Before moving to Phoenix in 1979, we lived on Big Mountain (near
> Lakeside and Kalispell)...with Glacier National Park as our backyard.  To
this
> day, I have not seen country so beautiful as this terrain.
> 


I am another with ties to Montana.  I was born and raised in Cut Bank which
is on the other side of the Divide from the Kalispell area and Glacier was our
backyard as well.  My father actually helped build the Going-to-the-Sun Hiway
back in 1929 - 1931.  That hiway was built at a cost of
$1million/mile...unheard of then.

I have also lived in Missoula, Bozeman, and Butte.  I lived In Montana for
most of 36 years.  I would jump at the chance to move back up there, if I
could find a means of gainful employment equal to what I have out of state. 
Sadly, that, in most cases is just not possible.

Montana has changed a lot since I was younger.  The small towns such as Cut
Bank are dying the death that most small towns in America are now.  When I
graduated from High School Cut Bank's Population was about 4500 and we had 121
people in our class.  I saw this years graduating class was 58.  The town now
has about 3000 people.  A lot of the people there are the parents of the baby
boomers most of whom's children have moved to other states to find decent
work.

The larger towns, Missoula, Bozeman, Kalispell, and even Billings, Helena,
Butte, and Great Falls have changed as well, but that is from an explosion of
being discovered.  They have become playgrounds for a lot of out of state
people who have bought up a lot of the property and developed it for summer or
winter thrills.  All well and good but the bad part is that the traffic has
just expanded to the point that it is out of hand.  This is more so in the
Kalispell and Bozeman areas.

I miss the days when with permission you could hunt or fish just about
anywhere you wanted.  No one charged you, and in most cases the land owners
would tell you where the deer, elk, antelope or whatever had been running on
their property.  Now you have to apply and pay the land owners for the
privelidge to hunt on their land.  Which is their right as land owners, but
really just takes the fun out of things.

Still even with those changes, I would love to live back up there.

Anyway, Brian, good luck to you and your family.  I would sure like to be
moving up there as well, but I guess I'll have to settle for getting rained on
in Oregon.

Joe
TeamBlunder
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