http://www.hungryhorsenews.com/articles/2008/11/27/news/news01.txt

Covering this sort of thing is always a bit difficult. It's not very pleasant watching a man try to kill himself. It's even less pleasant knowing that you have to let events take their course. Your job is to get the pictures, not interfere. Early in my career I went to a bear mauling in Glacier. They were wheeling one of the victims down the trail and I took some photos of her being loaded into the ambulance and then I asked the ranger "Does this mean the trail is closed?"

Perhaps one of the dumbest questions I've ever asked anyone. He looked at me like he wanted to kill me. I get along with that ranger rather well, today.

A Kokanee salmon, caught earlier in the day.

We were coming back from a short but pleasant hike along McDonald Creek Sunday. November, in general, has been unusually nice and Sunday was no exception — the sun was shining, the air was cold but not unpleasant and the conversation ranged from the darkness in the financial markets to when it had been worse to how little, really, we could do about it.
Why let Wall Street ruin a perfectly good day in Glacier?
At the end of our hike we crossed the one lane bridge near the outlet to Lake McDonald. Below us, kokanee salmon were spawning, their orange and black shapes gliding in the clear water beneath us.
Earlier in the day I had stopped and caught a fish with a fly rod, just to see if they would eat a fly. Most didn’t. One did. I gave the fish to another fisherman who happily took it home to smoke it.
Now a spin fisherman was trying his luck and wrapped his lure into the bridge. He asked if I might be able to get it out, and, after a bit of maneuvering, I was able to reach down, unsnag his lure from the timbers and let it fall to the water below. The lure landed nearly directly over a fish, briefly caught it, before it was able to squirm away.
The man laughed.
On the other side of the bridge three youngsters were also fishing with spinning rods and directly above them a man was decked out in neoprene waders and wading shoes and vest and hat and all the other crap that goes along with a fully equipped fly fisherman.
He was lobbing something big and heavy at the fish by the looks of it. His rod wasn’t loading right and jerked back and forth against the weight at the end of his line. Fly fishing, done right, can look downright elegant. Fly fishing done wrong, looks like a body with one joint badly broken.
The fly fisherman kept flailing the water and then he did something I didn’t expect: He walked right across the lies of the spin fishermen to go after salmon he couldn’t reach with his lousy casting.
And then, he did it again and again.
Salmon scattered to and fro. The fly fisherman, caught none of them. Perhaps salmon, even in death, know an idiot when they see one.
The rules of fishing, spin or fly, are that you never walk through another fisherman’s lie. You give them their space, unless they say it’s OK to walk through.
I suppose that’s just common sense. But common sense and courtesy are lost on some folks. You can outfit them with all the fancy gear, the expensive rods, but you can’t buy brains or decency or sportsmanship.
A friend of mine had a more blunt assessment.
“We should have stuffed that fish you caught up his ass,” he said.
A novel approach, I suppose, but one that certainly would have caught this goon’s attention.

In the Fall/Winter issue I misspelled Julie Helgeson's name in the story of the Night of the Grizzlies. I regret the error. I had it spelled right in my notes. Thanks to reader Charles Browne for catching the mistake.

Here: http://www.timberlakefire.com/goat.html

Yeah, the classic shot a of a whitetail buck is ears up, looking straight at you, but I like to try to get critters doing something natural, like eating lunch... The Park hasn't seen much snow in lower elevations yet. In fact, it's been downright pleasant, which is sort of scary. I mean, we need, snow for a lot of different reasons. I hope we don't have a dry winter.

I recently did a lengthy hike in the Nyack Valley. For the most part, the trip was a disaster — I carried too much weight — I was running close to 65 pounds — and I tried to do too many miles in too short a period of time. November only gives you about eight hours of daylight — less on cloudy days. My back and hips protested immensely and somehow I got an infection in my eye. Still, the place is downright gorgeous, and I did get this sunrise...

When I started with digital photography in 2000, we used the Nikon D1, it was pretty much a horrible camera. Trees turned purple, people turned purple, and at anything over ISO 400, you got nasty purple and blue streaks in the photos. Fast forward 8 years later and this deer, shot yesterday, was taken at ISO 800, underexposed at least a half stop, at a file size that is 10 times bigger than the original D1. Digital cameras have widely expanded nature and particularly bird and wildlife photography. The light can be marginal and yet the pictures exceptional. I still like film for certain situations (alpenglow, where the pink hues are captured better by film), but I suspect in 2009, I'll shoot maybe 20 rolls of film, whereas I used to shoot 10-20 rolls a week.

One of my favorite birds in Glacier is the pine grosbeak. Beautiful song and the males are bright red. This is a female, eating mountain ash berries. Every home west of the Divide should have one of these trees in their yard. In Glacier, they're more of a bush, but for your yard, you buy them as a tree. It was a very good berry year in the Park, which was good for the bears and the birds. Grosbeaks can be difficult to photograph because they spend most of their time in the canopy of conifers. They're found on both sides of the Divide, but I see them more on the east side. This one was photographed in Two Medicine. I took a nice post-election hike in the snow. It was very pleasant. I think I'm up to about 220 miles this season lugging that big ol' camera-lens combo however. My knees are getting sore, but my legs are like rocks and my back is in pretty good shape, all things considered.

Mick Holm lost to Dee Brown, the Republican, 2617 to 1965. Republicans still pretty much rule the roost in Flathead County.

Former Glacier Park Superintendent Mick Holm gets one last campaign stop in Monday evening at the corner of Nucleus and Ninth St. In Columbia Falls Monday night (Nov. 3). Holm, a Democrat, is vying for the open House District 3 seat, which covers a big chunk of real estate in Montana, including half of Glacier Park, the city of Columbia Falls and the Canyon communities of Hungry Horse, West Glacier, Coram and Martin City. I expect a tight race between him and Republican Dee Brown, who held the seat for 6 years. My prediction? Holm by a nose. He's campaigned hard in a door-to-door effort for support. I guess we'll all know by the end of the day...