Weekend Template

By Micah Drew, Jordan Hansen and Keila Szpaller

My Hulu, YouTube and social media ads have been recently dominated by political advertisements. While this is a welcome change from pharmaceutical ads, I’m ready for them to be done.

Of course, we’re still five months away from the general election, and I’m a political reporter, so really there’s no hope for me, but one can dream, right?

One way to get a quick snapshot at how much money is pouring into our elections is to check the mailbox.

The above photo is just two weeks’ worth of mailers from candidates and PACs supporting or opposing, or opposing by pretending to support different opposing candidates.

Anyone else out there about ready to wallpaper the spare room in a shade of “dark money?”

~ Micah Drew

Depending on where in Montana you are, the weather is likely getting increasingly lovely. This statement is particularly true in the Flathead Valley, as we are coming off of 4 days of thunderstorms, but I hear from my Billings-based boss that they’ve already hit 90-degree days.

With the nice weather this holiday weekend, I presume many of you are planning on getting outside on trails, in forests, and through our National Parks.

If you’re going out and about in grizzly country, a plea to be extra bear aware. They seem to have woken up a little angry this year.

Earlier this month, Glacier National Park recorded the first fatality from a bear since 1998, down in Idaho a hunter killed a grizzly that charged him and his son, and two hikers in Yellowstone National Park were also attacked.

In the last week, I have received five separate notifications from Glacier Park about road or trail closures due to bear activity.

If you are recreating in bear country, do it as safely as possible— go with other people, make noise, carry bear spray (though this is NOT a failsafe) or a firearm, and if lucky, you’ll SEE a bear from a very, very safe difference and get to take a photo and tell your friends the story.

~ Micah Drew

Who doesn’t love a good old-fashioned treasure hunt?

If you do, and you live in the intermountain west (which, as a reader of this newsletter, odds are you do), then there’s a good chance you have heard of the Forest Fenn treasure over the last decade or so.

If not, a brief summary: An elderly eccentric art and antiquities collector in New Mexico decided to create his own treasure hunt by taking an ornate chest, filling it with ~$1 million worth of gold, jewels, coins and other valuables, and hide out in the wide world.

The clues to the treasure were published as a short poem in the back of Fenn’s memoir in 2010.

Broadly, the treasure was hidden somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, in a spot accessible by a then-80-year-old Fenn.

Hundreds of thousands of people schemed, sleuthed and searched for the treasure, a few people died in the pursuit, but in 2020, the treasure was found in Yellowstone National Park.

The story of the treasure hunt, the eventual finding, and the subsequent legal battle between searchers who felt cheated out of their own finds, and with the federal government over how to deal with treasure found on federally-managed public land, has been the subject of many articles, books and Netflix documentaries.

And, loosely inspired novels, as I found out while reading Scavengers, by Kathleen Boland.

The book follows protagonist Bea, a recently fired market analyst from New York, who heads out west to spend time with her estranged mother, who has fully succumbed to the allure of treasure hunting; at the expense of everything else in life.

It’s a great read, and ultimately led me into the internet rabbit hole that is the Forrest Fenn treasure (not the first time I’ve done this over the years), which is always an entertaining time.

Have you found any hidden treasures lately? Or craft an exceptionally good Easter egg hunt earlier this spring? Do tell.

~ Micah Drew

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