Ty's Take Most days around here you don't notice the power lines until something goes wrong with them, which is why that October 14th outage notice deserves a real look at your calendar. Planned maintenance beats emergency repairs every time, but it's the kind
Ty's Take The high school volleyball team's got their eyes on next season already, which is the right kind of thinking when you're rebuilding. Over at the school, folks are planning ahead instead of dwelling on what didn't land this year, and
Ty's Take Kiki's opening a second spot with a full kitchen and bakery, which says something about where Silver City's headed these days. A decade ago that kind of expansion would've been unthinkable in a town still nursing the mining economy'
Ty's Take Soulcraft Brewing's bankruptcy filing landed like a winter storm nobody saw coming, the kind that reminds you how fast things can change in a small town economy. The brewery's been part of the downtown fabric for years now, one of the places
Ty's Take I don't see actual headlines in what you've sent over. You've got a setup note about liking the word "Phelps County Focus" but no stories to work from. Send along what's actually running today and I&
Ty's Take A missing person in a county this size stops everything else cold, and by now most folks around Red Lodge know who we're looking for and what the search teams are doing. The specifics matter less right now than the simple fact: someone local
Ty's Take There's real infrastructure work happening around town right now, and it's worth noticing. U.S. 160 reconstruction, the tire collection that happened despite the weather, the prescribed burn coming to Eight Mile Mesa tomorrow, the push to expand Head Start and hire
Ty's Take Jim Dyson spent nearly five decades around Los Alamos, which means he watched this plateau change more than most, saw the Lab grow and shrink and grow again, knew the names of people who've since moved down to Santa Fe or back east. The
Ty's Take High school track meets aren't always the marquee event around here, but when you've got two runners who show up every Saturday and do the work the same way they do it in practice, people notice. Copley and Huffman taking first and
Ty's Take The jobs board is filling up again, which is what you want to see heading into the back half of October, and down in Helena they're breaking ground on a new elementary school while figuring out how to get better food into the cafeteria.
Ty's Take Slow week up the valley, which around here usually means folks are out working instead of making headlines. But there's some good stuff moving anyway: the high school's recognizing solid students, the library's figured out how to let people look
Ty's Take Starting next month, any kid in Colorado with a learner's permit is going to face some tighter rules about when they can drive and who can ride along, and frankly, it's about time somebody took a hard look at how we'
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Ty's Take The XTERRA crowd rolling through town this week, most of them lean and hungry and used to pushing their bodies past what normal folks think is reasonable, reminds you something about Alamogordo that doesn't always make the papers. We're a town built
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Ty's Take There's something worth watching in the Oregon County data center fight, even if the debates happen somewhere else. These things have a way of rippling through the whole region, and West Plains sits right in the middle of whatever comes next, whether it'
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Ty's Take The voting machine changeover is done, Dominion's out and Liberty Vote's in, and yes, the politics of it landed a little sideways around here. But here's the thing worth sitting with: the machines themselves haven't changed. What matters
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Ty's Take Election season here tends to bring out the idealists, which is fine. We heard candidates talk education and worker benefits this week, the things people actually need to live. But there's something worth watching in how Silver City sits at the crossroads of two
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Ty's Take There's a lot of noise in the valley right now about who's running what and why they won't say what they mean, but if you want to know what actually matters to people around here, skip the political letters and
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Ty's Take A community arguing with itself about what's real is a community that needs to sit down together, and it looks like folks around here are trying. The Mountain Chile Cha Cha brought people out, the Blessing of the Animals will bring them out again,
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Ty's Take Betty Joan Essington spent ninety years in this life, from the Depression straight through to now, and that's a long time to watch a place change. The aquatic center keeps coming up at council meetings without getting resolved, which tells you something about how
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Ty's Take Laclede County's 911 system is getting the attention it's been needing, and if the county commission moves forward with these upgrades, it won't be a moment too soon. Our emergency services have been running on infrastructure that's older
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Ty's Take Obituaries in a town like this read like chapters from the place itself. Coralie Bailey Carrier and Bernie Carrillo, ninety-two, both belonged to the kind of Las Cruces that built this valley before the subdivisions came pushing north from the border and the university started
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On the Water TodayLake level: 659.39 ft (0.6 ft below full pool) Today 88° Sunny · Tonight 59° Mostly Clear · Thursday 86° SunnySources: USGS gauge 06925500, National Weather Service Ty's Take Trooper Justin Hedrick did what the job demands when he spotted that wrong-way driver threading
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Ty's Take Eight million dollars is a lot of money in a county seat of two thousand people, which is why Houston's bond issue on the November ballot deserves hard thinking from anyone who pays property taxes around here. The city council is moving forward on
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Ty's Take Losing someone at 92 means the valley loses a witness to better times and harder times both, the kind of person who remembers when water meant everything and still does. Bernie Carrillo carried that memory forward into a long life here, and the people who knew