Amazing.
It’s an exhaustively used verb, uttered with such irreverent profusion that it has been relegated to the ranks of banality, its eye-popping significance diminished with each gratuitous application, whether we’re denoting a sale at a shopping mall, a sunset or the quality of a quiche.
A Google search of the word returns 1.6 billion results in 0.33 seconds, which, in itself, is actually pretty amazing.
But how do you hashtag a phenomenon that is so uniquely individual, subject to such a broad and diverse range of interpretations, no less profound now as when we were children, and vice-a-versa?
Those are questions we didn’t bother asking while researching our second annual “Amazing Issue” because, well, we didn’t have to.
Just because it’s impossible to linguistically quantify our astonishment in a single word or phrase or emoji does not cheapen the procession of breathtaking moments that pepper our lives and characterizes the human experience.
That quiche, after all, was pretty darn good, the sunset especially brilliant, those heels a real steal of a deal.
We live on an amazing planet, populated with people who accomplish remarkable feats every day, on a landscape defined by geologic wonders carved out by time, alongside critters whose furry constitutionals defy reason. There are smells and tastes and touches. We divine powerful, immeasurable emotions based on how we relate to one another and through the stories and experiences we share.
The Flathead Valley’s streak of Herculean figures and astonishing features runs as deep as its glacier-hewn lakes, moraines and mountain valleys, as rich as its history and as resolute as its residents.
It is home to Glacier National Park and Flathead Lake, to tribes of super-athletes and super-moms, a place of unrivaled engineering feats like the Going-to-the-Sun Road, Hungry Horse Dam and the Great Northern Railway, the stomping ground for a suite of species whose members criss-cross the wild, untamed habitat much as they did centuries ago – climbing over mountains and traversing great wilderness expanses.
We live here and among them, we map and explore, we quantify and question. But at the end of the day, the missing puzzle-pieces and data gaps leave us mesmerized, yearning for more. Our capacity for astonishment is endless, our desire to push further quenchless.
These vignettes of amazing accomplishments provide a glimpse of the awe-inspiring wonders that surround us, captured here not to offer a definitive catalog or to attempt to rank these facts, feats and figures nor to measure their importance, but to remind us that they’re boundless and ubiquitous.
A comet streaking across the night sky is never a lack-luster moment, and in this issue we follow a few of those stars as they make their way through our universe.
The Bobbing Bruin
How a grizzly bear spent one summer’s holiday weekend island hopping on Flathead Lake
By Tristan Scott
It was Labor Day weekend when the so-called Lakeside Female dipped a paw in the tepid west shore waters of Flathead Lake near Rollins and decided to go for a swim.
Grizzly bears aren’t afraid to get wet, and their webbed paws make them more than proficient swimmers, but usually they’re chasing chum rather than swimming laps for pleasure.
Hiking the Triple Crown
Columbia Falls woman hopes to conquer the Continental Divide Trail over the summer, having already hiked the Appalachian and Pacific Crest trails
By Molly Priddy
On April 21, Shayla Paradeis will start hiking in New Mexico with the goal of getting back here. It would be easier, one might say, to instead just drive from her Columbia Falls home to hike in Glacier, but Paradeis is hell-bent on taking the long way: 3,100 miles, from the Mexican border to the Waterton-Glacier border.
Building Northwest Montana
From Going-to-the-Sun Road to the Great Northern Railway, Northwest Montana is home to some of the state’s most impressive infrastructure projects
By Justin Franz
They hold back millions of gallons of water, take us to breathtakingly scenic vistas and helped establish the Flathead Valley as the economic center of Northwest Montana.
They are some of the region’s most amazing engineering feats and even though some were built more than a century ago, these infrastructure wonders still serve us today, providing water, electricity and transportation to the masses. Today, these projects – the Going-to-the-Sun Road, Hungry Horse Dam and the Great Northern Railway – stand as sentinels to a time when people tackled massive undertakings and accomplished amazing things.
Amazing Mom
Working two jobs to support her family and raising awareness about Down Syndrome, Corinne Bludworth of Whitefish has earned the distinction of Montana’s Mother of the Year
By Dillon Tabish
Last week, amid a hectic schedule working two jobs to support her family in Whitefish, Corinne Bludworth dropped everything and rushed to the hospital.
Corinne’s 25-year-old daughter, Jordan, who has Down syndrome, had suffered her second stroke, the result of a rare cerebrovascular disorder called Moyamoya disease. She was released from the hospital but remains prone to more strokes until doctors can perform surgery to try to remove the blocked arteries causing the interruption in her blood supply.