After efforts to transplant wild sheep stalled last year, Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks may now have two project sites in southwest Montana.

The FWP Commission on Thursday gave the department the go-ahead to make a second attempt at introducing wild sheep into the northern Madison Range and to start a study of the possibility of a similar effort on Livingston Peak in the Paradise Valley.

FWP had planned to capture wild sheep from the Quake Lake herd at the southern end of the Madison Range this past winter and transplant them to the Wolf Creek drainage farther north.

But in February, biologists confirmed that three members of the Quake Lake herd had died of pneumonia. Concerned that other wild sheep were also infected and wanting to avoid moving sick sheep, biologists canceled the transplant.

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The Beartooth Highway is set to open Friday. The scenic highway that links Red Lodge, Montana, with the communities of Cooke City and Silver Gate, Montana, and the northeast entrance to Yellowstone National Park, is scheduled to open for the season at 9:00 a.m. Friday morning, May 23.
Spring road clearing and maintenance is conducted by the Montana Department of Transportation and the National Park Service.

Inside Yellowstone, the road over Dunraven Pass linking Canyon Village, Tower Fall and Tower Junction also opens for the season Friday morning.

All other park roads and all park entrances have already opened for the season.

Most seasonal visitor services in the park open in time for the Memorial Day weekend. Saturday also marks the opening of fishing season in the park.

The National Weather Service forecast for the holiday weekend, calls for partly cloudy skies with a chance of afternoon or evening thunderstorms with high temperatures in the 50s and low 60s, and overnight low temperatures near freezing. Spring visitors to the park are encouraged to have flexible travel plans and to be prepared for a wide range of weather conditions.

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Visitors who brave the dusty stretch of Montana 486, known simply as the North Fork Road, are rewarded with striking views of the park and an array of baked goodies – huckleberry bear claws, cinnamon rolls, macaroons, microbrew, coffee, fresh-baked bread and pocket sandwiches – while the shelves of the Merc are lined with practical wares like gauze and parachute cord, power steering fluid and Spam, making it a one-stop resupply shop.

It is a place steeped in a history older than the name “Polebridge,” and the Merc’s “General Mercantile Historic District” is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

William L. “Bill” Adair built the Merc back in 1914, just four years after Glacier Park became a park. He fished, using only one fly (the Coachman), and drank and grew king-sized cabbages while his wife (and later, after she died, a second wife) ran the store and lived in their homestead cabin, which is now the Northern Lights Saloon.

He planted the only elm tree in the North Fork, which still shades patrons of the neighboring saloon, and his transplanted hop vines continue to creep up the saloon wall.

The Merc’s interior still bears the log walls that Adair hand-hewed with a broadax so he could adorn them with wallpaper, and the old glass-cylinder gas pump, which used a pump-and-gravity system to fuel vehicles, remains on the complex.

The Mercantile was originally known as Adair’s, while Polebridge was the store and post office a half-mile north, toward the Glacier National Park entrance.

That second store was owned and operated by another homesteader, Ben Hensen Sr., who opened his store in the 1920s because he thought Adair’s prices were exorbitant. When Hensen was awarded the post office contract, his wife May submitted the name Polebridge, which was accepted.

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Lonnie Larson gently sprayed smoke from a small metal can across a half-dozen rectangular wooden frames in a white wooden box, each frame crawling with hundreds of bees.

“C’mon, girls,” he said, sending out another puff from the smoker. “Go away.”

Larson, a Huntley resident and president of the Yellowstone Valley Beekeepers Association, was looking for the queen of one of the six hives he owns and maintains on a friend’s property in the Arrow Creek area east of Billings.

The goal was to find the queen and move her to a new set of boxes in order to create a new hive, splitting it before the bees’ population grows to the point where it swarms and splits on its own. The smoke calms down the rest of the colony’s 40,000 bees and masks pheromones that signal them to attack.

For many beekeepers in Montana, splitting hives is practically an annual rite of spring, signaling the start of the local beekeeping and the honey-producing season, which runs through the summer and ends with the collection of honey.

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The experts are in agreement. Montana is facing a "below normal" risk of wildfire for the first time in a couple of years this summer.

But Governor Steve Bullock says Montanans shouldn't let down their guard when it comes to fire safety.

The governor brought his annual fire season briefing to Missoula this year, with leaders of all the major players in firefighting at the table, from local to state and federal agencies.

And for the first time since Eastern Montana was scorched by massive fires in 2012, and Western Montana burned last year, the outlook is encouraging.

While we might be complaining about the delayed start to spring, these fire experts are rejoicing. In fact, with spots like the Bitterroot Range seeing snowpack percentage soaring some 200% above normal, and all the other indicators pointing "down", Bullock was told Montana finds itself on the downturn for fire risk.

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