Vexacious.

Well, it’s that time of year again:

(Yeah, things are getting a little stinky in the liner department.)

Date night!

Night commute:

First time to this gem:

The 70-mile drive had me down until I realized that would be a stock commute if we had moved to the Front Range.

You say you want another sunny day? Hmmm. Let me see.

Aw, look at the cute little sleeping city.

Well-placed turns:

We found this: Megan figured a wolverine smelled the elk carcass and dug to it – about four feet down.

Second time to this spot:

Early start, early finish:

Does baby’s allowance cover re-trueing for a 29er?

Twilight train spotting; we got a short hoot from one conductor as he passed underneath:

Long shadow on the M:

Yes, the wheels have come off the bus in Ravalli County.

Ah, how to explain the current state of things down the Bitterroot? Let’s try and cut this down to the essentials:

1. Last fall commissioners appointed Valerie Stamey as treasurer ($50,000 a year!). Suzy Foss noted Stamey lacked any experience treasurering but did in fact have a lot of enthusiasm.
2. Most of the remaining deputy treasurers promptly quit.
3. Stamey fell behind. October statements still aren’t out and tax disbursements have not been made in months – meaning everyone from school districts to irrigation boards are short of operating cash.
4. Stamey asked for help, and some commissioners agreed [though Foss – who, remember, first introduced herself to me as “a pissed off grandma” - said, “Things are not a disaster in my opinion.”]. Commissioner Jeff Burrows voted to use vacancy savings to pay for outside help in the office (and whoever gets to fix the county’s balance sheets will get $9.67 an hour), saying that there was no net extra expense to taxpayers. (I don’t remember which tea party platform Burrows ran on, but I’m pretty sure it was not “a penny saved is a penny we can spend later on”). Oh, the meeting where this was discussed? Stamey skipped it.
5. Commissioners learned Stamey used a few different last names, one of which was the subject of a 2010 default judgment in South Carolina which claimed she cashed the same $18,149 check twice after refinancing her home. She’s also apparently been sent to collections for a $312 vet bill.
6. Stamey stopped talking.
7. Commissioners asked what was up.
8. Stamey delivered this:

Actually, she did not deliver it. She read it, then ran from the room. It was Jan Wisniewski (yes, that Jan Wisniewski) who came in later to deliver the paper copy. And yes, it does appeared that Stamey's first name is spelled incorrectly.

Don't ask me.

Perry pretty well summed things up

Once again, this is a problem Suzy Foss could fix pretty easily. I’m pretty sure Stamey, as an appointed official, serves at the pleasure of the board – and is probably still a probationary employee.

Eat, sleep, fall of your bike, repeat.

Because who doesn't floss their teeth with a scalpel while your friend pretends to listen to his heartbeat?

...and...

Yeah, what winter? I guess someday soon we'll look back at this and think how good we had it.

The former '2834'. I found it while biking in the pre-dawn icy blackness of Fourth Street last week, spent about a half-hour, and cracked the code. I don’t know if I have been plain lucky or good at looking, or if this happens to everyone. Anyway, I seem to come across a lot of good gear out there on the streets and trails. The past couple of years have been especially fruitful. Among the finds:

*A pocket knife in Butler Fork in Big Cottonwood Canyon. I used this a ton until I left it in a bathroom in a restaurant on the Spanish side of the Spanish-Portuguese border.
*A multi-tool lying on a tree stump near Gash Point. I keep this in my pack all the time.
*A military grade Camelbak in the high Wallowas. I felt bad about taking this, but it was alongside the trail in the morning and still there in the late afternoon, and I had not seen anyone all day.
*A handheld digital weather station in an overflow parking area on the east side of Glacier National Park. I was super stoked about this, but unfortunately some of the functions stopped working almost as soon as I learned how to use it.
*A pair of Skullcandy ear buds in the parking lot of the cross country ski area at Whitefish Mountain Resort. This was fortuitous as at the time I owned four pairs of ear buds, each of which had only one working speaker.

I’ve lost a few things, but still I’m way out ahead. Actually, the only thing that I can definitely recall losing, except the aforementioned pocket knife, was a snow saw that popped out of my pack in Mill B, in Big Cottonwood Canyon.

All of my finds, however, were eclipsed by one mega find in 2003. Laura and I were two months into a three-month circumnavigation by bike of the South Island of New Zealand. Fall was progressing, it was cool and wet, and we were biking a deserted road along the southern swing of the island. It was windy, and I was biking with my head down and slightly to the side so I could keep an eye on the shoulder. Suddenly I noticed a spot of color on my peripheral vision, and stopped to wait for Laura to come up. She held my bike (our bikes weighed ridiculous amounts and even leaning them against road markers was not always wise as the markers could be pushed over) while I waded into the wet grass to see what it was. It was a yellow Australian bill. Australian money is color-coded – one denomination is yellow, one is red, one is green, you get the picture. I looked up and the field before me was covered in colorful confetti. When the find was totaled, we had just under $300 US.

I don’t remember what Laura did with her money, but I bought a nice bottle of wine when we got back to Christchurch.

Wait, did someone say icy streets? Just in time for the thaw, I pull out the big guns:

Was someone just complaining about this non-winter? Huh, well go uphill a bit and you get this, my first check each morning when I get online:

If you look in the right center of that picture you can see the remains of a snowstake, which is currently almost buried but if you look closely shows there is seven feet of snow on the ground. Odd to think that the trees next to it would not fit in most living rooms. Here's what it looks like in real life: pinballing down a tunnel of snow:

Last fall I paid $149 for a $299 Patagonia Troposhere jacket. It's got h2No waterproofing, which works pretty well:

But I still sweat a little on the inside.

The snow was so deep on Sunday on Lolo Pass that it was not possible to turn. I just had to point the skis straight, find something relatively steep, and go, and hope I was not running into anything. Floating suspended on snow like that, able to see nothing for it flying in your face, is memorable.

Since everyone cares:

Wait a minute, the Tea Party was supposed to fix government, right ?

On deep days, Whitefish should pass out simple information brochures like Mount Baker does to prevent this .

And ...

"Rehberg said then that people had begun contacting him, asking that he consider running for the seat he held for 12 years ." Oh really? What people are those?

Adventures in Candyland.

Yo -- cheapest gas in the nation! And the cheapest prices are in ... West Glacier?

Low vis in Cascadilla, on the edge of Glacier.

I climbed for two hours thinking there was someone else in this canyon, and sure enough there was: two guys from Whitefish.

Marias Pass food truck: breakfast burritos and black coffee on the Continental Divide.

I skied to Marion Lake, then to a cute little peaklet above it.

For years and years, backcountry users basically had two tests to gauge slope stability: the stupidly time-consuming and stupidly complicated Rutschblock test, and the plain old stupid shovel shear test. In the past few years those two have been augmented by a few new tests, including the extended column test, which produces a lot of data and geeky technical apres-ski bar chatter ("Yeah, it had an ECT-24 Q2"). Beta-tested in the past few years primarily at the University of Calgary but just really released for pedestrian use this fall is the brand new Propagation Saw Test. I've done a dozen or so pits using it and in general like it, especially the fact that it results in a yes/no reading with a bit of room for analysis if you want it; the main downside is that you really need a saw to to it right, which is not a huge expense but a bit of a pain to lug around and not something most casual skiers stuff into their packs each morning. I think a final verdict is still out, though; my gut so far is that it's going to produce a lot of false-negatives, but I have to use it in more delicate conditions to see for sure.

Here's an isolated column from midway on Elk Mountain:

And fooling around with the slab:

Two weeks earlier, on Lockwood, Scott and I cut the slab 80 cm and got this weird fracture. (I know, I'm using my probe and not a saw.)

Back to the narrative: brief sun at Marion Lake.

Back at home, low tide in Pattee Canyon.

Christmas Eve.

A sunny drive down from the Montana Shot, AKA Hangover Hill.

With Scott and his pup on Lockwood: the first really good day of the season.

Laura and I had a baby-free ski day at Lost Trail.

Nice! (You'll notice she's sporting her new $14.99 Kinco all-leather ski gloves. That's right. We get our ski gear at Ace.)

A nice spell of cold weather. (That's the window inside our home.)

We made what's become an annual New Year's trip to Whitefish and went skiing. I made Laura pull the Chariot though all the scenic parts.

I could use some of that.

(These hidden trails are below the Willow lot at the ski area and are ... free! This is decidedly Montana's best deal.)

Jeez this kid sleeps a lot.

The baby behaved, so we took him to the train station.

And as Ed Abbey would say, "Holy faith!"

Current conditions.

Yesterday’s paper had this gem from the principal of Bonner Elementary: “teachers check the temperature and wind chill levels before any recess or lunch break, and keep children inside if the wind chill is [lower] than 10 below zero.”

Unfortunately I’ve been stuck in the office this week and unable to really enjoy this great weather, though I did manage to bike about 40 miles in the past four days.

(Spot forecast for Lolo Peak.)

NWS Missoula said this would likely be the longest stretch of cold weather in 40 years. I’m not quite sure what that means, since low temperatures here aren’t even in the neighborhood of record values, though Mesonet did show this morning that apparently the entire state of Montana was below 0 – with some spots approaching -30.

(The Clark Fork mostly frozen, with what’s not frozen freezing fast, this morning in light snow and -6.)

Rock on!

And...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxnN8OieCHA&list=RDdxnN8OieCHA

Suzy Foss should fire Jan Wisniewski.

Let me start this off by saying that Jan Wisniewski was never anything other than nice to me. He’s actually a funny guy. He drives around town in an endearingly small and battered pickup which is co-piloted by what is probably the nicest cow dog in all of Ravalli County. The first time I met him he told me a joke: “Why do all Polish last names end in ‘ski’? Because it’s easier to spell than ‘toboggan’.” Sometimes when he would talk to me he was so earnest I thought he was being ironic, but he wasn’t.

Unfortunately, Wisniewski is at the center of the latest in a long line of shitstorms to emerge from the Bitterroot. It’s easy to blame him, but it reality a lot of it is Suzy Foss’ fault.

I used to groan when Sepp Janotta would tell me that I “need to tell the backstory”, but here you go. Wisniewski has been on the county planning board for years; mostly he kept quiet, but occasionally would offer some gems, as he did once when he told me that he had seen black helicopters up to no good in the valley.

Suzy Foss first introduced herself to me as “a pissed off grandma” and seemed to fashion herself after Sarah Palin. She beat Carlotta Grandstaff in the 2010 commission race and became chairwoman in 2012. Despite being a Republican, Greg Chilcott is actually a great guy, but while he and J.R. Iman used to make up the right-wing of the commission, those two have now become the meager voices of reason in the county building’s third-floor chambers.

This fall Foss led the charge to deny federal funding that kept open a low-income health care center, saying she was “concerned about the staggering national debt” (she kept the fed's PILT money, though). She’s overseen the firing of Dave Ohnstad, the roads manager, who was a good man – and a Republican – and the departure of the planning director, who was replaced with a real estate agent. More recently, Foss has been at the helm while the county’s tax office has plunged into disarray, with employees saying the recently-hired treasurer is unable to perform even the most basic duties; the current treasurer was hired in lieu of a much more experienced junior officer, who then resigned after being forced to teach her new boss how to do the job. Foss’ current project is to bring in a consultant from Utah who specializes in organized fights to “take back” control of public lands from the federal government; she suggested the county pay $5,000 to become members of study group that thinks the counties should manage federal land.

So far Wisniewski has been known for goofy but mostly harmless stunts; most recently he ran for the state House District 87 seat – as a Democrat – and as a Democratic precinct chair. Obviously, he’s no Democrat – this was a brilliant/idiotic attempt to infiltrate the party. Earlier this year, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes – which is headquartered up in Lake County – filed an application with the Bureau of Indian Affairs to transfer 58 acres the tribe owned in Ravalli County to BIA trust. In April, though, the county commission voted to oppose the application, noting it would lose $808 (!) annually in property taxes.

The parcel is known as Medicine Tree and is adjacent to U.S. 93 south of Darby, and in November five tribal members came to the commission to explain the site, which officials said pilgrims visit twice a year – Medicine Tree has roots in the tribe’s creation story. During public comment, Wisniewski, a Darby resident, approached the podium. As The Missoulian reported, “Wisniewski offered observations from a ‘fact-finding’ trip he took across the state. Wisniewski said he had a conversation with law enforcement officials in Havre who complained about their jails being filled with “drunken Indians” off the reservation.”

Well, let's wonder at the mysterious ways of the world for a moment. What does a jail in Havre have to do with a parcel in Ravalli County? Were those drunk Indians CSKT members? How many drunk white people are in the jail in Darby? Why does the county commission, which is always going on about protecting property rights, want to fart upon the tribe’s property rights? If the commission is truly concerned about the tribe opening a casino on this patch of rock, have they not noticed that casinos already line nearly the entirety of US 93?

CSKT members said they were “deeply offended” by Wisniewski’s comments, which went unremarked upon by the commission until a lot of county residents spoke up. Last week, the commission said they’d write a letter offering an apology to the tribe.

Blanket statements that stereotype Native Americans as “drunken Indians” are stupid, and extra stupid given the context of Montana. The Salish were forced out of the Bitterroot, and not that long ago. CSKT has been re-acquiring this lost land since the 1930s, and Medicine Tree is part of that effort. It’s ironic that those who scream the loudest about “property rights” should have an opinion about the tribe’s.

For her part, Foss later said she was offended by the Wisniewski’s statement, but that’s not much consolation. Wisniewski’s term on the planning board expires this month, and Foss would be wise to end it.

I’m betting she won’t.

Here’s a picture of two chili dogs: