown, Oliver Carey, Myles Faerber, Geno Graf, Ibrahim Al-Kaisy, Inga Lee-Eichenwald, Kylie LaMeres, Cameron Mansfield, Olivia Morgner, Reese Navarro, Helen Nelson, Katelyn Pahut, Daniel Peace, Bobby Pratt, Heidi Rich, Owen Riendeau and Quinn Werner.

A video of the logo design process can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx9_n9znXhA. A full recording of the launch can be viewed on the SpaceX website at http://www.spacex.com/webcast.