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The Anaconda Aluminum Co. employee Club under construction in 1956. Today it is city hall. (Mel Ruder photo)
70 years ago
Jan. 14, 1949
Ernie Harter and Norman Watkins of fish and game surveyed into Spotted Bear through the snow. They counted 523 elk in small herds of about three to 25 in Dry Park and temperatures dropped to 30 below. They measured 76 inches of snow at Trout Lake. The men snowshoed and skied the 50 miles to Spotted Bear.
60 years ago
Jan. 14, 1959
The commercial timber cut on the Flathead National Forest for 2018 was just under 80 million board feet — the new established sustained yield for the Forest at the time. Columbia Falls shipments over the Great Northern Railway were 3,800 carloads, which was a new record. Columbia Falls voters shot down a vehicle tax that would have paid for roads and maintenance in the city.
50 years ago
Jan. 17, 1969
Front page photo featured kids skiing down the Schoenberg Park hill in Columbia Falls. A tow rope had been set up to haul people up the hill. It’s still a popular sledding hill today, though the tow rope is long gone. Columbia Falls Lions set up and operated the tow rope.
40 years ago
Jan. 18, 1979
The Anaconda Aluminum Co. plant had gone to a dry scrubber pollution control system. The old system, wet scrubber, pulled off gases from the pots with fans and mixed it with water. The water was treated, purified and reused, but the sludge from the process was then put into a pond near the plant. That sludge pond is one of the highest areas of cyanide contamination on the site today, which is now a Superfund site. In the dry process, the gases were forced through alumina, which took out the fluoride gases and made aluminum fluoride, which was then reused to make more aluminum.
30 years ago
Jan. 18, 1989
Log trucks were heading into Glacier Park in what was believed to be the first commercial log harvest in the Park. They were harvesting about 435,000 board feet of timber that was down from the Red Bench Fire, which burned about 25,000 acres of land near Polebridge.
20 years ago
Jan. 21, 1999
The Fred Meyer variety store on Nucleus Avenue was set to close after a 13-year run in Columbia Falls as the chain was bought by Smith’s Food and Drug. The grocery store, which was started by Jack Brown in 1954 (then the B&B) moved from First Avenue to Nucleus in 1962, where it remains today. The variety store was eventually torn down. A lawsuit stopped work on a controversial parking lot expansion at Avalanche Creek in Glacier National Park. Federal court judge Donald Molloy ruled the Park had to do a full-blown environmental impact statement on the project. The Park didn’t have the funds for that, so the plan was scrapped.
10 years ago
Jan. 15, 2009
The Flathead Valley saw a double whammy in job cuts as the Great Recession dug in. Plum Creek announced it would cut 145 jobs in addition to about 221 that were furloughed through the winter. Semitool also announced it was cutting 200 jobs from its Kalispell plant.