Daily Digest
Ty's Take The Yellowstone Art Museum's funding fight isn't really about a building or even a budget line—it's about whether this region thinks cultural institutions matter enough to sustain them when money gets tight. Every county in the Northern Rockies faces
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Ty's Take The Grey Fire came close enough to make folks hold their breath, but the Greycliff Mill—one of the few pieces of industrial infrastructure left in this country—dodged the bullet. Meanwhile, Ted Turner's passing has set loose a hundred stories about what one
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Ty's Take We've gotten used to bear activity shutting things down around here—it's the price of living where we live—but having to close school buildings hits different. Bridger Elementary and the high school both locked their doors this week because of persistent
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Ty's Take That data center north of Billings is going to be the defining conversation around here for the next couple years, whether folks realize it yet or not. Two massive gas power plants to juice a facility that'll sit out there in Broadview—that'
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Ty's Take Montana's kept same-day voter registration, which means come November folks in Carbon County can still walk in and register at the polls if they haven't done it yet—no advance paperwork required. There's something to be said for that
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Ty's Take When the budget's this tight and the teachers still get raises, somebody's making hard choices about what matters most. The city council knows what every parent in Billings knows—you don't keep good schools by nickel-and-diming the people
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Ty's Take Slow week on the blotter—nothing that'll keep anybody up at night—which gives us room to notice what's actually holding this county together. There's a woman out in Joliet doing the unglamorous work of matching people with what they
Daily Digest
Ty's Take Slow week in the county, which this time of year usually means everybody's either fixing what broke over winter or getting ready for the season ahead. The briefs column is where you find the real texture of a place like ours—who's
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Ty's Take Sue Ray taught forty-five years at Chief Charlo and nobody had to wonder why—that's the kind of tenure you don't rack up unless you actually show up for kids, day in and day out, through all the changes a half-
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Ty's Take The county's taking a hard look at what we've actually got to work with when it comes to tourism—inventory and strategy, they're calling it—and that's the kind of unglamorous thinking that keeps a place from getting
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Ty's Take The rails that built this place are mostly history now, which tells you something about how fast a region can remake itself when the economics shift. We've gone from empire to adaptation—coal giving way to refining and healthcare, the old transportation networks replaced
Daily Digest
Ty's Take The commissioners are meeting, the trolley's making noise again, and somebody's still worried about litter on the roadsides—which tells you everything you need to know about a Tuesday in Red Lodge. When a town this size can hold onto its institutions