Old Salt recycling, running in the West, and cooking with love

By Micah Drew, Jordan Hansen and Keila Szpaller

“To all those Oregonians who want to outlaw hunting and fishing, please stay out of Montana.” — Gov. Greg Gianforte, regarding a ballot initiative in Oregon that would remove exemptions for hunting and fishing from animal cruelty laws.

Last weekend I spent four days on the Mannix Ranch at the annual Old Salt Festival, which was in its fourth year. I spent that time collecting recycling and compost from the festival, which was interesting, occasionally gross and ultimately felt really rewarding — and I learned a ton about the field.

I was helping out 406 Recycling, owned by Matt Elsaesser, a long-time Helena resident and former commissioner of the city. For years, Matt has been working compost and recycling at events around Montana, including Old Salt. This was his fourth year running the operation, and he also does Red Ants Pants and events in Big Sky.

We drove up on Thursday night, set up our camp and got to work. There’s a fair bit of strategy and spending a lot of time watching how crowds move and where people gather — you want to make the recycling and compost bins easily accessible and near trash cans, so people can make that choice easily.

This also involved a lot of public outreach. Part of my job was hanging out and watching the recycling and compost bins and letting people know what was compostable, and what wasn’t. For example, Old Salt beer cups from the bar are actually compostable, and I like to think both they and we saved a lot plastic cups from going into the landfill.

This also involved having conversations with vendors about what materials they brought to serve customers on as well as working with the Old Salt kitchen staff to make sure they weren’t overflowing with compost. I’d add here that everyone with the festival and ranch was awesome to work with, and I was really impressed at how clean people left the venue and how well they sorted the compost out themselves.

The dirtiest part of this job is digging through compost bags, by hand, and pulling out things that will not be accepted by the places Matt takes the compost to. This was really important and something we did on site.

Bears, of course, were a major worry, so we locked up all our compost at night — the box truck we had would have been a walk-in buffet if it wasn’t locked up. This also meant some late nights. Each night, there’s these awesome little campfires that the festival has and people gather around them until quite late after the music ends. On the last night, we closed up shop around midnight after setting up one final can collection bin so the late-night partiers could clean up after themselves, which they absolutely did.

In between my running around, I also had the chance to meet some extremely interesting people and listen in on a couple of the talks from speakers Old Salt brought in. I cannot stress enough how good of an event this was, and I absolutely will be planning to attend this moving forward.

~ Jordan Hansen

If trail running had a Super Bowl, it would likely be the Western States Endurance Run, the oldest and most prestigious ultramarathon in the country, if not the world. It is a 100-mile footrace from Olympic Valley near Lake Tahoe, to Auburn, California.

Competitors face 18,090 feet of elevation gain and 22,970 feet of descent over the course, with a 30-hour time limit.

Montana will be well represented as a trio of pro trail runners from Missoula are among the favorites of this year’s race.

Adam Peterman, a Hellgate High graduate, won Western States in 2022, his first time attempting the 100-mile distance. He competed in 2024, but ended up walking much of the later stages of the race to finish 49th.

He returns this year after winning The Canyons 100K, a competitive ultra earlier this year that saw him beat several top-tier runners lining up against him this morning.

He will be joined by training partner Jeff Mogavero, who finished fourth at Western States last year in the fastest debut on the course ever — 14 hours and 30 minutes. He said in a pre-race interview that in the months leading up to Western States he “fell in love” with running all over again, and hopes to take that energy onto the course.

Jenn Lichter, a former Whitefish resident who now trains and lives in Missoula, is among the favorites in the women’s race, despite it being her first 100-miler. She has set two course records in ultramarathon races so far this year, has won The Rut 50K in Big Sky several times, and has rarely finished off of the podium in a trail race.

You can watch a pre-race interview with Lichter here.

A livestream of the race will be available on YouTube, with a 5 a.m. start Pacific Time, and winners expected in Auburn around 7 p.m.

~ Micah Drew

My mom wanted a book recommendation recently, and I know she likes biographies and autobiographies, and she’s a great cook herself, so I thought this food memoir by Stanley Tucci might be just the thing.

So far, so good.

Coincidentally, we’d just seen and enjoyed “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” so why not more Tucci?

Here are three reasons to appreciate “Taste: My Life Through Food”:

Happy reading — and cooking.

~ Keila Szpaller

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