Audubon's Christmas Bird Count, an annual tradition that excites families, communities, and the conservation movement, is here again. The Christmas Bird Count (CBC) is the longest running Citizen Science survey in the world. The tradition began 114 years ago and is a long-standing program of Audubon, including in Montana.

The CBC is an early-wis count every bird they see or hear during one day in a designated 15-mile diameter circle.

This year's CBC will be conducted between December 14, 2013 and January 5, 2014. Details about exactly where, when and how to participate will be posted below

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Yellowstone National Park will open to the public for the winter season as scheduled on December 15.

Beginning at 7:00 a.m. Sunday morning, visitors will be able to travel to the park’s interior roads on commercially guided snowmobiles or snowcoaches from the North, West and South Entrances.  Travel through the park’s East Entrance over Sylvan Pass is scheduled to begin December 22. 

The road from the park’s North Entrance at Gardiner, Montana, through Mammoth Hot Springs and on to Cooke City, Montana, outside the park’s Northeast Entrance is open to wheeled vehicle travel all year.

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Montanans likely experienced some of the coldest temperatures on the planet in early December.

According to the National Weather Service in Great Falls, Havre set a daily record on Saturday. At its coldest, the temperature hit minus 39 degrees. 

According to Victor Proton, senior meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Glasgow, temperatures of 43 degrees below zero were reported at the Edgar G. Obie Airport in Chinook about 22 miles from Havre.

Fort Peck was 37 below on Saturday. The Valley County town shattered its previous Dec. 7, record of minus 27, set in 1956.

Williston, N.D., bottomed out at 25 below zero, Greybull, Wyo. set a daily record at minus 21 and Boise, Idaho, hit 6 below.

In Fairbanks, Alaska, the mercury stayed above zero, at 15 degrees.

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Jenna Caplette migrated from California to Montana in the early 1970s, first living on the Crow Indian reservation, then moving to Bozeman where she owned a downtown retail anchor for eighteen years. These days she owns Bozeman BodyTalk & Energetic Healthcare, hosts a monthly movie night, teaches and writes about many topics. 

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For much of her life, each December my daughter has set out Christmas Eve food for Santa and his reindeer. For years, I took a photograph of her careful plate of treats. I’m guessing many of you have a similar series of holiday-related images -- your lineage of holiday trees, or the succession of family dinners that begins with Thanksgiving. 

Here’s several ideas for making your favorite photographic images into a vital part of your holiday traditions.

First, get them out of the drawer, or box, or photo album where you store them. For prints or negatives, get them reprinted at a good photography store so you don’t cut or mark up your originals. If they're digital files, saved to a computer hard drive, your iPhone, or trapped inside your camera on the memory card, back them up to an external dive like a flash drive and get prints made. The same is true with photographs stored in your FaceBook or Instagram accounts. Get prints and get ready to have some fun.

For holiday meals, use photographs as place cards at the dinner table. For a family dinner, pick a baby photo of each person and see if everyone can figure out the baby’s identity. Or, use shots from family adventures. Then listen as people begin to share stories, “Oh, yeah, remember that snowshoe trek in Yellowstone? We had so much fun...”.

Take the images you didn’t use for place cards and put them in a basket for visitors to sort through. Or, work together to create a collage. Set out poster board, photo stickers, and colored markers, along with festive stickers to use as decorative enhancements. Embellish the collage with cutouts from old holiday cards. For a more formal look, most stores that sell pre-made frames offer collage frames. Others offer a service where you take in your digital images, design the layout you want, and they create the collage for you.

As you rev up for a frenzy of holiday decorating, create photo-garlands by attaching prints to a brightly colored ribbon. Use two photo sticker squares to attach photographs back to back, so that the garland looks good no matter which angle you see it from. Run ribbon between the photos, through the opening between the stickers. Organize images by theme or color. Hang the garland across a room or along a mantle. Use a garland, or two, or three, to decorate this year's holiday tree.

Create a custom album or photo book filled with images from holiday celebrations or use one to showcase your favorite images of winter's snowy beauty. It’s simpler than you think: much can be designed and ordered online and you can use photos taken with your iPhone. Send the finished product to long-distant friends of relatives, as a kind of virtual hug. If you'll be traveling, pack it along to show and share.

If you’re thinking, "Well, maybe next year," then what you can do now is get your camera off the shelf to use at holiday celebrations, gatherings and adventures. If you’ll give a camera as a gift, include everything you need for the recipient to unwrap that camera and immediately begin to use it.

Then, on those long, cold and snowy, January nights, explore the shots you took. Choose some to create truly personal cards to send thanks for holiday gifts and gatherings or express your best wishes for the New Year.

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When you’re gearing up to visit Bozeman, it helps to accept that you will constantly feel pulled in two directions. There’s the laid-back downtown, with its coffeehouses, galleries, and bookstores just begging you to linger. And then there’s the great outdoors, calling you to try your hand at fly-fishing, rafting, skiing, and hiking. Our advice? Stay at the Olive Branch Inn, housed in a 19th-century Victorian Manor house, and let your hosts help you create an itinerary that includes a bit of both.

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Adventurers sick of the Forest Service's waxy, old-fashioned, hard-to-fold maps are now in luck. The agency has entered the Android and iPhone app business with a new product for Internet-age orienteers.

On Nov. 20, the Forest Service launched its PDF Maps Mobile App, available for free from the Android Play Store and iTunes. The app allows national forest users to buy digital maps for their mobile devices and track their location using GPS technology. Digital maps for the Lolo, Bitterroot, Flathead and Beaverhead Deerlodge national forests are already available for purchase.

"We had this overwhelming cry from the public that they really want to see more of our maps online," says Betsy Kanalley, national manager of the Forest Service map sales program. "What we realized we could do right now was geospatially reference PDFs of our visitor maps, which are now available for download, and allow you to track your location on the map as long as you are in range of a GPS satellite."

Avenza Systems Inc. was the contractor responsible for developing the map app.

Going forward, the Forest Service has still bigger plans for bringing its maps into the digital age: interactive visitor maps. Unlike the PDFs, these interactive maps could eventually show users which campsites are open, advise them about closed trails or even warn them of incoming inclement weather.

More>>> Missoula Independent