Well, I stand corrected. No more had I mentioned Montana's scarcity of residential air conditioning (see below), when Northwestern Energy set an all-time record for electricity consumpion, hitting 1724 megawatts on July 23. What's striking is this was the third time the record was broken this month! Even more, according to the recent Billings Gazette article this completely eclipses neighboring Montana-Dakota Utilities (serving parts of far eastern MT and the Dakotas) similarly timed record of 500 megawatts. Northwestern also services parts of South Dakota and Nebraska, but Montana is where the meter is spinning fastest.

Hmmm... Power company officials say a megawatt will power up to 400 homes, so theoretically on the 23rd over 600,000 homes had the A/C cranked?! Our population is thankfully still under a million, so there's clearly more to this than meets the eye. Still, air conditioning is the big power draw this time of year, and the meters don't lie, right? They better not...

As I mentioned in the last entry, though, I have a pretty broad spectrum of friends and acquaintances, and very few to none of them have air conditioning in their homes. You didn't used to need it in Montana! Oh, sure, it used to hit a hundred for about a week every summer during my youth (the 60's/70's), but then things turned downright temperate until more recently. Winters also, for better or worse.

I'd be curious to see Montana's power consumption broken down by region. I'd think it would be centered in the boom towns; the Flathead/Bitterroot/Gallatin. Also, I'd think a big part of it might be commercial buildings, as yes, most of those are air conditioned anymore. Residences; I suppose a decent percentage of recent construction might be A/C, not to mention castles up around Big Sky and the Yellowstone Club.

But then you for sure didn't need air conditioning up in the mountains until recently! Besides scenery and greenery, that's a big part of the reason people went to the cabin or camping. During these recent heat waves, it's even been hot up high, though.

At least I finally took a day off myself, true to form spent hiking the high country. Gads, in retrospect it seems a suspect decision approaching disorder status. Anyone with a lick of sense would hit the river instead (or just lay in front of the air conditioner), but no... I wouldn't be surprised if the Forest Service didn't close things down due to fire danger at some point, and I've been wanting to check out yet another elk hidey-hole. Besides, it's supposed to be cooler up at 8000', as long as one ignores the exertion of getting there.

And, it was. I don't carry a thermometer hiking, but it was tolerable, at least down in the 80's. Long as you have plenty of water, you might even make it up into a spot where the ground is literally covered with an impressive multi-year accumulation of elk droppings, and so many trees have antler rubs it's almost a threat to the health of the forest! So yes, I'll be back up there, once I figure out how to get horses at least into the vicinity. And barring that, we'll backpack it. Things better have cooled off by then!

Well it's a hot one, like seven inches from the midday sun, except no one I know (around here, at least) is staying cool. Air conditioning just hasn't caught on in Montana yet, at least in homes. Not in the circles I run in, anyway. And mercy, I know a few heating & allegedly air conditioning guys, and I don't think their places are A/C! Except, at least one goes to the lake all the time, my long-time neighbor Orill. He's trying to retire, but can't give it up entirely.

But no, I haven't been to any lakes lately, and I'm not sure even that would have been the answer when it hit 106 in Bozeman a week or so ago. It would have been vastly preferable to haying, though.

I'd just swathed some dandy third-year alfalfa-grass mix, and wanted to get it baled with just the right bit of moisture left in it. You talk about flash cured, though! Mercy... There's lots worse things, and the baler was even cranking them out like old times. Those go back quite a ways... We are talking a ten dollar baler here!

But it works. Except for when it doesn't. You talk about a touchy device... Oh, it'll crank out several hundred bales and not miss a one, and then suddenly... mutiny. The thing is, the forty thousand dollar balers will do that too! And do, on basically a daily basis. Or if not them, the swather or stacker or something will break.

At least that's how it works at my son's job. To my delight, he is working again (the fourth summer) for Leonard Reed, one of your more significant custom hay contractors in the Gallatin Valley. Thing is, Leonard is 85 years old! Still going strong, although possibly not quite as hard as last year. He did break his back, over the winter...

Off by himself moving hay, a bale fell from the top of a stack and hit him. Yes, broke his back! He crawled to his truck, called his son and 911, and had near-total paralysis when they found him (which turned out to be from accumulated blood pressure on his spinal cord). We saw him in the hospital about a week later, after he'd had a steel rod put in the length of his spine. He had to be up four hours/day to move into therapy, which he handily accomplished a couple of days later. This was at Christmas, and by April my wife saw him tearing around on a 4-wheeler, albeit wearing a halo. And now that's off, and it's pretty much business as usual.

Blast it, I now realize I don't have a picture of Leonard, which must be rectified. Longevity runs in the line, his Dad lived to 97, and was the first person I custom butchered beef for. That's a whole story in itself...

And hey, you're being kinda quiet, so they had these three steers destined for the freezer. Now the Reeds have tame cattle. If they have corrals I can't place them, and it wasn't a great deal more back then. So I dispatched and dressed the first one no problem. The second was getting a little nervous, but down he went. The third; without hesitation vaulted the "corral" and away! It was getting on in the afternoon, so I said we'd pick things up again, so to speak, in the morning.

I no more than pulled in the yard, the steer took one look deep into my eyes, and bingo, out'a there... Luckily I'd brought appropriate weaponry.

Such was not the case the time I completely missed a pig with the first shot, always a bad thing. Yes, we ran a custom meat plant winters for 15+ years, you know, and didn't do just wild game, although about 98% was. Anyway, that was the first attempt with a 44 mag and a scope, a combination I've since sworn off. Because yes, you can completely miss a pig at close range with one of those!

Lest you had any doubts about our carnivority, my wife even butchered thirteen chickens last Saturday, God bless her. I wouldn't even consider it myself, although am head chopper.

She's thinking another batch or two next year, and she'll leave it to the Hutterites also, but it's kinda handy to know you can, if need be. And hey, your meat comes from where, again...?

Other than that, though, I've gone soft (well, except for big bull elk, and...). I even swerve to avoid hitting gophers on the road anymore. On the Rockpile Ranch, the resident redtail hawks seem to keep 'em in check, and unlike my childhood, you can't blaze away endlessly without getting on nerves around here. Better to keep the balance naturally, if possible, eh? Barring that, though, gopher hunters are easy to find.

We were talking about haying, though, and one item I was sweating (another inadvertent...) was getting my bales picked up. Now we're certainly not big hay producers, and wouldn't hardly even fool with it except for the soil rebuilding benefits. Unfortunately, we slightly exceed hobby status at ~50 acres, but don't have our own stacker. Maybe they used to pick up that much and unfathomably more by hand? That was then...

Still, my prospects were up in the air. Last year, another long-time neighbor, Tom LeProwse picked mine up. Besides being football coach at Bozeman High for a long time, he spent his summers running a significant custom haying operation, which also employed my now-ex neighbor. When he retired, Tom kept a decent line of stuff, as they still hay maybe twenty acres. Tom is eighty, though, and didn't have any fun picking mine up last year. We don't call it the Rockpile Ranch for nothing, and although I'd rolled the field it's not what most would consider hay ground. Soil rebuilding, again... Plus it's hot out, and it's just no fun, even with a balewagon. Tom begged off, saying he'd do it if things grew dire, but...

Now since my kid is working for who sort of took Tom's place, Plan B should be a simple matter. Leonard hit it big with a gravel deal a few years back, and instead of "retiring" bought a line of pretty top-notch stuff and went haying. Cody has learned so much there. Leonard has a lot of friends, deals with lots of people, goes full tilt most if not all the time, and generally has fun at it, I'd say. Educations like that simply cannot be bought, and I'm forever grateful.

Of course the downside is they're booked solid, not to mention Cody is attempting to take at least the odd day off this summer, and as mentioned my hay isn't exactly irrigated Garden of Eden stuff...

Fortunately timing fell together yet again. Two days prior, Cody'd maybe set a record of some sort by stacking 84 ton at MSU, mostly in an effort to spend the next day with his girlfriend. And then, one more ten-load job and a well-timed shower, and we had an absolutely uncharacteristic "slack" day to dodge rocks with the balewagon here, and got 'er stacked.

Plus we got a good laugh out of it, when I explained to Leonard that Tom couldn't do it because he was "too old".

All the same, I can't complain about spending the day in the office, next to a fan today. Not to mention it was vastly more profitable! Haying, I dunno... Considering the stress, and the myriad abilities it takes to keep things going, you should be able to get fantastically rich at it! But no, hay has sold for $70-$85/ton around here for basically as long as I can remember, except for maybe some $65 back in the day...

But it's part of the trifecta. Wheat, barley, hay. Diversification <yawn...>

But then I better shut up. My camelina is not looking so hot, or rather too hot, or something. I need to go check the flax, it was faring a lot better last I saw.

Ah, at least we got .7" in a freak thunderstorm last night, and now the evening breeze that flows down off the Bridgers has just arrived, and Carlos is back in my head...