WEST GLACIER n Heavy rains stripped winter’s white from Glacier National Park early this week, pushing lowland streams above their banks and turning Going-to-the-Sun Road into Going-to-the-Sun River.
The popular route, which tracks along McDonald Creek, was closed at Lake McDonald Lodge on Tuesday as floodwaters climbed. Near Avalanche Creek, more than 2 feet of water was reported spilling down the highway.
With more mountain rain and wet snow in the forecast, Glacier’s staff would make no projections regarding a scheduled reopening the routes.
Instead, park officials on Tuesday were warning visitors that all park roads could be hazardous due to storms and rising stream levels, and they cautioned travelers to be on the watch for fallen trees and debris on roadways.
That’s also good advice for travelers outside the mountain park, as well, with stormwater drenching the greater region in recent days. Flood warnings were in effect Tuesday not only for Glacier Park, but also for much of Flathead and Lincoln counties.
In Lincoln County, officials said small streams were flooding, including Libby Creek. Bridges there were inundated, and residents in low-lying areas were sandbagging against the floodwaters.
Near Noxon, county roads and private drives were reported flooded. And in Kalispell, Monday’s rainfall set a record, 0.43 inches, breaking the 0.39-inch mark set in 1958.
“This is a tremendous amount of rain for this time of year,” said Marty Whitemore, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Missoula.
The storm originated in the far-off Pacific, he said, then raced north and east from Hawaii to Montana on high winds popularly known as the “Pineapple Express.”
The clouds dropped 3.34 inches of rain in West Glacier during a two-day period, he said, and 2.66 inches in Troy.
The largest rainfall amounts, however, were in the mountains. A high-elevation station above Victor, for instance, registered 3.38 inches, while a valley station in Stevensville recorded just 0.46 inches.
The rain and warm temperatures have also caused creeks in the Bitterroot Valley to swell and flood surrounding roads on Tuesday.
High water in Kootenai Creek near Stevensville washed out a bridge on Kootenai Creek Road about one mile west of U.S. Highway 93, said Ron Nicholas, director of emergency management in Ravalli County.
“The bridge is in pretty bad shape,” Nicholas said. “The county road department is trying to secure walls of the bridge, and they’ve been hauling in rock and fill.”
Because there was no guarantee the bridge repairs would hold through the night, the road was closed. Residents who live in the 10 homes on upper Kootenai were forced to drive through a neighboring ranch and bushwhack on logging roads to their homes.
“The creek does get high, but not this time of the year,” Nicholas said.
Nobody was hurt when the bridge washed out.
“There have been reports of sporadic flooding across the county today, with water of the roads,” Nicholas said, “but nothing like this bridge.”
But what comes down up high, Whitemore said, must keep coming down, and valley flooding could continue even as rains slowly abate. He forecasts a cooling and drying trend n although by no means a dry trend.
“We’ll still be getting some moisture,” he said, “but nothing like what we’ve seen over the past couple days.”
Instead, he said, some of the rain should turn to snow, with winter creeping back down the mountainsides.
“That,” Whitemore said, “should help some of these high water situations.”
Updated road conditions for the region are available by calling 1-800-226-7623 or by visiting mdt.mt.gov/travinfo.
Ravalli County business incubator takes shape
By TYLER CHRISTENSEN of the Missoulian
An eight-year effort to build a resource and research center for Ravalli County entrepreneurs is starting to pull together.
Several key components n such as a site for the anticipated 15,000-square-foot building n are now lining up, and a market analysis that will help shape the future facility is in the works, said Julie Foster, president of the Ravalli County Economic Development Authority.
As it’s currently envisioned, the entrepreneurship center would be a business incubator offering laboratories, meeting rooms and business services to scientists and entrepreneurs in the county. The idea for the center grew out of the opportunity presented by the presence of Hamilton’s twin biotechnology anchors, GlaxoSmithKline and Rocky Mountain Laboratory.
Those two companies represent a new direction for Ravalli County’s small-business-based economy, which has yet to recover from the loss of its natural resource base in timber and mining, she said. If more entrepreneurs were inclined to build niche businesses within the biotech sector, they could hire local people at higher wages, who could then afford to live and work in the valley n while perhaps starting businesses of their own.
But without access to basic resources, would-be entrepreneurs face a daunting challenge in just getting off the ground, Foster said. An entrepreneurship center would allow access to shared equipment and services, from copy machines to receptionists, without having to spend a lot of money on exclusive resources n or time raising startup capital.
“We need to take our opportunity to build,” Foster said. “If we don’t, somebody else will n or it will pass.”
Once the market analysis is complete, the center will probably start rolling toward completion a lot faster, she added.
The RCEDA is already involved in fundraising and grant-writing for the facility, and recently received a $20,000 grant from the U.S. Economic Development Administration n in addition to a matching grant from the Montana Department of Commerce Big Sky Trust Fund.
And this summer, the Ravalli County Council on Aging offered 4 acres of its 20-acre property located just outside Hamilton city limits. The Aging Council is looking at building a 90-unit senior housing cooperative on the property, so organizers involved with the entrepreneurship center have agreed to collaborate on ways to enhance the area’s infrastructure, Foster said.
“It’s a growing area,” she added.
Meanwhile, a Hamilton-based consulting corporation called Human Interactive Products Inc., or HIPinc, will perform a market study and use that information to develop a strategic plan for the center.
HIPinc is familiar with the local market and how it compares to national conditions, said president Jim Olsen, who founded the business in 1991. The corporation regularly leads billion-dollar proposals and international programs, logging about $2 million a year in sales.
It already boasts some success with the local entrepreneurship center idea, albeit on a smaller scale. Last year the company converted the Hamilton Carriage House, a 60-year-old single-family dwelling located near downtown Hamilton, into a business-friendly facility with 10 office spaces, a commercial kitchen and multimedia conference room.
Each can be rented by the hour to area businesses lacking their own facilities and resources, or even those just wanting to try out a new idea. On that front, HIPinc’s 15 employees are willing to provide business planning advice.
“We’ve lowered the barrier for some small businesses that want to get started,” Olsen said. “That’s why I was interested in this.”
Barriers remain for a full-fledged entrepreneurship center, not the least of which is the region’s relatively small population, Olsen said. Cities such as Denver have the population base to offer a large pool of talent, as well as the education institutions to support them.
Another challenge is, obviously, the current lack of biotech businesses. If Ravalli County had a reputation in niche biotech, it could draw in small businesses and entrepreneurs from outside the region.
“People come here because they think of this as a nice place to live, but they don’t think of this place as where you come to rub shoulders with biotech companies,” Olsen said.
His company plans to take a good look at who GSK and RML’s vendors are and where they come from, with an eye toward encouraging competing businesses, he added.
“I’ll bet you that a lot of them aren’t in Ravalli County, and if they’re not in Ravalli County they’re fair game,” he said.
However, the entrepreneurship center will be aiming to attract entrepreneurs from outside the biotech industry as well. Therefore, HIPinc will survey students, local businesses, hospitals and education institutions to learn just what it is the region is most in need of, Olsen said.
After all, he and Foster recently returned from a National Business Incubation Association meeting in Denver, where they learned how similar centers across the nation have won success by adapting their facilities to the needs of the community and building synergy among local businesses.
Once the market study is complete n hopefully around February n HIPinc will begin working on a strategic business plan for the center, then a site survey.
The center is gaining ground but there’s a lot more to be done, Olsen said.
“We’ve been told we have a mountain to climb,” he said. “So we’re going to try to climb that mountain.”
Kootenai forest officials sifting land-use comments
By MICHAEL JAMISON of the Missoulian
LIBBY n After more than two months of sifting and sorting through the full field of public opinion, Kootenai National Forest officials are nearing the bottom of pile.
It was a big pile, full of public comment on how best to manage national forest lands into the future. Not least among the issues was a controversial proposal that would replace the long-established “recommended wilderness” land-use designation with a somewhat less permanent “wild lands” category.
Now, however, that divisive plan seems far from set in stone.
“We got about 500 original letters,” forest supervisor Paul Bradford said of the Kootenai’s draft forest plan. “But then we also got lots of form letters and petitions.”
And it was those form letters that made the opinion pile so thick, he said. “We had thousands and thousands of those.”
It’s not uncommon, Bradford said, to be swamped by form letters. This is, after all, the Internet Age, and everyone from environmentalists to big industry knows how to rally the troops for a letter campaign.
That’s especially true on a forest such as the Kootenai, which has proved ground zero for many public-land policy battles. Currently, the Kootenai National Forest has more miles of road (8,000 miles) and less designated wilderness (4.2 percent of 2.2 million acres) than any national forest in the state.
The plan proposed for the future recommends no wilderness, and opens 77 percent of the forest to possible logging, a sure recipe for conflict among user groups.
The former supervisor there, Bob Castaneda, knew as much when he chose to replace “wilderness” with “wild lands,” and he even predicted the tumult that would follow.
Sure enough, conservationists were incensed that when Castaneda released provisional maps showing how the Kootenai forest would be managed, all mention of “recommended wilderness” was erased.
In its place was “wild lands,” a brand-new category hatched right there on the Kootenai. The acres covered by the new designation would still enjoy some amount of de-facto wilderness protection, but would no longer hold the cache of being recommended for inclusion in any future wilderness bill.
Passing any wilderness legislation, Bradford said, “is a tough, hard road to follow.” Conservationists say it’s tougher and harder n perhaps impossible n without a “recommended wilderness” designation from the local national forest leadership.
Castaneda’s change in terms was, all agreed, a matter of permanency. Wilderness is, more or less, permanent; wild lands are not.
The problem, Castaneda said, was that “wilderness” had become a “conflict word.” But in effect the change was more than linguistic n it was a fundamental shift in philosophy, an abandonment of what traditionally had been widely accepted land-use categories.
Those land-use maps were part of the Kootenai’s new forest plan, a guiding document that, when complete, will set out how the national forest will be managed for the coming decade or so. Some lands will be open to logging, for instance, and others will not.
All agree it’s bound to be a contentious process, but in erasing the “wilderness” designation, Castaneda admitted he had perhaps made it particularly so.
But now Castaneda’s gone, replaced by Bradford, and everyone involved is anxious to see how the Kootenai’s new top boss will handle the situation he’s inherited.
So far, he’s not saying.
“I think we’re still finding our way as an agency,” Bradford said, adding that he’s undecided as to whether local forest supervisors should be unilaterally creating new land-use categories.
“I’m still thinking about that one,” Bradford said.
But of one thing he is certain: “I like consistency across the greater region. I’m not one to go reinvent the wheel just for one national forest.”
Bradford said he favors a forest plan that is coherent with those of the Idaho Panhandle National Forest to his west and the Flathead and Lolo national forests to his south and east, a plan in which “people can see an integrated set of decisions that make sense.”
He wants a consistent plan that “doesn’t look like a crazy quilt.”
“It’s important to me that we edge-match with our neighbors,” he said.
Of course, there’s no “wild lands” designation on neighboring forests, no matching quilt piece for that land-use classification. Supervisors on adjacent forests n also revising their long-range plans n have stuck with the traditional land-use categories.
But beyond outlining his preference for coherent and consistent planning throughout the region, Bradford will not say precisely how he will rule on the escalating “wild lands” controversy.
That decision, he said, will be informed by more than his personal opinion. It will be informed, in part, by all those other opinions received during the public comment period, and by his professional staffs’ expertise.
It is an “art,” he said, this balance between professional land-use management and public opinion. Ideally, the experts would drum up a proposal, relatively independent of local sentiment, and then would put that plan to the people. Any substantive suggestions that arise during the comment period would be incorporated, and a revised plan would be crafted.
But that process becomes messy when, in Castaneda’s words, “wilderness” becomes a “conflict word.” When that happens, the process is infused with emotion, ideology and, sometimes, vitriol. Discourse falters, and decisions become political.
Activists know that. It’s the reason they drum up those form-letter campaigns.
And although Bradford insists “it’s not a vote,” he admits that weighted public sentiment can and does influence decisions. It’s a matter of measuring quality against quantity.
Of course, each of those preprinted letters says exactly the same thing, and so should count as only one single substantive comment. But they have an undeniable collective weight that must be accounted for.
That accounting is exactly what Kootenai staffers have been up to these past couple months, ever since the public comment period ended in early September. An analysis of those comments n a “content summary,” as it’s known n should be on Bradford’s desk next week.
Then, he said, his leadership team will dig into that controversial forest plan and begin revising. A final document could be ready by late spring, he said, still on track despite the wave of comments.
“There’s been a lot of controversy about the ‘wild lands’ designation,” Bradford said, “and no one’s made any final decisions.
“But I expect there will be changes in the map, as well as in the plan.”
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