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Bighorn sheep rams on the Garden Wall, July 20, 1969. Today bighorns still gather in the same area. Rams form large bachelor groups in the summer months.
70 years ago
May 6, 1949
The Department of Interior would start urging folks across the country to come and visit the Hungry Horse Dam site, which was under construction. The Bureau of Reclamation had plans to have guides on duty from June until September to talk about the project. A visitor shelter was going to be built so people could watch the construction underway.
60 years ago
May 6, 1959
Crews were planting 13,000 Douglas fir trees on Teakettle Mountain in an attempt to reforest the burn of 1929. Each planter carried about 100 trees wrapped in wet burlap. “Surprisingly rocky looking Teakettle has some soil,” a photo caption of the planting said.
50 years ago
May 9, 1969
The Montana Veterans Home was building a new main building for 54 residents on its campus. A big rock slide covered Highway 2 east of West Glacier. One big rock bounced down the bank, then over the railroad tracks and landed in the Flathead River with a splash, without harming the tracks. No one was hurt, but a school bus had just passed through there seconds before and another family with children just missed the slide as well, as it happened at 11:10 a.m. Crews had to break up the big boulders on the road just to clear them.
40 years ago
May 10, 1979
Trumbull Creek flooded, closing Highway 40 from Tombrink Hill to the Blue Moon. People were mad because the swollen creek couldn’t flow under the highway properly and instead ran down the borrow pit, flooding homes. They said they’d notified the highway department a month earlier that the culvert was plugged.
30 years ago
May 10, 1989
Aerial surveys in the South and Middle Forks of the Flathead were showing strong elk numbers. The South Fork count had 950 elk; with most of them being cows and calves. The elk herd seemed to have wintered well, biologists noted.
20 years ago
May 6, 1999
It was a wet, cold, day, but hundreds still turned out to watch Glacier National Park plows during the annual “Show Me Day” on the Going-to-the-Sun Road. Glacier doesn’t do “show me” days anymore, out of avalanche and liability concerns. Vandals dumped soap into the falls at Glacier Bank and it filled full of suds.
10 years ago
May 7, 2009
The week before, about four feet of snow fell in St. Mary. The newspaper had a photo spread of the snow-covered streets at East Glacier Park and a snowy St. Mary Lake. Wind topped 75 mph in some places and near Columbia Falls, dozens of trees were down on houses. Obama Administration stimulus funding meant another $27.6 million for reconstruction of the Going-to-the-Sun Road, which was a bright spot in an otherwise dismal economy.