One of western Montana's most famous grizzly bears now has its own interpretive display for the many visitors who stop by the Forest Service's Lincoln Ranger District office.

In 2007, a driver hit and killed the 830-pound, 12-year-old male bear on U.S. Highway 200 outside of Lincoln. The bear quickly gained notoriety for its exceptional size, likely from its propensity to scavenge food amongst dwellings, and the clamoring of entities that wanted the animal after it had been stuffed. Officials finally determined the Lincoln bear's final home would be the Forest Service office, where it came to reside in 2008.

The initial buzz around the bruin immediately made the office a must-stop location for tourists passing through, said Forest Service biologist Pat Shanley. The opportunity to use the bear for education led to the recent completion of an interpretive display, full of grizzly facts and the famous bear's story.

"We still get quite a few with everyone on vacation that stop to see it," Shanley said. "It's certainly not like it was that first year when it was kind of crazy. From a local standpoint, a lot of people bring guests out to see it and they really like the display."

Included in the display is information on the natural history of grizzlies, their feeding habits and bear safety. An adjoining "Be Bear Aware" wall advises visitors on how to safely navigate the backcountry.

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Tabitha Graves can’t say this will be a bad year for huckleberries, even though four of the five sites she is monitoring in the West Glacier area show berry production is down 75 percent to 95 percent from last year.

But the fifth is showing the same number of berries as 2014, when a bumper crop was produced after a wet, cool spring.

And Graves, a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, doesn’t yet know what the huckleberry crop at higher elevations — where bushes are just popping out from under snow — will be like this summer.

"It could still be a great year if the berries at the higher elevations grow," Graves says.

The fact that she’s watching — and watching closely — means the day may come when she will be able to predict with some certainty what huckleberry lovers can expect.

Of course, the huckleberry lovers Graves is concerned with will never read her research or decipher the predictability maps she hopes to produce.

This is all about the bears. In Glacier Park, huckleberries constitute 15 percent of the diet of grizzlies and black bears.

If you can predict when and where huckleberries will be plentiful, you can predict where bears will likely be at that time.

In a Glacier National Park forest, just a short walk from her office near park headquarters, Graves has set up one site where it’s easy to show people how she and her collaborators are gathering data for their huckleberry research.

There, she kneels next to a plant that has more tent caterpillars chewing on its leaves than berries hanging from its branches.

She counts five caterpillars, and three berries, on the bush. In 2014, Graves says, a bush of this size would have had at least 20 berries, an estimate she also calls “conservative.”

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Kathleen Clary Miller has written 300+ columns and stories for periodicals both local and national, and has authored three books (www.amazon.com/author/millerkathleenclary). She lives in the woods of the Ninemile Valley, thirty miles west of Missoula.

A Washington Post writer quoted a Southern California resident as saying, “"What are we supposed to do, just have dirt around our house on four acres?" The woman in question doesn’t think it’s fair that she should have to conserve during the historic and potentially cataclysmic drought there---and has obviously never visited Montana. The dirt tattoo on the shin of my jeans sends the unspoken message that I live on 21 acres of free dust and gravel. Anyone would think Pig Pen was driving considering the cloud of dust my car kicks up behind me. And somehow I manage to survive without an expanse of lush lawn and a weekly car wash.

I am a native Southern California girl who goes back to the dark ages of the early 1950’s. Hence, I stay current on the news there, most especially the growing media coverage of the drought. When I worked for the Los Angeles Times my sales territory included the Eden from which our quoted woman in question hails: Rancho Santa Fe, a collection of estate ranches (no ranching involved here) that I used to think God was decidedly dedicating for the afterlife –reserved exclusively for those who had been really, really good on earth.

After reading this morning’s newspaper account I’m not so sure. The self-absorbed attitude of the quoted resident that exemplifies many other similar reactions (also quoted in the article) to water rationing in order to save their state from ruin gives me pause to wonder: instead of heaven, are we looking at the other option?

Meanwhile, back at the real ranchland, out here in the country where, granted, people opt to sometimes duke it out with seasonal severe weather, we take orders from Mother Nature and the land itself. It’s really quite simple: If it rains, the grass is green. If it doesn’t, it’s brown. Sprinklers don’t define us. We don’t feel entitled to blue skies, manicured landscape, and a well that can never run dry.

Montana rural life may not be picture perfect but as author Dejan Stojanovic writes, “Everything that looks too perfect is too perfect to be perfect. To accomplish the perfect perfection, a little imperfection helps.”