We've Got The County Covered
We've Got The County Covered
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The Montana Grizzlies had a mixed bag last Saturday when they played Savannah State at home in Missoula. They won the game handily, beating Savanna State 56 to 3 of all things but their main quarterback Reese Phillips had a serious ankle injury. That called in freshman Gresch Jensen who did a great job as backup quarterback. Closer to home it was the Thunderbirds losing to Box Elder 22 to 6. Chinook lost to Fort Benton 36 to 2. Havre lost to Belgrade 43 to 6 and Harlem lost to Cut Bank 65 to 0. Bad day for the home teams, right? If that...
I hate wildfires. We used to call them forest fires if you will recall but then the prairies started burning as well so the name had to be changed to wild fires. The Bear Paw fire that we have been in the midst of for a week or more was one of the worst ever but there have been others that have been almost as bad. This is the first one that there was an actual loss of cabins in Beaver Creek Park and that shows how strong and terrible that fire really was. I learned most about fires when I lived for eight years in the Flathead Valley. I saw...
There were many wins and losses in football this last weekend. Great Falls Central really took the Thunderbirds to task, beating them 64 to 6. That led Central to a 3 and 0 record and a look of a winner in class C. Cascade beat Chinook and Laurel beat Havre. The Chinook score was 40 to 20 and Laurel beat Havre 42 to 21. I did not get a Harlem football score at press time but I saw that Harlem lost to Box Elder in volleyball. In the Frontier League Rocky beat Carroll 40 to 14. Talk about decisive. It was Rocky’s first win against Carroll s...
It is September and if it ever cools off September signals the beginning of fall and a wonderful time to start cooking those casseroles that you missed so much during the long hot summer. My version of Shepherd’s Pie I have given out the recipe before but it is so comforting, so delicious and so fall like that it is worth the work to put it all together. Consider Shepherd’s Pie to be a three pronged attack. First get a whole mess of the largest Yukon Gold potatoes you can find, boil them after peeling or leave the peelings on for that mat...
Prep football like all prep sports in Montana is changing. Schools are getting smaller and there are more and more who opt out of football or go to eight man which is much easier to fill than the traditional eleven man teams. Chouteau this year is going to be playing eight man football which is sort of shocking considering what the size of that town has been through the years. Then there is the case of Poplar High School who cannot play its varsity football schedule due to a lack of boys to field positions. They started out with seventeen...
I have not shared any mail with you gentle readers for some time now. Old time readers know that my mail is usually about the same each time I get any and varies from those who are in love with me to those who hate the ground I walk on. Yet, it is always good to stay humble so here is a sample of what the last three months have brought in. I call it the good, the bad and the ugly. Dear Mr. Lucke, I see you hobbling down the street using a walker these days. Surely I think we will not have to read any more of your drivel in the paper as you are...
Prep football like all prep sports in Montana is changing. Schools are getting smaller and there are more and more who opt out of football or go to eight man which is much easier to fill than the traditional eleven man teams. Chouteau this year is going to be playing eight man football which is sort of shocking considering what the size of that town has been through the years. Then there is the case of Poplar High School who cannot play its varsity football schedule due to a lack of boys to field positions. They started out with seventeen...
I have to go to the doctor in Great Falls today. I am not looking forward to that but I am looking forward to stopping at Borries in Black Eagle on the way home and picking up some spaghetti sauce and meat balls that are to die for. Borries sauce is a very old fashioned spaghetti sauce and is as good as any I have ever eaten. Best of all I do not have to go to Borries to get great spaghetti sauce for Nalivka’s in Havre has it as well. They use a very old recipe and their meat balls are simply wonderful too. I think that spaghetti and meat balls...
There is a lot of wildlife to view in our area but not everyone sees it. I had to laugh when I was driving a bus in Glacier National Park. People used to ask if they would see wildlife and I would say probably not in my bus as I had bad luck in the wildlife viewing department. That is not to say that I have not seen plenty of wildlife in my life. I have seen two mountain lions in the Bear Paws. Both of them at the end of June and both by the school house coulee that runs west from the Faber School. It was light so long that the lions nocturnal...
There is plenty of football news all of a sudden this month as the NFL starts their pre season and college teams regroup for yet another season. I notice that for fantasy football freaks there is no end to trades and the like all making the choosing of a fantasy football team more difficult. If you are a Cowboy Fan your star running back Ezekiel Elliott has been suspended for six games for injuring his former girlfriend in three separate accidents last summer. So, you can’t use Elliott for the first six games and if more people had their w...
August is a good month to take a vacation in Glacier National Park. While there plan to stay for several nights in the Lake McDonald valley on the west side of the Park. While east side campgrounds can be very hot, the Lake McDonald campgrounds are very cool. Two are larger camping units. They are Apgar and Fish Creek. Fish Creek is right on the Lake and Apgar is close to Apgar village. I believe that one or both of these campgrounds have installed a reservation system. You can see for yourself by going to Glacier’s home page and scrolling to r...
How about another recipe for potato salad? And this recipe turns into a really good recipe for potatoes and tomatoes with steak. You need to grill these vegetables on the barbeque so get yourself a grill basket to grill without the vegetables falling through the barbeque grates. You will need maybe two cups of new potatoes, a banana pepper, some of this year’s crop of very small tomatoes and some onions from this year’s crop as well. For the sauce for the potato salad you will need a quarter cup of a raspberry and vinegar salad dressing, a quar...
This week I was going to advise going for a couple of days to Zortman and having a good steak dinner, staying maybe at the historic Buckhorn cabins and exploring Mission Canyon. The terrible forest fire there stopped that travel guide. It reminds me of hearing of the great fire of 1936 that burned most all the timber in those wonderful mountains causing the forest de jour these days to be lodge pole pine due to that tree being the first to reforest itself after a major forest fire. So, instead of the smoky Little Rockies, how about going on...
Hasn’t this weather been tough on so many of us? Just hot and hotter and hotter and little or no rain and the National Weather Service says it is going to stay that way all through the rest of July. I was afraid to ask them about August. I can well remember going through drought periods like this before. Now, this is not really true but I once said that in the 1980’s there was a period of one summer what there was never a cloud in the sky. Never! Only the incessant sun day after day after day. Then in the 1990’s in another very dry perio...
My bedroom is a wonderful gallery of some of the best art that I own. It started out as a tribute to Grandma Moses. I love her art and through the years have collected seven large prints covering such subjects as winter scenes, Halloween, harvest time, and the Fourth of July. The Grandma Moses prints did not seem enough for that room. I have a lot of pictures of relatives; two buffalo head ducks that were mounted by Grandpa Lucke in 1925, a couple Pasma “Thinkum Happy People”, and some of my own art on the walls. Two of my favorite pai...
I am just glad that it is not football season right now much as I miss the game. With this horrible July heat wave, it would be difficult to play football or any outdoor game that requires exertion. One would hope that when August rolls around, it will be more like fall than this very hot and dry summer. Not that we have not had these summers before. In the 1980’s there were several years that were dry in the mountains and out on the prairie. And for those following the story of the Little Rocky Fire, remember 1936 when practically the e...
I have written before that I am not a big fan of potato salad. That is strange because I like everything that goes into potato salad. The other day I found a very old recipe in a Betty Crocker cookbook and thought I would try that. The biggest difference between that potato salad and today’s potato salads is that today, cooks recommend adding the dressing while the potatoes are hot so the dressing gets in the potatoes themselves. This salad recommends the potatoes be very cold when applying the dressing. Anyway I did like this potato salad. It...
The University of Montana football team is getting a new and better schedule as the years roll on. Most know that when the Grizzlies started playing the University of North Dakota, that brought a whole new level of football to the Big Sky much as it pains me to say that. Nothing should be as good in North Dakota as in Montana but that University of North Dakota football team is not good. Try great! In 2024 the regular Big Sky season will move to twelve games and that will make some extra slots to fill. One that the Grizzlies are going to use...
One of the worst things about getting old are all the wonderful memories and all the wonderful people that will not ever be seen again. As most of you know, I have written again and again about my life as a boy and young man on Clear Creek. But apart from Clear Creek itself and the incredible beauty of that part of the Bear Paw Mountains, it was the people who summered there and others who lived there winter and summer that were so intriguing for me. I have not written much about Dan, Jim and Veronica Murphy but at one time they were large in...
We are not even two months from the start of college football along with the NFL. So, there is news about football and a little more is coming out every day or so. Not only that but the Cleveland Cavaliers seem to be in chaos is one headline reported after their General Manager David Griffin left at a critical time. Apparently Griffin could not get along with Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert who is not satisfied with much of anything about his organization. This latest flap looks to be all about Dan Gilbert who is never satisfied with much of...
This is the time of year that I like best. I can watch my garden take off in a flurry of buds of all sorts and I am amazed at what can be done being a plain dirt gardener. Most impressive this year has been my sweet rocket. It was a flower that grew in alleys and on hillsides in early Havre, planted by women hitting the ground with the dried seed shells of the rocket and having it come up as if my magic. On Clear Creek there are hillsides that are simply filled with rocket which was mostly planted by Mary Ashline and Laened Black. Imagine my...
With the NBA Finals between Golden State and Cleveland all but over at this writing and I will be having more about that next week, but with that over I am really looking forward to football season. It is the middle of June and the start of college is not far away and that will lead to a whole bunch of wonderful college games and NFL games too. Matter of fact, I do see a tad of football news in various newspapers around the area even now. For example there was a Patriots story this last week. Patriot’s tight end Rob Gronkowski is just g...
Do I think that LeBron and the Cleveland Cavaliers are going to win another championship? As I write these words it is Saturday afternoon and Golden State is ahead one game and only one game has been played. I do think that LeBron James is simply the best player playing professional basketball at this time so if he can get his team going his way, and he is very good at that, he should be able to take this series. However, I will say that there is something about Golden State winning the first game that is unnerving. There is something else that...
When Congressman Ryan Zinke was appointed by President Trump to be the Secretary of Interior, that left Montana’s only seat in the House of Representatives vacant. Three men are running for that seat in a special election to be held toward the end of May. They are Mark Wicks, Libertarian; Greg Gianforte, Republican and Rob Quist, Democrat. “The Blaine County Journal/Big Sandy Mountaineer sent each candidate a set of questions to answer for readers of this newspaper. Here are the questions and the answers by the candidates. Do you favor a sin...
When I write about my childhood on Clear Creek sometimes I make it sound like we spent lots of time there in the winter. We did not. There were no four wheel drives then and in our family the first day on Clear Creek was often the first day of stream fishing which was around the third weekend of May. That was a big doings no matter what old fishing shack we were at. We were fishermen, after all, even if some of us did not fly fish but just dipped a worm engorged hook in the water and tried to bring forth a big brookie or rainbow to have for bre...
