Missoula Magazine Monthly Articles

We go to Arizona because there, unlike Montana in March, the sun plays ball.
Most of us who make our annual pilgrimage to Major League Baseball’s spring training have grown weary of winter’s long, bruising assault on our psyches.
The sun is a fickle friend in western Montana, all too reluctant to do its work of renewing our land, of warming our skin, of rescuing us from winter’s doldrums. Winter hangs on far too long here, even after the sun has begun to retreat back to the equator after its dip into the southern hemisphere.
But in southern Arizona, winter only happens in theory. And there is no better place on Earth to be than at the 10 ballparks of spring training’s Cactus League in the month of March.
Suddenly finding oneself basking in the heat under a deep blue Arizona sky, feet propped up on stadium chairs and a cold beverage clamped between one’s knees is a hug from from a long-lost friend.
And it’s friends, too, of the human kind who you find at spring training. You can’t walk 10 feet, it seems sometimes, without meeting and greeting a fellow Montana refugee who has come here, like you, to remember what the sun was designed to do.
Wear University of Montana Grizzly attire, and you won’t quite believe the number of knowing smiles and handshakes you’ll get from fellow Missoulians.
I discovered spring training in 1998, when my father and I first drove to Tucson in a big RV. That was the year the Missoula Osprey opened its inaugural season here and my father, a lifelong baseball fan, got us unprecedented access to the Seattle Mariners training camp because of his friendship with the Mariners’ team doctor.
I shook hands with a young Alex Rodriguez that year. And I haven’t washed my hands since.
Well, that’s not quite true. But it is true that spring training gives fans a much more intimate baseball experience than an evening in one of Major League Baseball’s cathedrals.
There are 10 spring training ballparks in the Phoenix area (Tucson lost its status as a host city to spring training last year, to great uproar) – Sun City, Peoria, Surprise, Mesa, Tempe and other suburbs.
None of them holds more than 13,000 fans, giving the rarely sold-out games a picnic-like feel. Adding to that is the fact that nobody really cares about the win-loss column of their team, because spring training is exactly what it says it is: a training and proving ground for minor league players, a warmup for those already in the show and a chance for fans to see how young prospects fare in big league competition.
Cheap are the tickets, long are the days, glorious is the sun.
Missoulians can find cheap airfare to Phoenix directly from Missoula International Airport. The faces of the passengers on the flight down are beaming with anticipation of being renewed in spirit, because many of them are being airlifted, like you, from the cold Montana earth to life-giving days of play in the sun.
They will not be disappointed.

Jamie Kelly is a Missoulian reporter. He can be reached at 523-5254 or at
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written by chelsi moy
photographed by
linda thompson and david erickson

There’s one day each year when it’s perfectly natural for skiers and snowboarders to sport board shorts and swimsuits on the slopes.
No, it has nothing to do with the “frosting” craze spawned by Missoulians on Facebook this winter. Rather, it’s a longtime tradition for the mountain community: end-of-season ski parties.
Over the last decade, Montana Snowbowl owner Brad Morris has witnessed more and more customers showing up for the last day of ski season wearing rather unusual outfits. The chairlift is chock full people in superhero costumes, furry ape suits and banana outfits. Some carry boom boxes. Skiers forego their backpacks in exchange for fanny packs and their helmets for wigs.
“It’s one of those things that just kinda started,” Morris said. “Over the last five or six years, it’s really become more of an event.”
End-of-season snow parties are a rite of passage for skiers and snowboarders as they transition into spring sports like mountain biking and fishing. People dressed in outrageous costumes arrive at the mountain midmorning to squeeze in a few last turns on soft corn snow.
The sun is out, unlike most ski days in winter. People bid farewell to winter and welcome spring with a few celebratory pints on the balcony. It’s a day that’s less about skiing and more about reflecting on the season and enjoying the company of people who have become friends throughout the winter.
For the mountain community, it’s the last hurrah until next year.
“Skiers celebrate because the season has come to the end, even though you hate to do it,” said Riley Polumbus, spokeswoman for Whitefish Mountain Resort. “You often have great weather, the snow is decent and it’s a fun time getting out and enjoying Mother Nature.”
After months of bundling up, skiers and riders strip off a few layers to bask in the sun. Sunglasses replace goggles. It’s an opportunity to change the outfit you’ve worn all season long, Polumbus said.
“Why not go crazy on the last day and do something different and fun, even if it’s just adding a boa?” she said.
Some call the end-of-season antics “a tribal ritual.” Others blame spring fever.

Read more: Winter's Last Hurrah

Written by Michael Moore

Ah, the glories of spring are upon us.
No, we’re not talking about warmer days and  more
sunlight.
We are talking about the most unpleasant way that spring is, quite literally, upon us.
Reader, the ignoble tick.
Yes, the miniature vampire, spreader of disease, plague of the spring mountain-goer.
We are loathe to anthropomorphize, but the tick is sinister to its core. The tick may not actually be evil, but it’s certainly not a force for good.
What can a tick do for you? Consider: Rocky Mountain spotted fever, tularemia, Colorado tick fever, tick paralysis.
Here’s what the federal Centers for Disease Control have to say about Rocky Mountain spotted fever: “Typical symptoms include: fever, headache, abdominal pain, vomiting and muscle pain. A rash may also develop, but is often absent in the first few days, and in some patients, never develops.  Rocky Mountain spotted fever can be a severe or even fatal illness if not treated in the first few days of symptoms.”
All from a dastardly arachnid the size of a pebble.
So do not come to us, you tick apologists, with your unfounded claims that ticks serve some useful purpose.
Because they just don’t.
About the best thing you could say about ticks – and we’re not saying you should, just that you could – is that they have produced a cottage industry here in Montana.

Read more: Ticks the spring plague

It’s no secret, this love affair Montanans have with sipping a good beer under the Big Sky.
When it comes to the innovative, creative and distinctive world of craft beers, Montana is No. 2 in the nation for breweries per capita. Craft breweries here generated more than $25 million in sales last year. The Montana Brewers Association trail map now has 32 stops.
As the culture of craft beers grows throughout the country, Missoula in particular has become a place where the brews flow as freely as the river that runs through it.
The three largest breweries – Bayern Brewing Inc., Big Sky Brewing Co. and KettleHouse Brewing Co. – call Missoula home. A fourth – Draught Works – opened late last year. Combined, the breweries boast almost 60 different flavors of beers. The power of their pints draws taprooms full of patrons looking for another taste of an old favorite or perhaps the next big beer.
“Missoula is very close to our heart when we talk about craft beer,” said Montana Brewers Association executive director Tony Herbert.
“Through all these businesses you get a variety of opportunities to try these beers. The brewers are doing a great job creating a seasonal, not stagnant, market. Brewers are creating and writing a new script every day.”

Read more: Brew Town

The formula sounds like a mad scientist’s mud pie: Combine leftover beer mash and pond scum, zap with entrepreneurial fizz and stir in one evolutionary biologist. Make money.
The mixing bowl may have contributed as well. There’s little other reason why Jason Lind’s sewer cleaning business, James Stephens’ production of high-end food flavorings and Carrine Blank’s research into ancient algae should combine, other than they all share a Missoula connection.
Algae has been a building block of life on this planet for billions of years. And now it’s making life better in Missoula, Montana. But it took some chance collisions to turn primordial soup into present-day success.
What’s so good about algae? How about plant-based dyes and flavors that can go into vegetarian and vegan food production, or Omega-3 fish oil without the fish (since it comes from the algae the fish eat – thus, removing the “middle man”). Other oils can replace the skin-rejuvenating compounds in beauty lotions, without sacrificing animals to produce them.
Many of those products now come from coal-based compounds that need a lot of energy to produce and give off a lot of carbon pollution. But what if there were an algae that doesn’t need petroleum-based fertilizer and actually eats the carbon waste other processes give off?

Finding the start of this story isn’t easy. But let’s begin with Jason Lind. The son of a Montana farming family with an MBA from the University of Montana had been working with some startup financial firms in Missoula. About three years ago, he got a phone call from another Montanan named Craig Hurlbert, who owned a clean energy business in Houston, Texas.
“Craig contacted me, said, ‘You don’t know me, but I’ve made this investment, and I need somebody to run the business,’ ” Lind recalled. “I didn’t know anything about algae when I got involved.”
The company was AlgEvolve, and was based in Corvallis. It intended to use algae to purify wastewater. The obstacle was that algae need sunlight to grow. That typically means big ponds where the algae do their work on the top inch and a half of water.

Read more: Algae Solution

Chef Thomas Campbell doesn’t mince words with his Culinary Arts students.
The second they walk into the classroom, before they ever have the chance to torch a terrine, he tells them that the dicing and slicing and scrubbing and sanitizing they will do won’t be glamorous.
“This is not Hollywood, folks. If you’ve been looking at the food shows, and you think you’re going to be one of these Rachael Rays, you might want to rethink,” Campbell tells them.
Many do. The attrition rate for the Culinary Arts program at the University of Montana College of Technology hovers around 50 percent, as is typical for culinary programs, Campbell said. But under his watch the last nine years, enrollment at the state’s only accredited culinary school has roughly doubled, a team of students brought home a national trophy, and Campbell has a vision of expanding the kitchen and augmenting the associate degree program.
“I would be tremendously pleased if we could introduce a bachelor’s degree program,” said Campbell, voted 2007 Chef of the Year by the Montana Chefs Association.
That’s part of his grand dream for the future, though, and in the meantime this winter, 42 aspiring chefs were awaiting instruction. One day in January, Campbell worked the dining room and the kitchen, imparting the basics to first-year students.
They should know how to pronounce “pastitsio,” a Greek baked dish, if it’s on the menu.
They should iron their shirts.
They should guard against dropping disposable gloves on the floor because each costs 5 cents; in a professional kitchen, profit margins are miniscule.
Apparently, the lessons stick. Campbell can tick off a long list of places where his students find work cooking, managing and purchasing: The UM Food Zoo. The Silk Road. The Pearl. Iza. Ciao Mambo. And those are just some Missoula employers.
“Nearly all of the students before they graduate are employed, and that’s our main goal,” Campbell said.

Read more: A taste from the Hunter Dining Room

Architect's historic remodel creates new understanding from client's perspective, winning awards along the way.
written by gwen florio
photographed by tom bauer

Here’s what you don’t notice about Angie Lipski and Dean Johnson’s house in the University District.
All the doors.
There are 15 of them in the upstairs alone, short ones, tall ones, skinny ones, wide ones, tucked into all sorts of unobtrusive places, cleverly concealing impressive amounts of storage space.
Which becomes key if you’re remodeling a 1922 house without expanding the footprint or raising the roof.
That was Lipski’s self-administered task. An architect with MacArthur, Means and Wells, Lipski added another 600 square feet of usable space to her 1,600-square-foot home by taking the dormers to the full width of the house, optimizing space that was already there, but unused. By the time she was finished, “there were only five square feet that I didn’t use in the upstairs, and they’re behind a stacked washer and dryer,” she said.

The project won a 2011 Historic Preservation Award in Missoula and also was chosen from among 350 entries nationally for Fine Homebuilding’s 2011 Remodel of the Year Award.
“The words they wrote in the award meant so much to me,” Lipski said.
Fine Homebuilding extolled the project’s “practical excellence,” calling it “modest, rational and in tune with the times.”
Nearly as important to Lipski is the fact that the work demonstrated that “a construction project doesn’t have to be adversarial.” After five months of having her home’s second floor covered in a big blue tarp, with workers on the Scariano Construction project going up and down a specially built outdoor stairway all day, she said that “I love everybody on the project even more.”
ave for a breakfast nook (whose bench seats are atop storage bins) in the kitchen, the remodel was confined to the second floor, which originally consisted of two bedrooms flanking a bath. Now there are three bedrooms, two baths, a sitting room and a sewing room for Lipski off the master bedroom. All – even an interior bathroom – feel light and airy, thanks to the fact that Lipski put the same premium on windows that she put on storage space.

Read more: Growing Spaces

The Knudsen home fits neatly, if unremarkably, into the Potomac Valley’s ever-remarkable landscape of rolling foothills and braided meadows.
From the outside, it is simply a structure of wood and glass, spacious and sturdily built – anything but a trophy home.
Yet once inside, there is no other home like it.
In fact, you won’t find such exotic residents living under one ordinary roof anywhere but here, in this rural paradise just north of Missoula.
This is where Chili Pepper, the South American cavy, lives with his best friend Patches, a guinea pig from the Andes.
This is the home of Gizmo and Nemo, sugar gliders from Australia; and to Groucho, an African pygmy hedgehog; Cas, an arctic fox; and Kemo, a prehensile-tailed porcupine from the Amazon.
Here, you’ll get an earful from a flock of smart-talking parrots who have taken an entire room as their own. In this raucous corner of the Knudsen house, you’ll get a curious look from Curly, a white-cheeked turaco from Africa, and a cheerful welcome from an always-flirty Ginger, a green-cheeked conure and native Brazilian.
Down the hall is where the more secretive residents live: Lizzy, the Russian legless lizard, and Blueberry, the northern blue-tongued skink from Australia.
There are plenty of others who call this place home – some 72 feathered, four-legged, two-legged, scaled, furry and spineless creatures in all.
It is called Animal Wonders, and it is all of that and more.

Read more: Animal Wonder