It’s tempting to complain about the heat. Everybody’s doing it… We have set records for sustained heat in July. In fact, we’re nearly a week beyond setting a record of sustained high temperatures (with no letup), and Bozeman even hit 100 yesterday.
But then I talk to clients in California, and they’re just not all that sympathetic! We have numerous bison clients scattered around the state, but several in the central regions, from Sacramento to Bakersfield and south, where it’s been just unrelieved scorching for weeks now.
They have air conditioning, though! Couldn’t live without it… It’s rare here in Montana, as staying warm is more normally the issue. At least it was, back before global warming.
I don’t have air conditioning in my tractor, either. But the cab windows open up wide, and it’s usually like sitting under a canopy with a slight breeze, and not all that bad. Yesterday, though…

I’d say it was typical, but thank God only in that things took way longer than I thought. Set out to plow down some lentils. I really must come up with a better name than “green manure”. The things are little nitrogen siphons (out of the air, into the soil), but that doesn’t roll off the tongue quite right either. Anyway, they were getting ready to make seed, & so it was time to plow them under. That part went fine, but then I set out to finish nuking the rest of my canola, which I vented about in last month’s column.
We’d seeded two fields of canola, one of which I scrapped in favor of re-seeding to lentils early on. The canola had sprouted, but then we got an odd April-May dry spell, & it croaked. This other field, though, had somewhat of a stand, and by the time I realized the pigweed was taking over, the damn stuff was three feet tall. So I borrowed a disc, which in theory will chop up a mess like that and mix it with the soil. Unless, the ground is too rocky and hard for the disc to penetrate all that well, in which case you wind up with a disturbing amount of pigweed still standing, as well as a dense thatch of stalks laying all catty-wampus on the ground.
I’d harrowed it early last week, which actually did a pretty fair job of crunching up all the loose stuff. It was looking like a chisel plow might go through it without undue problem, or so I’d chosen to delude myself.
It turned into an ordeal! Luckily it was only a 7.5 acre field. The plow would plug up with pigweed stalks two or three times per round. I didn’t count how many rounds it took, but with a thirteen foot plow it’s quite a few. You can’t just raise up, swing around, and dump the stuff because the pigweed stalks are like re-bar, and where they hit is where they stay, until you get out and dig it out by hand. In near-100 degree temperatures… Because this has to get done, and there are no miracle solutions awaiting a grand entrance, and so you do it. For me at least, it starts out with attempts at denial, which morphs into anger. This gives way to resignation, and then you can finally see that you may actually get done, and then you do. It’s a predictable progression, although never seems that way when you’re living it. Then, of course, there is no guarantee that you’ll persevere.
Luckily I had lots of water to drink. It was excruciating, though. An interminance… Definitely beyond drudgery, and into the danger zone. After a shower, Jacuzzi, a couple of Aleves, a good dinner and profound night’s sleep, I’m not too bad off today, though.

At least I managed to take parts of a couple days “off” earlier in the week, for a high country exploration/elk scouting trip. My family has grown leery of these exploratory trips. Cody says if he’s taking time “off” he doesn’t want to go back to work in a state of exhaustion. He’s working again this summer (the third one) for Leonard Reed, the hardest-working 83 year old guy I know, and significant Gallatin Valley custom hay contractor. They consistently put in hard 10-12 hour days, so I can see his point. He says he’s taking four days off as soon as they finish the job they’re on now, & taking the ponies up to a mountain lake where he plans to do nothing but fish. And rest. I think I’ll join him if possible, and we’re working on Kim.
She learned long ago that these exploratory trips are not her thing, although come to think I did invite her on this venture. I don’t blame her…
Because, yeah, they’re not exactly relaxing. Obviously I wouldn’t keep doing it unless there were rewards involved, though… In this case, we’d just wrapped up haying, and dealt with several other pending items. At about 3:00 PM Monday, I judged things were handled for the moment, gathered up some camping gear, shod two horses, headed out and was on the trail by 8:00. Rode until about 10:00, long enough to reach an intermediate campsite at about 8000’. Where, you ask? Tsk, be serious! We’re talking about elk hunting spots, although this one is such a bugger to get to that hardly anyone does. I only know of one other person poking around up in there in the last couple of years. Anyway, let’s just say it’s over in the Madison, & leave it at that.
For months now, I’ve been wanting to get up there and check out a spot I noticed on the topo map where a person might get horses down off a headwall, facilitating a shortcut across the head of a basin. I’d been up there before, but hadn’t investigated this potential route. It’s about 9600’, on a north facing wall, & so you see this is not an early spring venture. Maybe not even a late fall venture. Much snow would preclude it altogether, which may be moot, as it turns out there’s a couple of cliff bands that don’t show on the topo map, and so the “shortcut” is a no-go. So one could classify the trip as an abject failure, except no, I added a few other things to the knowledge base. Like the place is still huntable, you just have to go the long way around. So it goes…

A couple of tired ponies and myself arrived home almost exactly 24 hours from departure, mainly because I wanted to attend a meeting of the Interagency Bison Management Team here in Bozeman Wednesday morning. This consists of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, the Dept. of Livestock, APHIS (the Federal Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service), Yellowstone Park, and the Forest Service. Hal Harper, Governor Schweitzer’s chief policy advisor was scheduled to give an update on the Governor’s plans for bison management.
I wouldn’t say it drew a big crowd, maybe forty people or so, but it was an interesting mix. The Montana Stockgrowers and Farm Bureau were well represented, as well as right-wing lunatic politician Roger Koopman and even-farther-right motorized use advocate Kerry White (whose brother Steve White is running for the Gallatin County Commission).
As I’ve repeated ad nauseum in this column; common-sense “solutions” that would benefit not only sportsmen and wildlife enthusiasts, but cattle producers as well would take nearly nothing to implement. There is considerable resistance to this, though, mainly by the folks who’re spending millions to perpetuate our endless regime of capture, haze, vaccinate, slaughter. Things you do with livestock, you know. Works fine there. Wildlife is a little different, though…
I have to hand it to Governor Schweitzer and his staff for how they’ve presented their plans to the ranching community (which doesn’t just consist of the Stockgrowers and Farm Bureau, not even…). Although, I was disappointed to hear that they have no interest in re-drawing zone boundaries, as that’s key to a sustainable solution. As is, the Zone 2’s (areas where bison are supposed to afforded a degree of tolerance) consist of the main livestock conflict points! The substantial areas of conflict-free public lands adjacent are Zone 3’s (where bison are not welcome). Does this make no sense to you?! Me either.
Unless you recall who drew up this plan and the maps. Livestock interests, and their agency minions.
So barring Interagency Bison Management Plan updates, the Governor’s “plan” makes no changes except offering inducements for the handful of area cattle enthusiasts (remember, we’re talking ~200 head) to raise something other than disease-susceptible breeding age cows. And we’re expanding the hunt, even though we still have no year-round habitat for wild bison in Montana!
So that’s kind of lame.

We had an eminently common-sense bill in the last Legislature, HB544, that declared bison “valued native wildlife” and put their management under FWP only in areas of no livestock conflict. Against our better judgement, we accepted questionable advice and “watered down” the bill in an attempt to make it palatable to the Stockgrowers & Co.
It didn’t make a bit of difference! Stockgrower lawyer John Bloomquist submitted amendments that neutralized the bill, and my local representative Scott Sales killed it.
The Stockgrower/Farm Bureau administration is overwhelmingly Republican. Can you say; Conrad Burns? Well in this case, I don’t know if that’s good… Not to mention if they’re aligning with Koopman, White, etc. Good luck with that…
Governor Schweitzer could be presenting a Pulitzer-caliber plan, and it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference! The Montana Republican Party will attempt to thwart anything that could reflect favorably on his administration.
“Fixing” the bison issue would be a plum, for sure. It’s not going to get “fixed” by sticking with the existing Plan, though. We’re not talking major surgery, just a few tweaks. Zone boundaries, for one, are key. Some of these private landowners who don’t want bison, fine; they’re Zone 3’s. Buffalo fence.
Who knows, when they see how well it works, and the new economy that springs up around wild bison in MT, they just might switch parties!