Trego's Mountain Ear

"Serving North Lincoln County"

Tag: travel

  • We Still Have The Basic Rule

    Way back when I started driving, I listened to folks tell me that Montana had no speed limit. I eventually learned to just shut up and let them prattle. I knew Montana’s Basic Rule – and despite the fact that we now have speed limit signs, that rule is still enshrined in our traffic codes.

    The basic rule, outlined in Montana Code Annotated 61-8-303, requires drivers to travel at a speed that is reasonable and prudent under existing conditions, considering factors like weather, visibility, traffic, and road conditions. Drivers can be cited for speeding even if they are below the posted limit if their speed is unsafe for the circumstances. https://legalclarity.org/montana-speeding-violations-laws-penalties-and-defenses/

    It’s a good rule for writing tickets – if you leave the road, or hit another vehicle because it’s slick out, the cop can write ‘Basic Rule’ and you don’t have any argument to take into the JP’s court. Back in the old days, Montana’s speed limit was ‘reasonable and prudent’. I guess it still is, really – the posted limits just provide caps under good conditions.

    I got a basic rule ticket years ago for my first really impressive car wreck. After I got in good enough shape to realize the A-frame had let go, I thought about arguing the ticket – but I realized that improper maintenance of a motor vehicle cost the same. Basic Rule is like Heller’s Catch 22 – it’s one heck of a rule that we still have in Montana.

    I read of an accident a few miles up the creek – first on Facebook, then in the TVNews. It was an obvious spot to write a ticket for Basic Rule – when it’s really slick out, the Basic Rule violation occurs as you drive onto the highway. I recall driving back from Spokane, before Highway 37 was completed. There was an Idaho state trooper stopping traffic at the state line, and he accepted my argument – “I have studded tires and four wheel drive. I can handle it.” It took 13 hours to make it back to Trego – and that confident, erroneous phrase came back several times each hour. I think I violated the Basic Rule for 130 miles and half a day.

  • Not Made in This Millennium

    I have the habit of looking for low mileage older cars. That’s why my two main rigs weren’t made in the 21st century. The Talon is a 1995 with 65K miles on the odometer. The Suzuki Vitara is a 1999, that has just rolled past 90K. My last trip out with it, in the darkness before 8:00 am, and with bright lights close behind me, I clipped a deer’s right hind leg – cracked the edge of the plastic grill and left a small dent in the right fender. I don’t enjoy denting my cars – particularly when lights from the rear, close to my bumper, are a fellow driver’s way of saying I should speed up in deer country.

    My wife drives the “new” car – it’s a 2009 Chrysler PT Dream Cruiser – built in this century. It has a device to tell when the air pressure in a tire gets low. It reported a lot of low tire pressure – I had to inflate the tires to 40 psi to turn the light off. Then I started researching. For the car to monitor tire pressure, it takes a small battery operated device in each tire. After 16 years the batteries probably are a bit tired. I can get new sending units, with new batteries through Amazon for $16 each. I suspect that to make things work right I probably need four for the summer tires and four more for the winter tires. That’s $128 plus the cost of taking each tire off the rim. For years I’ve made do with a tire pressure gauge. I’m still making do with a tire pressure gauge, but I have an annoying light on the dash – not to mention tires that were ran overinflated until I figured out that it’s another spot where modern technology and I aren’t particularly compatible.

    It got me to realizing – I drive cars that were built in the previous millennium. Not just the previous century, but the previous millennium is just as accurate, and shows that I am definitely driving old cars. The state of Montana thinks that because of my advanced age they only need to give me a drivers license that’s good for four years at a time. The bastards may be correct.

  • The Christmas Goats

    The things I don’t know about goats would fill books. But it has been great watching my community spontaneously move into action, small group by small group to do something about two shaggy goats that moved onto the Ant Flat Ranger Station just in time for the Christmas season.

    In some ways their rescue was a bit of a comedy – first the challenge was finding the owner who had lost them, then the assumption was that they had been abandoned. Then the explanation – they had been wandering on their own for most of the year. Renata and I drove down to see them – the long, shaggy coats testified that they had been on their own for a long while. When I stepped out of the car and walked toward them, they ran around the building – but when I turned back to the car, they followed. However long they’ve been on their own, the pair remembered that humans are good creatures.

    And I watched the informal organization on the Trego, Fortine, Stryker Facebook page. First it was folks searching for an owner, folks bringing goat snacks to the old Ranger Station. Then the annoyance at animals being abandoned – and finally the individuals coming forward with determination, a pickup and horse trailer to rescue the goats.

    The rescue didn’t go smoothly – one goat was captured and hauled to a safe place – which left the other alone. Some of the folks who had been following the goats started to chime in on the errors. Now I wasn’t part of the rescue – or of the critics of the rescuers – but there is a little that I do know about goats:

    First, goats are herd animals. A lone goat is not a happy goat. Same as cows and horses, they are social animals. Second, goats are easier to catch when you let them catch themselves. Third, a goat’s pupils are different than ours – they’re kind of like horizontal rectangles. It makes for absolutely fantastic peripheral vision. The book tells me that, without moving their heads, they can see in 340 of a circle’s 360 degrees. A cat’s vertical pupils help the cat to succeed as an ambush predator. The goat’s horizontal pupils make them downright difficult to ambush or sneak up on.

    Facebook reads like the second goat was captured by a couple of women who brought their own goat along – demonstrating to him that they are trustworthy. The photo shared on Facebook showed some pretty respectable ropes around him after he had been caught.

    But the story isn’t about the goats – the story is about the high quality of our neighbors. These are people who will go the extra mile because a couple of goats don’t have a home. These are the same people who will rescue kittens and elderly dogs – in spades. I live in a good neighborhood with good neighbors. I didn’t see anyone calling on the government to fix the problem – I saw people who observed animals in distress, chose to act, and by the time they were done, two goats have a home for new year. They may have been homeless at Christmas – but my hat’s off to the neighbors who took the initiative to get the goats a home for their future.

  • The January Run

    It’s the week before Christmas. Fifty years ago, I was on a Ski-doo Alpine, making the January Run. It was a partial run – mostly for the purpose of rewinding the clockwork recorders that measured the height of the antifreeze solution as deeper snows compressed the snow pillows (a snow pillow is a rubber bladder, filled with antifreeze – I measured a lot of them, but rarely saw one).

    It’s a different world now – instead of pushing twin tracked snowmobiles up Grave Creek to sample Weasel Divide, then sample Stahl Peak and rewind the pillow, I can download the measurements from my armchair. Today, the only need for snow surveyors is to visit the site, and provide the measurements that allow the correlations with the (longer established) snow course. The real iron men of snow surveys were the generation before me – they did it all on skis and snowshoes.

    So, in memory of the job that once brought me envy (“You really get paid to ride snowmobiles?”) Here’s what the data recorder has to say about Stahl Peak today:

    I like the chart – and the long-term data (for the last 30 years – it really does make me feel old to see that my measurements from 50 years ago, are so far in the past that they’re not included. But even a half century ago, I had learned that climate, like weather, changes – it’s just slower to change).

    6 Hour
    SWE Change
    (inches)    		12 Hour
    SWE Change
    (inches)    		24 Hour
    SWE Change
    (inches)    		48 Hour
    SWE Change
    (inches)    		1 Week
    SWE Change
    (inches)
    0.000.000.501.202.40
     Daily Statistics
    Latest Observation is 20.90 inches which is 147 % of average
     Note: The Median/Average is based upon the 30 year period 1991 to 2020.
    The Min/Max is based upon the Period Of Record (POR).

    So, at this time, the snowpack on Stahl is about 150% o the average. If you click on the NCRS site, you’ll see where the Kootenai basin sits:

    Basin
      Site Name    		Elev
    (ft)    		Snow Water EquivalentWater Year-to-Date Precipitation
    Current
    (in)    		Median
    (in)    		Pct of
    Median    		Current
    (in)    		Median
    (in)    		Pct of
    Median
    KOOTENAI RIVER BASIN
      Banfield Mountain55806.8   6.2   110   19.5   10.3   189   
      Bear Mountain546016.8   18.8   89   47.4   31.8   149   
      Garver Creek42503.3   4.7   70   15.2   9.0(24)169   
      Grave Creek43503.0   5.2   58   28.8   14.3   201   
      Hand Creek50303.6   3.9   92   11.6   7.2   161   
      Hawkins Lake646014.3   9.8   146   25.8   15.2   170   
      Poorman Creek50508.8   11.4(22)77   46.1   25.9(22)178   
      Stahl Peak604020.9   14.2   147   27.1   18.2   149   
    Basin Index (%)104   168

    The percentages are impressive – but there is a lot of winter yet to come. I don’t have data based on the Bouyoucos blocks we once measured to show how much moisture is stored in the soil at the sites – but I’d bet the soil moisture is at 100% capacity too.

    It’s a pleasant thing that the data is so readily available anymore.

  • Time Was

    Time was when I would catch a cold and work my way through it – a certain amount of misery, but no lost productivity. That time seems to be gone. As I recover from this last plague and contagion, I recall the words of Leon Trotsky: “One of the most surprising things in life is the sudden realization that one has become old.” I’ve reached that epiphany – though not with a life so much on the margin as his. My favorite variant of his quote is: “Old age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man.” Somehow, I have found old age, it is unexpected every morning, and each task I undertake that reveals a new, or a slightly greater infirmity that is as unexpected to me as it was to Trotsky.

    Today I noticed a Facebook post from an Idahoan who decided to contrast the long-term precipitation records on Bear Mountain and Rattle Creek with the recent events that led to floods on Keeler Creek and Rattle Creek. When I reviewed the records he shared, I found that he didn’t go back far enough to show the year when Jay and I had to go past Bear Mountain, and down Rattle Creek to get the snow measurements for Idaho – access was no longer possible from the west.

    I was nervous about Rattle Creek – my avalanche safety class at Snow Survey Training was taught by a guy who had made his reputation in an avalanche trap called Rattle Creek – and, having heard his warnings, I wasn’t really at ease about the opportunity. Getting in through Keeler Creek was a challenge – shovel the snowbank down to a spot where we could ford the creek, park the snowmobile in shallow water, shovel a new ramp up through a five or six foot snowbank as quickly as possible, and repeat about a dozen times until we left the washed out road and arrived at the Bear Mountain snow course. From there, follow the map over the mountain, and proceed down to Rattle Creek snow course. It was a cake walk – I should have realized that, since we regularly sampled Bear, all of the Rattle Creek hazards were below that snow course. The security of that part of the trip was unexpected.

    When we returned to the road that Keeler Creek had washed out, we encountered a half-dozen recreational snowmobilers – the trails we had shoveled up the snowbanks were good enough for our twin-track Alpines – but the lighter machines had a rougher time. Funny to realize that the data from one of my tougher runs is now ancient history, and doesn’t show up on the readily accessed records.

    The trip taught me that, while the snowfall and precipitation around Troy and Libby is every bit as intense as what we see on Stahl Peak, we’re lucky that our valleys are a bit higher, our mountains are a little higher, and Fortine and Grave Creeks do not share the same peak runoff times. They have it rough when winter floods hit the low country in south Lincoln County. Libby Dam has definitely served it’s flood protection purpose this past few days. But I never expected to be around when my snow measurements became ancient history.

  • Second-hand Information

    Most of my information, my knowledge, is second hand. I know Venezuela exists because I have been there – but my knowledge of Viet Nam comes from other people, their spoken stories and written ones. The world is too big to have a preponderance of experience.

    I’m looking at the photographs and videos posted on the internet about the flooding in south Lincoln County. My first-hand information is from floods down Libby way in the 70’s and 80’s when I worked for the Soil Conservation Service. My second-hand information is from people taking pictures with cell phones and drones yesterday and today. It’s a lot more relevant than my first-hand information. The change in technology though – that is impressive. I recall driving down to Libby with my 35mm camera, and vividly recall calling Oly Euland at the state, to fund a flight to get photos of the flood before it receded, the weather turned cold again, and snow covered all the damage.

    My first-hand knowledge won’t do anyone any good. Although there may be a chuckle at the expense of a landowner on Callahan Creek, who saw my government truck as I was photographing the flood, came up to me, said something nice about the government doing well to get there so quickly, then cursed me when I responded to his question of “You have a check for me, right?” with “No.” It was interesting to meet a man who went so quickly from compliments to curses.

    For the folks who are looking at Lincoln County being declared an emergency – up a Trego, we’re a little damp, but fine. Down Libby way, they’re at about 2,100 feet above sea level. Troy is about 1900 feet. We’re at 3,100 feet. The general rule is that you lose 5.2 degrees Fahrenheit for every 1000 feet of elevation increase. (That’s second-hand information, too – someone better than I did the calculations) Troy (well, actually where the Kootenai leaves Montana for Idaho) is the lowest point in Montana. That low elevation makes Libby and Troy very susceptible to flooding during winter thaws. On the other hand, there’s a big advantage in having Libby Dam, where the Corps of Engineers can crank the flow down and minimize the Kootenai’s impact on the flooding.