Ecorover in the Queen City: Helena, Montana

There I was in Helena, Montana's capital, for two days. As a representative for the faculty union at My College, I engaged in pre-budgetary negotiations (along with reps from other faculty unions) with represenatives from our Office of the Commisioner of Higher Education. The sessions went very well and were cordial & collaborative--a welcome relief after having engaged in contract bargaining sessions with some of the same management folks.

And there are worse places in world to spend two days. First of all, Helena is just one hour from Butte, and it's a scenic trip over the Continental Divide at Elk Park and across the Boulder hill. Elk Park is aptly named, for sure enough there was a big herd or two out on the greening meadows. Still lots of snow back in the trees and on north faces, though, and I think the elk are about a week late returning to calving areas.

Helena is home to the Sleeping Giant Brewing Company/Brewhouse Bar & Grill. For years, the Brewhouse served the best barbeque ribs in Montana. I'm not so sure about that, now, for the latest batch of raspberry chipotle was wimpy at best. The ribs themselves had their usual succulent, slow smoked, texture & flavor. And they go well with the truly excellent Tumbleweed IPA. Let's not forget the fully ripened and smoked jalapenos in the sauce next time, though!

The MEA-MFT put us up at the Wingate near the airport. It's an interesting neighborhood, with modest homes on small, grassy lots and a sort of anything-goes approach to things like putting your truck up on blocks for curbside repairs and erecting huge amateur radio antennae towers:

There are some real gems in the 'hood, like this classic little "dollhouse:"

The neighborhood is very flat, so I put in a couple of brisk miles without ever raising my heartbeat, and before I realized I should get back to the hotel for my usual early bedtime. In walking around uptown Butte, you KNOW when you've walked a mile or so, given the steep hills and 6,000 foot elevation. Still, a pleasant walk. Early the next morning I repeated a shorter version of it and was pleased the notorius mule deer of Helena's residential streets were out and about:


That day's negotiating session was in the Capitol Building (constructed 1896-1902). The Irish revolutinary and early Montana governor Thomas Francis Meagher (bronze, 1905) greets you as you approach the statehouse:

Inside, there is lots of art, including a few bronzes of Montana's finest, including Jeanette "I cannot vote for war" Rankin (1880-1973), a pacifist that served Montana in the U.S. House of Representatives and voted against U.S. involvement in both World War I and II:

And Maureen and Mike Mansfield (U.S. Representative 1943-53; Senate 1953-77):

The high, stained glass windows of the cupola (i.e. dome) is breathtaking:

And the murals decorating four sides of the cupola's base tell you a lot about how early 20th century Montanans felt about the role of Indians, Frontiersmen, Cowboys, and Miners in the formation of the young state:




Helena, Montana: a nice place to visit.

Spring Hike: Along the Big Hole River

Daughter Emily Munday was home from Boston for spring break a week or so ago, and her goals for the week included a hike (in addition to a ski). Butte and its immediate environs still had a lot of snow. After a leisurely breaksfast of elk sausage and pancakes, we loaded into the Toy p.up and set off for the desert ridges along the Big Hole River 25 miles south of Butte.

On the way, we pulled over on I-90 to check out a wreck. Apparently, the truck driver did not see the train (!!!) and ran into it:

The hills along the Big Hole are full of mule deer. It's not unusual to see 100 or more in a half day's hike. Here's Emily watching a herd through the spotting scope:

And a pic through the scope that she insisted on taking, despite my sage advice that "It won't work." Geez I'm glad to have a daughter and students who regularly prove me wrong:

RTD likes watching deer too:

Almost as much as she enjoys chewing on deer bones:

Watch where you sit, though, this place is full of pricklypear cactus (as I can attest having sat down on a few while settling in for a shot at deer or antelope):

Those spines are sharp enough to skewer a fresh falling deer turd:

Rugged country, and a great place for a spring hike:

No wonder Butte, Montana, is one of the top rated communities in America for easy access to outdoor activity.

Venison Sausage

Like many people I have known in my life, the longer I live the more I appreciate them. So it is with Grandma Beryl (nee Fitzgibbons) Munday. She was a tough old Scot-Irish Presbyter. When I was a child, I thought she was the meanest woman on earth. After Gramps died, however, and she no longer got up each morning at the butt-crack of dawn to cook him breakfast, she really mellowed.

Gram liked staying up late at night watching horror movies and reading, and for 50-some years of marriage she had been seriously sleep deprived. After Gramps died, she often sat in her chair with a cat on her lap reading until 1 or 2 in the morning, and then slept until 10 or sometimes later. When Jan & I lived nearby, we'd sometimes stop in after an evening on the town, and Gram was always ready for a glass of beer.

Gram didn't waste much. She cooked deer kidneys, picked a chicken carcass down to the bones, and made wonderful venison sausage. Here's the recipe.

You'll need a grinder. An old "armstrong" manual grinder like the one she left to me will work just fine:

For this batch, we'll use about 10 pounds of scraps left over from butchering a whitetail. Strips cut from the ribs, 1" - 2" chunks cut from the shanks, and anything else that didn't go into steaks, roasts, stewmeat, or stir-fry meat:

Add to that about 5 pounds of fatty pork scraps. Cheap bacon (our supermarket sells bags of bacon scraps) works well, and if you use salt pork you can use somewhat less:

Mix in a slew of spices and flavorings. Amounts are about 2 teaspoons for each of the spices, about a cup of dark brown sugar, and several (or more) hot peppers if you'd like:

Not shown are fennel seeds, about 4 tablespoons of which get added and mixed in before the second grind. Mix the spices, venison, and pork together and run through the grinder on a coarse setting. Gram's grinder has a single "plate" (cutter wheel) that reverses for fine and coarse grinding. Depending upon how sinewy and tough your venison scraps are and how efficient your grinder is, you might have to pause after every few pounds of meat, remove the plate, and clean out the sinews that are clogging things up. Here we are after mixing in the fennel seeds and switching the plate for the second (and final) grind:

This bulk or pan sausage is good for breakfast patties, and Jan likes it for dishes such as lasagna. Enjoy!

Montana Mule Deer Hunting

Mule deer hunting is to elk hunting as an easy morning hike is to a three-day peak bagging trip. Both mulie and elk hunting are wonderful pursuits, but they differ enormously in scale. And of course there are exceptions, such as the high-country, wilderness, "pack 'em out six miles" hunts that my young friend and superb bow hunter Chad Krause engages in.

A word about ethics: since I am talking about hunting and not mere shooting, I'll omit any serious consideration for the way that many of my fellow Butte residents "hunt" mule deer. As one good friend and former student (and a pretty good guy in most ways) puts it, "Hell, elk hunting is about hunting. Mule deer? We road hunt them fuckers."

Mulies inhabit a wide range of habitat in the Northern Rockies, from the flat sagebrush prairie to the jagged, broken foothills to the alpine meadows and goat rocks. Thanks to my friend and former hunter Dave Carter, I learned of a jagged, broken ridge that fits my ideal for a perfect mule deer hunt. It is far enough away from roads to keep the riff-raff out, and yet with a little planning and good luck you can find, kill, and haul out a mulie buck in a half-day's hunt. Sometimes.

This past weekend, I was blessed with two mule deer hunting partners: our "little brother" AJ and my old friend Don Kieffer. The latter made a long-overdue visit from upstate New York, where he is blessed with fine white-tailed deer and turkey hunting. Here's Don, hiking across some typical sage brush and mountain mahogany habitat on the slopes of our ridge, where we expect to see both white-tailed and mule deer:

Oftentimes, especially during the rut and with heavy hunting pressure, a mule deer buck and "his" does head for the highest, most rugged country they can find. And so this is where we spent our time, clambering along the top, staying off the ridge line, glassing carefully for bedded deer, and stalking every group we could find. I'm fussy about mule deer hunting, and generally avoid shooting the big bucks or any buck with a lot of does. Dominant bucks are stinky, and I'm talking gag-a-maggot stinky here. Usually, the stink seems to stay on the hide, but occasionally it permeates the meat no matter how carefully you field dress, skin, and butcher the critter. Ask Brent Patch, who once killed a stinky big buck whose strong-flavored wild flesh refused to be tamed by the strongest and hottest of spices!

Three humans moving through mulie habitat is a bit much. Mule deer have sharp vision and acute hearing, and still-hunting is difficult at best. After a brief conference, AJ hunted one way along the ridge while Don & I went the other. AJ was barely out of sight when we heard my little 25 Roberts crack once and then -- a minute later -- once again (I gave him three cartridges this year). Sure enough, AJ killed his buck:

And what an unusual rack: a 6 X 6 with triple brow tines on once side, double brow tines on the other, and one set of double points:

Maybe it was a mulie-whitetail hybrid, or maybe just a case of too much testerone. He was a stinky one, and ruled over about twenty does. Almost before Don & I could figure out what was going on (we're a little slow on the uptake, sometimes), we saw AJ a mile below us washing his hands in the river, his buck safely stashed along the railroad tracks. Like last year, we found a mountain bike handy for the two-mile trek along the railway grade. Tough going, but it beat dragging all the hair off on the rough ballast between the ties:

Don & I have 50-some year old knees, and by the time we got AJ & his buck back to the truck, we were tuckered out and it was dark. Did I say that you could hunt this ridge in a half-day? Well, there was a qualifier about "good planning and a little luck" with that claim. And not being 15-years old--an age when no task seems too daunting if you want to do it.

After letting the ridge quiet down for a day or so, Don & I went back and sure enough found the perfect mule deer buck: a fat forkhorn. Not too rutty. Young & tender. And in an appropriately rugged spot near the top of this outcrop:

Just before we saw the buck silhouetted on the ridge, we watched a 3/4 curl bighorn ram strut out of the sagebrush ahead of us, and a yearling moose ford the river far below us. Don's 7 X 57 is a great deer rifle, and he was generous in letting me shoot it. The rifle dropped this little buck in its tracks. It took longer to move it the first two hundred yards out of the rocks than it did to drag it the next mile to the truck:

With the two of us ferrying packs and rifle and taking turns on drag duty, we were home well before noon. A sandwhich and quick cup of coffee, and us old guys were starting to feel young again. We had time to drive back over to the lower Big Hole for a quick afternoon antelope hunt.

It took awhile to locate them in the basin where I usually hunt. We drove by three or four mulie bucks that would have been a Butte road hunter's dream. Turns out, all the antelope bucks and does were together in a herd of fifty or more critters. By the time we spotted them and stalked within almost-shooting distance, the sun was well behind the western ridge. Though I was sorely tempted, Don wisely suggested we save this one for another day. As Chad Krause pointed when I told him this, "A lot can go wrong real quick. Especially when it's getting dark." Good advice, Chad. Good judgment, Don.

Is THAT all there is... (to an antelope hunt), my friend?

An old friend from Pennsylvania (thanks, Bob!) emailed me about the previous "Pronghorn Antelope Hunt" entry. I'll exagerrate for effect, but the message went something like "What's this bullshit about a hunting story where it's all about what you bring home in the back of the truck. Have you lost your ethics?"

Well, no, I haven't. Now don't get me wrong: my hunter role models are the San "Bushmen" hunters of the Kalahari. They'll shoot a giraffe with a little poison-tipped arrow and then track the beast for five days if that's what it takes to bring home the meat. Even with unwounded game, they get on a track and will not say quit (see the marvelous documentary films by John Marshall).

Still -- whether for the San or me -- there is a lot more to it. Hunting is life. Hunting is a deep relationship and bond with nature. Hunting is learning to see and feel the rhythm of life. On the recent antelope hunt, hunting was:

• Meeting the curious jackrabbit that hopped over to within six feet of me in the dawn twilight.
• Seeing the coyote hunt its way up the coulee, and then jump out of its hide as its nose scented my backtrail.
• Wondering how those large slabs of volcanic rock along the ridges became so waterworn and smooth.
• Pausing occasionally to sit down (watch out for the cactus), feel the warm sun, keep my nose into the cool breeze, and take in a vast landscape without another human in sight.
• Wondering how sorry I might be for leaving my knapsack with water, food, and rain gear in the truck on a warm afternoon as I made the stalk.
• Watching a mule deer doe and her two fawns nonchalantly feed as they wondered what those high-strung, flighty antelope were so excited about.
• Knowing that the ravens, whose excited croaking and flying back and forth between me and the butte, were telling me that antelope were there.
• Carefully gutting the antelope doe to keep the meat clean and sweet.
• Feeling the weight of the doe slung across my shoulders, smelling her strong antelope scent, and picking a good route to the nearest road.
• Being VERY sorry that I had not brought the water bottle as I draped the doe over a sagebrush and began the hike back to the truck.

Yes, there is a lot more to hunting than what comes home in the back of the truck.

Twin Lakes Backpacking

I had a few days for a backpack trip last week, and friend Dave & his daughter Chelsea suggested Lake of the Isle/Twin Lakes area on the west side of the Great Divide. We ended up going to a long valley just north of LotI, a place I've wanted to visit, just over the ridge (Continental Divide) from 10 Mile Lakes. Here is the cirque, a bit distorted by my amateurish photo-stitching:

Soon after leaving the Twin Lakes trail, we ended up bushwhacking through some difficult deadfall in the mid-elevation forest. Hmmm... I thought there was an old packer's trail into this place. Here are Chelsea, RTD, and I--happy, before the grim reality of cross country hiking in the ugly stuff set in:

Well, we did see lots of critters to cheer us on,

such as this curious mule deer doe:

and this curious elk cow:

I suspect both had young hidden near by, and were reluctant to flee. I thought we would see goats for sure, but found nary a sign of them. They were once common in this area, but seem to be suffering from the constant snow machine harassment that occurs throughout the winter.

Well, lots of bear sign, though (some critters are more tolerant of humans than others),

old:

and fresh (note the hair--this guy recently ate an elk calf, I think):

And we saw a bear, but like so many ursine meetings it was fleeting, no time for a photo.

Here are my companions at an old logger's cabin (the ACM raped the timber out of this area, too, a century or so ago):

The 90 degree F heat made the alpine basin feel especially good. Few trees can match the beauty of the alpine larch. They grow in incredibly harsh conditions, on scree, avalanche chutes, and wind (and lightning) blasted ridges:

There were an extraordinary number of tiny yellow violets dotting the open ground covered by snow drifts just a few weeks ago:

A supper of grilled steaks, baked potatoes, and asparagus looks pretty good too:

ATV trail violations are increasingly a problem in this area, as everywhere. No wonder, given the Forest Service policy of trying to close old roads rather than reclaim them. A big wide road is a big wide invitation to ATV riders, and the pitiful closure efforts mean nothing, as you can see by the illegal bypass:

Putting trails across old roads on clearcuts makes for hot hiking too--as with Dave & Chelsea here on the trek out:

Big Hole River: trout in April

I've been a little too busy with researching the role of citizens in shaping Clark Fork superfund, Bridge Access politics, departmental developments, and the backyard parking pad project...

Yesterday, I spent the morning and early afternoon preparing Earth Week materials for this weekend's sessions with American History high school teachers. My colleague Chad poked his head in my office about 11 am just to tell me he was going fishing that afternoon. After he left, I had a little talk with myself: I live in Montana, it's a sunny spring day, and I'm working like a dog [sorry for the metaphor, RTD]. What's wrong with THIS picture?

Some days, I NEED the gurgling white noise of a river to calm my anxieties and mood disorders. Fishing a river is self-medication at it best.

So I finished what I needed to do in a timely matter rather than following the dictum that available work fills available time, hiked up the 1&1/2 miles and 500 feet elevation that separates work from home, threw the gear in the truck, and headed to the Big Hole. Of course, just as I got there the sky closed in and the wind began to blow, but once you're on a river there's no turning back (short of a Biblical-scale storm).

Any day on the river is a good day on the river. There were white-tailed deer to watch swimming the river:

Mule deer to watch on the hillsides:

Trout to be caught and carefully released (like this gorgeous 'bow in spawning colors) after a careful examination by RTD, Trout Inspector:

The occasional pissed off neigbor honking its anger from a midriver rock:

And, on the way home, a beautiful sunset complete with virga:

Life is good (and it beats the alternative).

Antlers

Well, another spate of warm weather has wrecked the skiing, so instead of skiing today I walked to work. I've been sawing out buttons from a deer antler to restore an old Woolrich coat, so along the way (it's about a mile and a half, so I have some quality thinking time) I thought about the whole "antler thing." That is, why do we save and treasure antlers? Is it a mere acquisitiveness, like rats hording useless items or children collecting baseball cards? Well, I like to think it's a little more than that.

Maybe it's more like scars. Get a bunch of men & beer together, and they (the men) will start talking about their scars. The thumb they split with a wood chisel, the stitches where the chainsaw kicked back and split their scalp, the band of scar tissue where they nearly cut off a thumb while reaching up inside an elk's chest cavity while wielding a sharp knife in the other hand... Antlers, like scars, are a material reminder of memorable events.

Certainly, many antlers just end up a debris in the corner of the basement. At my house, most antlers do not get saved anymore.

But some do. Rarely, I might use them for something quasi-practical--like buttons.

In Pennsylvania, I grew up in a deer hunting family that did not treasure antlers. Usually, they ended up "recycled" back to nature along with the offal, feet, bones, and other inedibles. Or they ended up in the yard, gradually reduced to oblivion as the hounds chewing on them. In my twenties, though, I worked at an oil refinery and got to know fellow chemist Bill King. Nailed up in his garage, Bill had the rack from every deer he'd ever killed . Because in most years he killed a buck in both New York State and Pennsylvania (we lived very close to the state line, and it was common to hunt in both states), there were more than fifty of them. So I began saving mine, nailing them up on various posts around a now-gone family oil property.

I left the refinery and went back to school for my PhD. In central New York State, I shot a classic "8-point" (eastern count) whitetail and mounted it on a nice hickory board slabbed out of firewood. This deer was all-the-more-special because as we were skinning and quartering it, my friend Andy Wilson found an arrow shaft with point embedded between the shoulder blades. The deer had healed completely. It makes a good hat rack and catchall for things like Great-Grandpa's M97 Winchester.

When I moved to Montana 17 years ago, I began to adorn the interior of our home with antlers. The first to go up was the rack from my first elk bull. As I look at these antlers, I recall it all seemed so easy: I just went out the first day of season, hunted elk like I had always hunted whitetails, found a big track, followed it all day, and late in the afternoon shot the bull. Wow. Sometimes it is just that easy.

Having grown up seeing small whitetail antlers, I am still amazed by the size of mule deer antlers. Even young bucks sometimes carry a rack that won't fit in a broom closet. So another hat rack made it inside the house.

My wife was feeling a little crowded by this time, so the next memorable buck I shot had its rack go to the office. It's not a big rack by any means, but it's a bit unusaul: a biologist told me the deer was a mulie-whitetail hybrid (not uncommon, I've found).

Since then, memorable racks go up on the back of the house on the outside wall to the mudroom. Oh yes, you can also see a buffalo skull with horns on the upper right (on the roof). I shot a couple of buffalo for a high school history outing when my daughter was in the history club; sent one skull to my friend Don for his barn (he has a nice elk rack I sent him, too).

What makes a memorable rack? Something about the hunt, usually. I must admit, I cannot recall most of my mule deer hunts. They all blend together into one universal, Platonic hunt that ended up with a 125 pound forkhorn providing good meat.

But I do remember every successful elk hunt--whether I took a cow or a bull. These two racks -- a mulie and bull -- are especially memorable because I shot the two within minutes of each other, and I shot them with my old hunting buddy Dave Carter. Though Dave had given up hunting, he joined me one day for a deer hunt in one of our favorite mulie haunts ("Dave's Deer Mine"). And for the first time, we saw an elk there, too. Also, the bull's left antler is deformed --it never grew out much, and part of the base split off and a brow tine grew down the elk's head between its eye and ear.

Speaking of Dave's Deer Mine, this is from the first buck I shot there. I learned that, to get these deer to the nearest road, you have to wade across an icy river. I've since learned to quit shooting big mulie bucks. Frequently -- if they are in rut -- the meat is so strong as to be nearly inedible. People will deny this, but then they start describing the strong seasonings and other cooking methods...

When I shot this bull, it was a long haul out through very deep snow. I left the head in a tree and hiked back up the mountain to retrieve it the following July. A porcupine found it first, as you can see by the nearly-chewed-through spot on the main beam of the left antler.

These two bulls were shot from opposite sides of the same bedding area in two consecutive years. The bull that carried the upper rack was a sort of dwarf: its body size was more-or-less normal, but its legs were abnormally short and it had only half a liver.

Well, I'm no trophy hunter, and certainly none of the racks I've taken over the years are trophies. But they are memories. By the way, ask me sometime to tell you about that scar on the inside of my left forearm...