Trego's Mountain Ear

"Serving North Lincoln County"

Tag: travel

  • My Hay Field Lacks Carbon

    It is amusing to listen to folks who seem to have all the answers on C02 and global warming, but have no concept of soil fertility and agriculture. My hayfield lacks carbon in the soil – and soil carbon has a very high correlation with soil fertility.

    My field was a lake up until a bit over a hundred years ago. Before it was a shallow lake, it was a glacial lake. Before that, it was covered by really thick ice. That means the soil is all glacial silt and clay, and it doesn’t have much carbon. Back when they used dynamite to drain the lake, they probably thought it would be easy to make a field – fairly flat, no stumps to grub out, and few rocks. The problem was that there wasn’t much organic carbon, some of the clay was a calcium sulfate rich vertisol, and the soil is pretty marginal. Ideally, it would have been in small grain crops every year over the past century, with the straw plowed in – but it hasn’t been. The other problem with glacial silts is that the soil is pretty well compacted.

    Basically, the field was covered by a glacier until ten thousand years ago, then covered by water until a hundred years ago. Modern technology (at the time dynamite) made it possible to drain the lake and turn it into a field. At the time, soil science was in its infancy – a hundred years later, we had a lot better understanding of the problems that I still face.

    Low soil carbon means less microbial action in the soil – and this field never had the chance to accumulate organic carbon. It has needed systematic agri2cultural management to build more carbon into the soil – and perhaps, if it gets those treatments over the next century, we may be able to get the top six or seven inches of soil up to one or two percent organic carbon. Fortunately, the ground is flat, so erosion has not been a problem.

    It’s sensitive to overgrazing – particularly in the dry, saline areas. I was lucky enough to encounter a Russian Wild Rye variant 40 years ago that wasn’t particularly susceptible to overgrazing by horses and cattle. It has spread, and, with a bit of encouragement, will continue to grow in the saline areas. In the wet ground, there is Reed Canary Grass – these two grasses aren’t preferred by cattle and horses, but we’re learning that goats really like the hay. There is definitely a learning curve to managing the soil that makes up my hayfield.

    So I think I have it down – in some areas, Timothy. In others, Garrison Creeping Meadow Foxtail, Reed Canary, Wild Rye along with Wheatgrasses and Idaho Fescue. It’s looking like a mix that cattle will eat, but goats love.

    Soil management in this case is a question of developing more organic carbon. After puttering with the field off and on over 65 years, my grandson introduced me to a key component – his two little goats love the hay we produce.

  • Trump Okays Kei Cars

    So I’m reading the Canadian Blog ‘Blazing Cat Fur’ at https://blazingcatfur.ca/2025/12/05/from-full-size-to-fun-size-trump-gives-kei-cars-the-green-light/ and I realize that Trump has instructed the folks who regulate the auto industry to “clear the path for the production and sale of kei vehicles in America, following his recent trip to Asia, where he saw pint-sized cars flooding the streets.”

    In Montana, we’re used to seeing 25-year-old Kei cars on the street – federal laws make it easier to import those little white pickups (and vans, etc.) Now we have the President making it legal to build, and buy the little rigs new. I’m upbeat at the idea – of course I have already owned a couple of them, and did, 30 years ago, drive a Yugo.

    Trump said “If you go to Japan, where I just left, and if you go to South Korea and Malaysia and other countries, they have a very small car—sort of like the Beetle used to be with the Volkswagen—they’re very small, they’re really cute, and I said, ‘How would that do in this country?’” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy heard the message – and folks from the auto industry were also there.

    So we may wind up with little cars that look like this Suzuki Jimny – not a lot different than the old Samurai (full disclosure: I had an old LJ10, and am still driving a Vitara):

    Or a Daihatsu Copen (In Japan, Toyota is Daihatsu:

     I was talking with a friend yesterday – each of us drives an old, high mileage pickup. Those 300 thousand mile pickups are paid for. The old, small pickups that we drove through the last 20 years of the Twentieth Century have disappeared. I’m hoping that, with Trump’s support, I’ll be able to write a check for an American built new pickup that looks something like this Honda:

  • An Evening Like 1917

    It’s a little over a century since my grandparents bought the place in Trego. With the power outages, we’ve experienced a little of what their ordinary day and evenings were as the season moved toward Christmas – the wood stove keeping the house warm, and, for use, battery powered lanterns, where their light was kerosene. A kettle on the stove for coffee or tea – and no internet or electricity. I suspect we’re a lot less able to keep ourselves entertained during the long winter nights – but as I look at my stash of harmonicas, I realize it was my grandmother’s harmonica that led me to playing them – and that I can play harmonica in the dark as well as the light. Their power outages didn’t affect a refrigerator or freezer.

    I have a shallow well – and I’m realizing that a solar panel on the south wall of the pumphouse, charging a 12 volt battery, can power an inverter, so that we can keep water running by going to the pumphouse, turning the inverter on, and taking the pump off the grid and plugging it into the inverter. Our record power outage, to date, is 18 hours – and keeping the water running, without having to start a generator, has some advantages.

    The grill on the porch runs on propane – and it will take little effort to add a propane burner to handle a coffee pot or scramble eggs. Admitted, the top of the wood stove already does that – but it takes little to avoid the occasional return to pre-electric existence.

    Still, I suspect we have lost a lot of the family social interaction with the luxury of rural electricity. I think of being a Trego kid in the early sixties, when there were only two Spokane TV channels – and reading the entire encyclopedia before finishing the eighth grade. If nothing else, it made high school a bit easier.

    The connection with my grandparents is not strong – my grandfather died shortly after I turned 5. There were a lot of things that couldn’t be shared. But the occasional power outage does offer a little understanding of what their lives were like in the early days of Trego.

  • The Lady Wore Mink (or remodeling the gas station)

    As I unloaded material into the old service station, I had a visitor. A lady wearing a mink jacket – interested in what we’re doing there. I have a soft spot for ladies wearing mink, and it isn’t a common apparel in scenic downtown Trego, so I showed a bit of the unfinished project.

    Part of the deal with furs was my aunt Fay. Over half a century ago, she had examined yard sales and thrift stores for large women’s fur coats – which she would disassemble, and rebuild into vests for me. Afterall, it was the sixties. Later, after Renata and I married, I offered to get her a mink coat kit. She was less than impressed by a singe trap and a small skinning knife. The morning I drove to work and spotted a roadkill winter mink, I didn’t dare call her and ask her to pick it up for me. Sometimes discretion truly is valor’s better part.

    But back to the shop. We are remodeling it. The first step was replacing the leaking corrugated roofing – you can’t remodel when the roof leaks. The next stage is fixing the ceiling damage, and moving the stuff that has been stored there out of the way. I’ve built a 20 unit storage building, and one of those units is going to be full of stuff that is in the way when I work on remodeling. It’s easier to move boxes than to make a permanent decision about things we haven’t used in ten years.

    The service station was built to serve the population involved in building the tunnel. After that population changed, Retha McCully got the idea of changing it to a Convenience Store. When she died, Dad kept the store going – and took out the parts that made it a garage. I’m not remodeling the building for my ideas – at 75, my task is to remodel it into a building that fits with my daughter’s ideas. Today we brought a mini-split on line. Tomorrow, we bring back the wall that separated the gas and oil from the barber shop when it was built. By the time we finish, the building will include spaces for four small businesses.

    Then comes the other tasks – the southernmost building (that Dad put alongside the gas station) was originally a logging camp cook shack. If it can be restored, it will be moved another 20 feet south and be back looking like it did when it was part of a logging camp. The northernmost building was a logging camp bunkhouse. There is too much community history in those two logging camp buildings. The old service station is from the boom town days of the middle and late sixties, while those two portable buildings are from the logging camp days – two distinct times in Trego’s history.

    The center building looks like an old log building – but isn’t. Back when the railroad was relocated, and Libby Dam was built, a guy named Goldsberry bid in the task of salvaging railroad material from the area that was soon to be flooded. He figured that the cedar telegraph poles (installed in 1904) would still have value – but by 1970, they had spent their effective lifespans as telegraph poles. While the telegraph was high tech in 1904, by 1970 it was ho-hum. In the eighties, Dad set up a small mill and had Pat Eustace mill the telegraph poles and turn them into a small building – representing, in its own way, the first railroad relocation and Trego’s first initial boom. The first part of the remodel was taking off the handcrafted doors – unique, but so heavy that opening and closing them damaged the structure.

    As the new walls go up, it gets easier to see what’s coming in with the remodeling. You don’t need to wear a mink jacket to come by and see what’s going on – or to figure out if your dream business might fit into the old service station and downtown Trego’s future.

  • Chesterton’s Fence

    As I move toward my 76th year, I have a fence to remove – mostly because I’m the last one left who knows why it was built about sixty years ago. It still has the original barbed wire, all the wooden posts have been replaced, and it’s not in a place where a fence should be.

    https://theknowledge.io/chestertons-fence-explained/ tells of Chesterton’s paradox on fences: “He once wrote: “There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’”

    In other words, don’t be so quick to tear down things you don’t understand. That fence may have been put up for a very good reason, even if that reason is not immediately obvious. To ignore that reality risks unintended and potentially negative consequences.”

    That’s why I need to remove the fence. I know that it was put in when a cat skidder ran a line in to separate the ranchland from the trailer park – basically to solve a temporary problem. A problem of no more than five years duration. And if I leave it, my grandkids will be looking at Chesterton’s paradox – looking for the reason the fence was built. It’s in a spot where it’s downright inconvenient to maintain. It makes several acres of forest virtually impossible to keep thinned out and use. And, as the last person around when it was built, I owe it to the future generation to remove the dilemma. It briefly provided a solution to a small problem, was maintained to provide that solution when the problem no longer existed, and once it’s gone, the old cat line can provide a good firebreak for the next half-century.

    I don’t find any enjoyment in taking down a fence, rolling up barbed wire, pulling the metal posts and clearing things out. It’s an unpleasant task fraught with barbed wire knicks on my body. But it needs done – and Chesterton’s paradox reminds me that the work needs done in my lifetime – mostly because I know it was a bad solution installed because Walsh/Groves had a cost plus contract for the tunnel, and they made a profit whether the fence was put in a good place or a terrible one. And I don’t want the toddler to grow up and have to face Chesterton’s paradox without the necessary information.

  • Trego – The Hippie Years (and an occasional remittance man)

    If I were forced to set a date for the end of Trego’s boomtown years, it would be somewhere around 1970 or 71. First the tunnel was completed, then Koocanusa filled and the rails that had once connected the county along the Kootenai were picked up. The last construction project finished was highway 37, connecting Libby and Eureka. As the reservoir began filling, 37’s completion was less essential because there was a paved Forest Service road on the west side of the Kootenai – or Koocanusa. The boom ended with many of the construction boom workers moving north for jobs along the Alaska pipeline, and others becoming locals. Mike Brandon married Peggy Hilliker, went to work with a chainsaw in the woods, and became as much (or more) a part of Trego as any of his neighbors. Sam Chaney married Keith Calvert’s daughter, and lives his life on what remains of the Calvert ranch after the rails took so much away. But as the construction boom ended, Trego, like the rest of Lincoln County was left with a housing surplus. Through the seventies, the cheap housing of Trego, indeed all of Lincoln County, along with rapid population growth beginning in the Seattle area, was pressed into a new group of people.

    Anthropologists use the German term “volkswanderung” to describe the movement of groups across Europe during the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Those wandering groups were barbarian tribes who found a better, possibly easier life in declining Rome. Our ‘volkswanderung’, again comes with social change – rapid population growth in northwest Washington state, accompanied by rising land values and rents, followed by the migrations – in this case, gradually and eventually to Lincoln County. Unlike Europe’s ‘volkswandurung’, ours had a physical end to it – the Canadian line and Glacier Park meant that people couldn’t move further in search of cheaper living.

    To be fair, not every newcomer was a hippy – some were straight as they could be. But low cost rentals drew in the hippie lifestyle, and they were a bit more distinctive. Some of these new residents more closely resembled the classic ‘remittance man’ of the old west. (Wikipedia gives a description: “the “Remittance man” is defined in The Canadian Encyclopedia as “a term once widely used, especially in the West before WWI, for an immigrant living in Canada on funds remitted by his family in England, usually to ensure that he would not return home and become a source of embarrassment.” ) Relatively inexpensive land, often off-grid, provided a spot where families could set up the modern remittance man. Others made use of government support programs until 1996, when the Welfare Reform Act changed the game. Still others – probably more common – found places to buy and work on the local economy, little different than their neighbors with a possible exception of being a bit more likely to use ‘illicit chemicals’.

    Following Lincoln Electric’s member revolt in 1988, powerlines were extended up Edna Creek, resulting in fewer off-grid homes. While Lincoln Electric Cooperative’s return to expanding electric power was short-lived and incomplete, the Interbel telephone cooperative took expansion of telephone and internet services as part of their mission, and many homes that are otherwise off-grid are served by fiberoptic lines and have full modern communications.

    This is the time when Edna Creek and Butcher Creek lands were sub-divided, mostly into parcels that could be described as a portion of a section and sold without a survey. While fuel cell technology has not provided an acceptable alternative for these off-grid residences, solar panels have created a power source that has moved the off-grid homes and residences far beyond the typical home of 1945. Likewise, the portable gas and propane generators have improved the quality of life off-grid.

    This is the time when a single individual affected Trego’s composition – for most of the 20th Century, Trego’s growth and development was an outgrowth of national trends – in the late seventies and through the eighties, Al Luciano’s Land Store sold and financed parcels of land – particularly raw land around Butcher Creek.

    After the Great Timber Strike of 1917, Trego spent nearly a half-century regarded as a place filled with socialists and IWW supporting unionists (despite the fact that our only self-identified socialist was raising sheep). Butcher Creek has merely became the part of Trego that continues that external perspective – in a smaller area (or at least my conversation with a Whitefish resident suggests that to me).

    If I had to set a time when Trego’s Hippie Years began to end, I’d pick the middle of the 1990’s.