I’ve been ambivalent at best this week about the Butte 100.  I’ve had little energy in general, been sleeping much more than usual, and it’s been too damn hot in town.  Plus, as Jill noted, I’m already looking towards the next adventures, in which bikes do not feature prominantly if at all.  This morning I woke up and for some reason just knew I was ready to rock.  So now I’m looking forward to tomorrow, very much.

In other news, I finished my internship yesterday, so now I am fully (rather than just practically) unemployeed.  That combined with my now having a graduate degree makes the adultist position of having to really figure out what I want to do more acute than ever.  Certainly moreso than immediately post-undergrad.  I don’t mean what my profession will be, I figured that out years ago.  I mean the variations within it.  One example would be the choice to stay here, in Missoula, or move.  I’d rather not move, I’ve finally started to know the area well, have loads of good friends and adventure partners, way too many unfinished trips, and the town is just remarkably livable in every respect.  That is, except that almost all jobs pay poorly, and the competition to get them is fierce (how many Missoulians does it take to screw in a light bulb?  just one, but nine will apply and four of those will have doctoral degrees, and it will be compact florescent, natch).  Moving somewhere with more people, and perhaps taking a job that isn’t as social justice oriented as I might like, would create financial opportunities that could make things much free-er down the road.  The eternal, modern, mountain town debate.

In yet other news, the Soda Butte griz and her three yearling cubs have all been captured, and carted off to the center in Bozemen for DNA testing.  Circumstantial evidence does not look to be in their favor, and I imagine the mother will be euthanized early next week.  What will happen with the three cubs is a more complex question.  I certainly don’t argue with this course of action, there’s compelling reason to believe that a mother griz bold enough to teach her cubs to predate on humans will never be rid of that behavior.  As knowledge accrues, the incident keeps getting more disturbing, for the reasons I noted yesterday.  This mama griz seems to have been about as big an outlier w/r/t the spectrum of normal griz behavior as can be imagined.

It is then a strange cooincidence indeed that the New York Times published this editorial about the consequences of the White Bark pine blister rust, noting that “In bad [nut crop] years, the bears are driven down to lower elevations where they interact more frequently — and tragically — with humans.”  That in turn brings up a website with which all serious backcountry travelers in Griz country ought to be familiar, the publications list of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team.  While it is anthropocentric to think that we’ll ever be able to predict all bear behavior, that does not degrade the value of learning what we can about their patterns.  In particular the Gunther et al. 2004 article “Grizzly bear-human conflicts in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, 1992-2000” is worth reading.  It includes as definitive a list as is available of human-Griz conflicts over nine years, the parses the encounters by type, season, and location.  The map on page 14 of where conflicts have taken place is especially interesting, as is the knowledge that late summer and early autumn (when the bears are starting to really fatten up in earnest) is the most common time for interspecies conflict.  My experience in Glacier late last August fits with this.  Something to be aware of. 

Butte 100 spot page.  Rock on.