ongoing conflicts and resource concerns in the area. At the time, says Missoula Ranger District recreation specialist Al Hilshey, alcohol use and vandalism were serious concerns. The agency didn’t see many families using the bike trails or picnic grounds. Organizations like the Friends of Pattee Canyon, the Garden City Flyers and Montana Conservation Corps concluded that a disc golf season beginning July 1 and ending Nov. 1 offered the best solution. On the resource management side, Hilshey explains there are a number of elements at play up Pattee Canyon. The first two holes of the disc golf course, as well as the 18th hole, are located on part of a wet camas meadow that can be damaged by plant trampling and wet soil compaction. The upper portions of the course also serve as a drain field for that meadow, and the Forest Service wants to be sure the area has ample time to dry out. “By the end of the summer, those [upper] fairways tend to get pretty wide, and it’s due to vegetation loss, trampling, compaction,” Hilshey says. “If we can rest the folf course during that time of year—especially in the spring—those plants can have time to grow, it increases plant vigor and we’re more apt to have more vegetative cover in the future and less erosion.” The limited disc golf season has helped to balance public use too, Hilshey adds. The groups involved in the initial discussion had to roll out an extensive outreach campaign to educate the public when the closure first went into effect. People have since grown accustomed to the rules, and Pattee Canyon is a wildly popular spot for all sorts of recreation. When the disc golf course finally does open on July 1, Hilshey says, “people are really excited to go and play the course … It turns into almost like an event.”
Q A
: Why are there so many casinos and video gaming machines around town? : According to the Montana Department of Justice’s Gambling Control Division, there are more than 17,000 video gambling machines in the state. It only seems like 16,999 of them are in Missoula.
In fact, as of June 30, there were 1,210 video gambling machines within the city limits. But they appear ubiquitous, and not just limited to casinos. They’re also tucked into restaurants, bars and bowling alleys. This proliferation isn’t an accident, according to Ronda Wiggers, lobbyist for the Montana Coin Machine Operators Association, which represents those who lease and operate many of the gambling machines, pool tables and jukeboxes around the state. “In 1985, when [the state legislature] legalized gambling in Montana, they didn’t want it to become like Vegas gambling,” Wiggers says. “They wanted it to be something that was in our local bars, so they limited the number of machines any one establishment can have. That’s why, unlike driving down the strip in Vegas, where there’s 15 huge casinos, we intentionally designed the law so that all small locations can participate.” State law limits locations to having 20 machines. It also requires a location to have a liquor license in order to procure a gambling license. Liquor licenses are issued on a quota system: Only a certain number are allowed in each county, and the number issued is based on population. As a result, liquor licenses are highly valuable and very difficult to get, especially in larger communities like Missoula. Because liquor licenses are rare and expensive, and because liquor-license holders have a lock on the gambling market, those who hold them—whether it’s Al’s & Vic’s or the Missoula International Airport— have a big incentive to install a bank of lucrative gambling machines. (The Ole’s chain of convenience stores is an extremely rare exception to the liquor-license rule: Though Ole’s stores do not sell liquor to drink on-site, they were grandfathered into the system when state regulation of gambling machines took effect.) When you consider that gambling machines generate some $380 million a year, according to the Gambling Control Division, it doesn’t take much math to see how the profit margin on Missoula’s 1,210 machines translates into their omnipresence.
Q A
:
What’s with all the coffee huts?
: Those who’ve lived here for the last 20 or so years probably think nothing of the cozy coffee stands that
dot our neighborhood streets, parking lots and busy intersections. But confused newcomers and visitors are as quick to ask about these convenient caffeine stations as they are about Missoula’s abundance of casinos. The answer turns out to be quite simple, says Malcolm Lowe, owner of Loose Caboose coffee huts. Lowe opened his first Missoula location back in 1994. At the time, Missoula had just one coffee hut—Mountain Time, on Stephens Avenue—and a new wave of java popularity was sweeping the nation. Lowe saw an opportunity. “Cities were seeing more coffee shops, or office buildings were putting stands in the lobbies of their buildings,” he says. “Well, Missoula is not a pedestrian culture. We’re more of an automotive culture. And in areas of inclement weather, coffee huts make sense ... Montana cowboys want good, strong coffee, and they don’t want to get out of their trucks to get it.” Lowe, who says he had to educate customers “quite a bit” after first opening, has now expanded to five locations, plus a stand at the Clark Fork Farmers Market. Florence Coffee Company and Liquid Planet also operate a string of local coffee huts, and there are dozens of individual operations scattered throughout town. “They’re a part of the local culture now,” Lowe says, noting similar popularity in other inland northwest cities like Spokane. “It’s just a part of people’s morning routine.”
Q A
: How did Caras Park get its name?
: The spot under the Higgins Avenue bridge where locals now gather for rallies, concerts, car shows, craft fairs, brew fests and just about everything else was underwater not so long ago. The Clark Fork once lapped at the foot of the Wilma, which led to a reclamation effort in the 1960s to prevent the building from getting flooded, according to historian Allan Mathews. The reclaimed land was named Caras Park after prominent landowner George Caras. You probably know Caras by the Third Street nursery that also carries his family’s name. Caras Park started to become a cultural focal point in the late ’80s, when the Montana Rep Riverfront Summer Theatre put on performances under a brown-andorange-striped tent bought from a circus. The park’s white pavilion was built in 1997, and a Missoula Down-
town Association campaign from 2010 to 2012 paid for the new band shell below the bridge. As for the iconic carousel in Caras Park, the idea originated in 1991 when local cabinet-maker Chuck Kaparich told city council, “If you will give it a home, and promise no one will ever take it apart, I will build A Carousel for Missoula.” A few years and hundreds of hours of volunteer labor later, the carousel opened in 1995 with 38 hand-carved ponies, still ridden today.
Q A
: Why doesn’t Missoula recycle glass?
: It’s certainly not for lack of trying. Allied Waste, Garden City Recycling, i.e. Recycling and even the Target store on Reserve Street are among those who have collected and accepted used glass in Missoula over the years. The problem has always been about what to do with the glass once it’s collected. Essentially, there are two options: find a local use for it or ship the glass to where the demand exists. Both tactics have been tried, but neither has worked—at least not on a broad, sustainable scale. “It’s always been really hard to recycle here, because we are just not finding a lot of end uses,” says Paul Driscoll, public information officer for the Planning, Prevention and Assistance Division of the Montana Department of Environmental Quality. Most applications for recycled glass require that it be pulverized into smooth pieces that are as small as grains of sand—and that’s not easy to do. It requires an expensive pulverizer and a lot of energy. Once it’s been pulverized, the most obvious use for the glass is in cement or asphalt. It works, but it can’t compete with gravel or other commercial aggregates in terms of cost or availability. There are other uses for pulverized glass—for example, i.e. Recycling briefly partnered with a man who used glass to make retaining-wall blocks—but they are generally specialized and don’t provide a large enough market for Missoula’s considerable supply. In the absence of a more substantial local market for cleaned or pulverized glass, people have looked else-
missoulanews.com • August 21–August 28, 2014 [15]