any members in Montana

I lived in Missoula for a while, that was a great time!

Ah yes, @bjesien , Missoula is not your typical Montana town.  I wouldn't mind living there either.  

You mean they have more than one stoplight??

Yes, @thecarpathian , yes they do.  (Unlike the town in Montana that I grew up in.)

“Missoula is not your typical Montana town. ”

Curious what this means? Thanks

It’s a college town (U of M) and a tad more progressive, @grannyring . I remember in 2016 after I finished cleaning my Dad’s house out after he died, I decided to go a bit out of my way and take the scenic route back, and I stopped in Seeley Lake (Mt.) for lunch and the menu was featuring all these "organic" dishes, and I asked the proprietor/waitress if that was due to the proximity to Missoula, and she kind of snorted and said something to the effect of, "We don’t care what those hippies in Missoula think."

“Missoula is not your typical Montana town. ”

Curious what this means? Thanks

. . . I remember a while back ago I watched an episode of Dateline in which a home owner’s (in Missoula) garage had been burglarized previously. At the time, there was kind of a thing going on in Missoula where apparently the local high school kids would go out at night and enter people’s garages (if they were left open) and do minor pilfering of beer and what not. Anyway, some kids made the mistake of going into the homeowner’s (who I referred to above) garage which he had left open again and set up with a motion detector and alarm and then lay in wait with a (I think ) a Mossberg Model 500 and he blasted one of the kids a couple of time. The kid was unarmed and the homeowner was charged and convicted as the jury apparently decided that it was a premeditated ambush, and I think I remember that he (the homeowner) got a pretty lengthy sentence. (It did turn out that the boy who was killed was not involved in the previous burglary.)

Anyway, @grannyring , I remember thinking to myself that if that had happened in certain other Montana towns, he may not have been convicted or even charged.

“Missoula is not your typical Montana town. ”

Curious what this means? Thanks

@grannyring , I think another way to explain that would be by looking at the results of the last presidential election. In Missoula County the democratic ticket won 59% to 37% for the republican ticket. However, overall in Montana, it was R 58.39% to D 38.46%. I’d also say that by and large, Montana is an agricultural state east of the foothills, and I don’t think the economy of Missoula is based on agriculture. The agricultural culture (no alliteration intended) as opposed to to the not agricultural culture.

@immatthewj My neighbor is from Missoula, She’d be interested (more like I’d be interested) in all this Montana analysis. As a geographer, it’s fascinating to me. It’s the only part of the country I have not been to, but I sure would love to visit.

@grislybutter , well, I escaped Montana shortly before my 19th birthday in 1978 and I haven’t really been back for any extended periods of time, so my own analysis may not be completely on point. I do remember that a while after I got out of the Air Force I was back for maybe 6 months (December ’84 through June ’85) and once I was in a barber shop for a hair cut and there was a rancher/farmer bitching to another one about the laws protecting endangered species (I believe he was discussing grizzly bears at the time, and I am not typing that just because this is your thread). Anyway I remember him saying something about how he and his kids had never seen a dinosaur, but it didn’t bother him that they (dinosaurs) were extinct. But it is a beautiful and relatively sparsely populated state. If I remember from our Montana History class in HS, Montana is a Spanish word for mountainous, which seems to me to be a bit misleading as a large percentage of the state is what I consider to be plains/prairie.

While there in the 1990’s I was told that "the Californian’s were invading the place", driving up property prices, etc.

@bjesien , my Dad used to grouch and grump about that. My Mom was from Kalispell (my Dad was from Billings) and I have fond memories of our trips up across the Mountains in the summer (my Dad was a teacher, so he was off) to spend time with Grandma. Anyway, as time passed and both my Mom and my Grandmother had died and I’d take a vacation or two each year to visit my Dad, I’d always say to him that if he moved to Kalispell (which at one time when my Mom was alive they had thought about) I’d find a way to visit more often. I always said that in a half jokingly but half serious way. But he’s always reply that "The Californians had ruined Kalispell." He didn’t like making big life changing decisions (I am like him in that regrad, although I can list a couple I should not have made) so even if "the Californians had not ruined Kalispell", I doubt he would have ever packed up and moved anyway.

Thanks for the clarification. We are planning a trip to Bozeman and was curious about the statement. I don’t know Montana at all, but Bozeman looks interesting.

@grannyring , Bozeman is Southeast of Missoula on I-90 (which is a fun drive if you like driving, as I used to) and a bit Northwest of Billings. I am reciting that without the benefit of a map, so if the map in my head (I’ve made that drive a few times) is off, I apologize. I’ve only passed through, never spent any time there, but it looks to me like beautiful country. "The foothills" is how my Dad described it. He (my Dad) had a teacher buddy who retired a while after he did he did, and my Dad’s teacher buddy was a huge outdoors man (fishing and hunting) and Bozeman (actually a "cabin" in the vicinity) was where he retired to. That was back in ’15, about the time my Dad died. Anyway, Bozeman is another college town, MSU, and I kind of get the impression that it may be a bit more progressive/liberal than most of the rest of mainstream Montana, but I do not know that for sure. I do not remember it having the same reputation as Missoula. If you have ever watched that series Yellowstone (which I will not watch anymore and absolutely cannot stand), every once in a while, when they are tossing names about to try to add "realism" to that farce, they would refer to Bozeman.

scary story @immatthewj but I very much enjoy your writing (where did it goi?!

I used to get in trouble at that age but survived it, luckily. It was mostly my fault being in the wrong place in the wrong time - knowingly. We are only young once...

Hey, @grislybutter , well, I got to thinking that maybe it wasn’t appropriate for the site, let alone the forum I posted it in, but more than that, it’s a small world and Montana has a relatively small population in that small world and the towns that it happened in are small segments of that small population, so on the way off chance that A’gon has members from that particular area in the world that might read it and for some reason take offense (or even worse, recognize me from my retelling, as I would just as soon stay anonymous in that part of the world) I thought about it and deleted it. (I am not even on facebook and I never will be and if anyone I ever used to know back there ever wants to find me bad enough, they can hire a private detective.)

Anyway, let me continue with one more post on that particular subject, and although it has nothing to do with amps or preamps, it is your thread, so if you don’t mind. . . .

I used to do crime mapping so I was painfully aware of homicide rates and where and what triggered them.

That's interesting.  Out of curiosity, did that include Montana at all?  And if so, how did that state stack up?  

. . . if you wanted some follow up on that story that I related, if you remember the name I referred to, and you google it as I just did, there are a ton of hits on it and I got a couple of things wrong. The incident happened in ’75 and the death sentence was originally by hanging, but he wound up getting eight stays, so he was never executed until ’95 and by then the method was lethal injection. There do seem to be some news stories about at least one of his attorneys, although in the one I cursorily looked at just now I did not see the one who I had referred to (although, I just scanned that story quickly) but it would surprise me if the one that I had written about was not mentioned somewhere.

Since your thread kind of morphed off into a discussion about Montana and the culture(s) there, I will say that the Montana I grew up in was nothing at all like the Montana that is portrayed in Yellowstone, but bad things did (and I have no doubt still do) happen there. (Another incident, after I joined the Air Force, in my home town to one of my classmates just popped into my mind.) But things like that get the residents attention when they do happen. I don’t live in the city now, but in the city closest to where I do live (30 miles away) it’s real rare when a night goes by that the local news does NOT report on a shooting or multiple shootings. And it doesn’t really seem to get anybody's attention. Oh, I am sure that law enforcement and the paramedics are affected in ways that I wouldn’t understand unless I responded to gun play or the after effects of that kind of action, but at least to me, hearing about it has become routine.

I used to get in trouble at that age but survived it, luckily. It was mostly my fault being in the wrong place in the wrong time - knowingly. We are only young once...

Ah, the Missoula shooting incident.  Sneaking into open garages at night is not a good idea, and as a property owner it would make me quite angry (but I keep my garage closed and locked so it does not happen to me)  but to me it sure doesn't seem like something to get shot to death over.  And evidently the jury felt the same way.

@12many , that series went from bad to real bad to unbelievably bad in a hurry.  In retrospect I cannot understand how/why I watched it long enough to chart those evolutionary stages, except to say that I have some masochistic tendencies.

Of course Yellowstone was sensationalized, otherwise what would a show about Montana be about, new squeegee at the gas station? Neighbor’s cow ate an old spinster’s petunias?

You are over simplifying,, @thecarpathian , there actually was and I am sure still is some drama that did and does occur in Montana from time to time that some might find interesting. I truly believe that with some (’some’ is the operative word) poetic license a more realistic drama could be presented that would capture the actual spirit and culture of the people that work with the animals and the land and could also capture the interest of viewers without constantly presenting dealings with corrupt law enforcement officers, ongoing conflict with land developers, murders and gun battles with fully automatic weapons on a weekly basis, rattlesnakes whose venom kills their victims within minutes, bad asses that are so incredibly bad they cannot be stopped let alone killed, countless bodies being routinely disposed of into the same ravine off of the side of a road leading into Yellowstone National Park without drawing attention of law enforcement as they decomposed and attracted scavengers . . . and so on and so on and so on.

I will concede that as an actor Kevin Costner was able to realistically portray a hard bitten aging rancher who had lived a life that included suffering in bad weather and uncertain economic conditions to get beef on the market, and the rigors of that life alone could have been an interesting story . . . his ability to act was wasted on the script that was full of executions and what not that were ordered on his behalf. I will also give Cole Hauser some credit for his portrayal of a sociopath who would just as soon get into a fight than have sex with a woman, because to a certain extent his portrayal did remind me of a couple of people I knew of who made a living on the range with that apparent mindset and that were people that I certainly would never mess with, but at least one of them wound up doing time in Deer Lodge (and to be clear, except for six short months from ’84 through some of ’85, I make no claims to have ever worked on a farm or ranch and I was absolutely never ever a bad ass) so I will give him that much credit up to the point he started executing people (once with what must have been the world’s most deadly rattle snake) and winning unwinnable fights on an almost weekly basis.

As far as the six months I referred to that I spent on a wheat farm on the plains of north central Montana, I learned some interesting things about some people (infidelity, drugs, premature death) out there that I am going to choose to not elaborate on, because as I typed previously, it is a small world and so on and so on, so out of respect for some who I know are deceased and some who may not be, I’ll leave the detail alone. As I think back on the town that I actually grew up in (the wheat farm I worked on was about a hundred miles east of that) of about between three to five thousand, depending on the year, and one stop light and at least twelve bars (that were frequented by drifters, custom combiners, ranch hands and farmers, oil rig rough necks) I remember an attempted murder/suicide (the suicide was successful) that happened in broad daylight right outside the county courthouse (this was the spring the World’s Fair was in Spokane) and was what happened when a love affair went bad. I wasn’t there the night that in the grocery store parking lot when in the course of a disagreement someone pulled a .410 out of their pickup and pointed it at one of the brothers of the survivor of the murder (attempt)/suicide that I referred to, and the other brother was wound so tight because his sister was nearly shot to death that the standoff that occurred resulted in the .410 being broken over a knee but I did hear some reliable first hand accounts . . . I remember after I graduated HS a suicide with a 30-06 (that I was told basically took the top of his head off) at a keg party (that I wasn’t at) that involved a boy who became a man too soon and by all accounts was another episode of love gone wrong . . . I remember talk of a local ranch hand who rode herd on a ranch just west of town off of US 2 who never went anywhere without his 30-30 being as close as he could get away with keeping it because of an ongoing disagreement he had with a ranch owner, and she happened to be his boss. After I joined the Air Force and escaped my hometown I remember hearing the story, and my mom sent me the newspaper articles, of an abduction in 1979 of one of my classmates from a hotel, where she was the night clerk, on main street of that town . . . that story ended with her murder in a coulee not far from the river outside of that town, and the apprehension of the mentally ill individual who abducted and murdered her . . . and I just now did a google, and unlike the 1975 murderer (who I referenced in an earlier post) in Conrad who was executed in ’95, this one was paroled under "strict supervision" in ’08. . . . And as I was doing that search, I found another story (KRTV mtn news), more recent, (June 8, 2024), again in my hometown, involving a man who ran over a town cop in the parking lot of a bar I remember well, and then died after the cop shot him.

And I truly think, that against a backdrop of real life small towns and prairie where the wind never seems to quit blowing and coulees and ridges and rural blight on reservations and alcoholism, with some poetic license all of this, the murder the suicide the revenge, could be made interesting for the viewer and there would be no need for the poetic license to go full batcrap Yellowstone crazy because this stuff was and is real with real people.

But I will also concede that judging from the success of Yellowstone, I am in the clear minority here, but you will never change my opinion of that mind blowingly unreal and stupid series.

@thecarpathian , oh my, I hope you didn't interpret my long winded reply as being antagonistic or defensive.  As I started typing I just kept thinking of more and more reasons a realistic and believable drama could be set in Montana that would be interesting for the viewer.  But I am likely not be a good barometer for what the average viewer wants to watch.  

A River Runs Through It was supposed to be set in the Missoula.  The Horse Whisper was supposed to be set somewhere in Montana.  Legends of The Fall was supposed to be set someplace in Montana.  None of these are on my personal list of favorite movies, and none of them are as action packed as Yellowstone, but I find all of them way more watchable because they are actually believable.  

But again:  sorry for the long winded reply.  I did not intend to type it in an aggressive tone if that is how it came across.    

you guys are the most polite gentlemen I know here :)

Ha ha!  When I was going off with that litany of reasons that I find Yellowstone to be a total waste, I forgot to mention the completely unbelievable  portrayal that Kelly Reilly does of John Dutton's (Kevin Costner') daughter.  Oh Em Gee but that is bad!  (There actually is a tiny town in Montana named Dutton.  Not even one red light in that one.  It's a bit north of Great Falls on I 15.  I guess the town's namesake  had something to do with the rail road way back when; I am kind of  surprised that Yellowstone hasn't found a way to credit that to their fictional John Dutton.)

A River Runs Through It was supposed to be set in the Missoula.  The Horse Whisper was supposed to be set somewhere in Montana.  Legends of The Fall was supposed to be set someplace in Montana.  None of these are on my personal list of favorite movies, and none of them are as action packed as Yellowstone, but I find all of them way more watchable because they are actually believable.  

And I'll quickly add Jeremiah Johnson to that list (I remembered that one and the character Will Geer played a little bit after reading the grizzly bear posts).  

@mark200mph , Montana resisted, but sometime in the mid seventies, right before I got my driver’s license, they went from R&P to 55 mph, but yes, the way they protested that was by issuing only a $5 fine for daytime (not night time) speeding on the highway. Then sometime in the ’90s they went back to R&P, but what basically happened was that someone fought a speeding ticket after the MHP ticketed him because they (the MHP) decided that he (the speeder) was going faster than what is "reasonable & prudent." I don’t know what all legally happened on the way to the Montana Supreme Court, but they (the court) decided that they would fix that by once again doing away with "R&P." At that point the daytime speed limit on interstate and US highways went down to 75 mph. The second to the last time I was through Montana to start cleaning my Dad’s house out was in the spring of ’16 and at that time the daytime limit was up to 80 mph. I came up over a hill on I-15 somewhere south of the Marias river at 86 mph (at least that’s what the backwards facing radar said) and on the other side of the hill there was a state trooper dawdling along in the left lane and I got on the brakes as hard as I could, but I still blew right by him. He gave me a warning ticket, but he told me that for him, "80 means 80." And he wasn’t crazy about 80, because of the "increased fatals" they were seeing." He told me I was "a long way from home" (out of state plates and all) and asked me where I was going: I told him, and he said, "Well, you are almost home, so slow down."

Anyway, the impression I got from a Dodge forum that I frequent is that the daytime speed limit is still 80 on the interstate and US highways. Some member from Montana was trying to say that R&P was done away with the second time due to "federal overreach." I posted back that I didn’t know how he figured the Montana Supreme Court is "federal overreach," but he never got back to me on that one. (Some folks out there consider just about everything that happens as some form of "federal overreach.")

Is it true that in Montana you can legally marry a grizzly bear?

The honeymoon would probably be a short one, @thecarpathian .

Anyway, the impression I got from a Dodge forum that I frequent is that the daytime speed limit is still 80 on the interstate and US highways.

Oops! Too late to edit, but as I thought about what I typed,  I got that part a bit wrong, and a google confirmed it:

daytime AND night time on interstate is 80 mph

daytime on two lane highways (not just US highways) is 70 mph, and night time on those highways is 65 mph.

That's nhp not NHL gotta love ai.

On the honeymoon, would the grizzly wear a teddy?

Ha ha!  No pun intended?  Well, @thecarpathian , I doubt it, but you be the judge:

night of the grizzlies

on that subject, did you ever see that documentary, Grizzly Man?  It is NOT about @grislybutter .  He thought he was on pretty good terms with grizzly bears up in Alaska, but I guess he was wrong.  It makes for interesting viewing.

Grizzly Man

@thecarpathian I don't care if I am not clever or interesting. I WANT TO BE THE FUNNIEST!

You've got stiff competition there, @grislybutter .

Wasn’t he the guy who lived on an old bus until they ate him?

Talk about Meals on Wheels, Alaska style...

@thecarpathian , I think you might be confusing the one I mentioned with another one. Emile Hirsch played the role of a young man (theoretically a true story) who went off to Alaska and was surviving off the land and found an old deserted bus to live in, but he ate some plants that were not edible and from his writings that were recovered when he was found, that is what apparently killed him.

Into The Wild

As far as The Grizzly Man, I don’t think he was living in a bus; I think he was just camping out in various places and interacting freely (rather recklessly) with the grizzlies (because he felt he had a friendly relationship with them) but when the bears got hungry, they did, in fact, eat him.

A grizzly bear walks into a bar, bartender asks, "What can I get you?"

Grizzly bear says, "I’ll have a rum.................and coke."

It wasn’t The Cocaine Bear, was it?

disagreeing with someone far more articulate than one, and a much better writer to boot, is a bit of a fool’s errand

Which is why in most cases I would never embarrass myself by daring to disagree with you on a public forum, @devinplombier , but

and the violence and body count and familial dysfunction are maybe a little bit exaggerated at times.

right there you completely lost me.

Helluva first post, @audioslave1970 .

I have been to Montana, what natural beauty! Question; Is there a grizzly bear tax?

Check with the cocaine bear on that one, @thecarpathian .

Bummer, @thecarpathian   Did he used to have some pretty good $h!t?

I was afraid to ask him for any...

I guess that might be like asking "does a cocaine bear $h!t in the woods?"

Ah yes, the politics ruffled many a feather. But in fairness, at its heart the show is more old-school libertarian than anything else such as the sort that triggers a lot of folks these days. The broad Republican brush it was painted with wasn’t entirely fair, or accurate.

@devinplombier , I am quite familiar with how, in general, Montana leans politically. That truly has nothing to do with my dislike for that series.

The fact that it was the most-watched series in the US (despite being absolutely ignored by the media) goes to show that it was good at entertaining all kinds of folks in a very broad cross-section of modern America.

And I am pretty sure that in a previous post, or more than one previous post, I made the concession that I was in the clear minority on this one. I cannot explain why I watched as many episodes as I did before I stopped watching. Sometimes I will watch something simply because I am fascinated by how bad it is. I will also reluctantly confess that at one time in my life I watched professional "wrestling," and I think a fair comparison can be made between Yellowstone and professional "wrestling" except that there is probably more potential for serious accidental injury in professional "wrestling." The plot-lines/scripts are equally as ridiculous but the acting, in general, is probably a bit better on Yellowstone, so at least I’ll give them that much credit.

Amps?  We don't need no stinking amps!

Oh yeah, right--now you'e serious, @grislybutter . . . sure thing, man.