Hundreds gathered in Whitefish this afternoon to watch a town tradition, the Whitefish Winter Carnival parade.
The parade is part of a long celebration in Whitefish that has been going on in town for 55 years.
This year the parade had a very special guest, as Mr. Las Vegas himself, Wayne Newton.
He was the Grand Marshall of the parade.
The parade included the Whitefish police and fire department, Whitefish high school athletics and pep band, and a number of area businesses and community leaders.
Record-breaking subzero temperatures have gripped the state this week, causing schools to close temporarily and residents to bundle up or hibernate until warmer weather arrives this weekend.
The National Weather Service reported the state's low temperature Thursday morning was 50 below at Elk Park north of Butte. Wind chills dipped as low as minus 56 in Livingston.
Several record cold temperatures of at least 30 below were reported across the state, including in Bozeman, Dillon, Fort Benton, Great Falls, Lewistown and West Yellowstone. It fell to 34 below in Great Falls, shattering the old mark of 28 below set 121 years ago in 1893. West Yellowstone's minus 47 tied a 100-year-old record.
Kalispell hit 21 below, breaking the previous record of minus 18 set in 1975. Missoula was 23 below, breaking the 1899 record of minus 17. Butte plunged to negative 36, five degrees colder than the 1933 record for Feb. 6.
The U.S. government has spent billions of dollars trying to save more than 1,500 animal and plant species listed as endangered or threatened.
A group of House Republicans say that’s translated into just 2 percent of protected species taken off the list. They called Tuesday for an overhaul to the 1973 Endangered Species Act, giving states more authority over imperiled species and limiting litigation from wildlife advocates.
Here’s a look at five species and how they’ve fared since being added to the list:
Grizzly bear
Grizzlies were listed as threatened in the Lower 48 states in 1975 after being nearly wiped out over their historical range. But the bruins have been coming back, particularly in and around Yellowstone National Park, where they number more than 700. They’re doing so well, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering removing federal protections for the Yellowstone grizzlies in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. But some scientists warn against it, saying climate change has devastated the whitebark pine trees that provide a key food source for the bears. Another 1,000 grizzlies live outside of the Yellowstone area, while 30,000 of the bears in Alaska have never been listed as threatened.
On this early morning, Bob Danley takes a minute to gaze out his office window at a pond covered in ice and the distant mountains just beginning to show through a swirling mass of steel-gray clouds.
The Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge’s outdoor recreation planner finds himself thinking of the Japanese and Muir.
In Japan, researchers have made it a point to learn just what a walk through a wildlife refuge can mean for human health.
They took blood pressure measurements of people just before they entered and then again when they left.
Danley wasn’t at all surprised to read what they learned.
“It’s a very healthy experience for people,” he said. “They have real data to back it up. Going into wild places is healthy and not only physically, but I think spiritually too.”
“Muir was right,” Danley said.
In all of the lower reaches of the Bitterroot Valley, there’s nothing quite like the Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge for the common man.
The cedar sculpin won’t be showing up in anglers’ creels any time soon, except perhaps in the form of some bigger trout’s lunch. But biologists at the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station in Missoula consider it a significant step in understanding how our river systems work.
Fisheries biologist Michael Young said the cedar sculpin looks similar to the well-known shorthead sculpin, but has clear genetic differences. It lives in the Clark Fork River basin, as well as the drainages feeding the Coeur d’Alene and St. Joe rivers in Idaho. They are often the only fish to inhabit the upper headwater streams of those rivers and provide a food source for larger fish.
“Recognizing species of sculpins is a challenge because even distantly related species look very much alike,” Young said in an email. “So rather than taking a morphological approach to identification, we used genetic methods to delineate the species. It’s really exciting to find a new species of fish. It’s something you might expect in more remote parts of the world, but not in the U.S.”
The Winter Olympics may be thousands of miles away this year, but a local group is hoping to bring the games a little closer to home in 2026.
Hundreds gathered in Whitefish this afternoon to watch a town tradition, the Whitefish Winter Carnival parade.
Record-breaking subzero temperatures have gripped the state this week, causing schools to close temporarily and residents to bundle up or hibernate until warmer weather arrives this weekend.
The U.S. government has spent billions of dollars trying to save more than 1,500 animal and plant species listed as endangered or threatened.
On this early morning, Bob Danley takes a minute to gaze out his office window at a pond covered in ice and the distant mountains just beginning to show through a swirling mass of steel-gray clouds.
MISSOULA — Western Montana has a new fish.