SAN ANTONIO – After 23 years on the run, a man wanted for murder in Montana has been arrested near San Antonio. Robert Chickene is accused of shooting and killing his girlfriend, Paula Rodriguez, near Missoula, Mont., in 1985 and dumping her body on the outskirts of Missoula, Missoula County Sheriff’s Detective Scott Newell said. […]

State officials describe a proposed sewage application site near Bigfork as “excellent,” but the plan has drawn the ire of nearby landowners who say the thousands of gallons of waste dumped there annually will ruin their neighborhood. About 30 Bigfork-area residents crowded last week’s meeting of the Flathead County-City Health Board, petitioning the board to […]

Nearly 40 years before the Wilderness Act passed legislation, a rancher from Fortine envisioned a wilderness half the size of Glacier Park at the north end of the Whitefish Range. Winton Weydemeyer’s dream never came to pass. Today, the Montana Wilderness Association has proposed protection for a smaller parcel of Weydemeyer’s vision—171,000 acres encompassing the […]

I am a confessed carbohydrate addict – “carboholic,” if you will. I can’t get enough bread, cake, rolls, doughnuts, crackers, pretzels – if it’s made with flour, I like it. In addition to cooking, I love to bake. But when it comes to bread, sometimes I just don’t have the patience that yeast breads demand. […]

Kayla Carlson, 16, has a certificate that reads “Queen of the Mountain.” “My hardest run was this summer when I went to Clearwater Cross Country camp in Washington,” said Carlson, a junior on the Bigfork High School cross country team. The race ascended for 2 miles straight up a ski slope. The winners were honored […]

MISSOULA – University of Montana budget and accounting officials are working to stave off a projected $675,000 deficit in the Office of Research and Development. The projected deficit is rooted in an overhead account that deals with the portion of federal grants called “indirect costs,” which is money UM receives from granting agencies to pay […]

On an autumn day 10 years ago, long before she was crowned Miss Montana U.S.A. 2009, Misti Vogt approached a deer she had just shot and recalled a popular children’s movie. “I shot Bambi,” Vogt remembers thinking. “And then I had to gut it.” Growing up in the small Montana town of Vaughn as a […]

It’s a long way from Wall Street to Whitefish, but for better or worse the connections these days are closer than you might think. This week’s case in point: Richard Fuld, chairman and CEO of Lehman Brothers, the huge financial firm that went bankrupt this week, is a partner in two major Whitefish-area real estate […]

Shay Smithwick-Hann, Glacier High School’s junior quarterback, understands his role in history. It’s two-fold: guiding the school’s fledgling football program to statewide relevance and carrying on the Flathead Valley’s long tradition of gifted quarterbacks. Like the other Class AA quarterback greats from Kalispell over the past two decades, he has a key ally on the […]

We left our island home for a short cruise in the Canadian Gulf Islands. Before gas costs were $7 a gallon we would push the throttle, headed for similar islands a couple of hundred miles further north or sometimes as far north as Glacier Bay in Alaska. This time we stopped at Saturna Island, which […]

8:07 a.m. A man in Texas thinks his granddaughter’s mom in Columbia Falls is forcing her to drink booze. 11:34 a.m. Garbage flew out of a truck that was driving away from a recycling business. 1:37 p.m. A heap of a car was reportedly parked in a Mission Trail Road driveway. 2:48 p.m. Someone reportedly […]

OMAHA – A survey of bank CEOs in 11 Midwestern and Plains states shows nearly 90 percent strongly opposed a government bailout of Lehman Brothers, which was forced into bankruptcy earlier this week. More than half the bankers surveyed also said they thought mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be privatized. Meanwhile, the […]

HELENA – Fire crews battled 1,000-acre wildfires Friday on opposite ends of the state but no structures were threatened. In eastern Montana, firefighters from Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota are fighting the Line Creek fire in a remote area on the Montana-Wyoming border about 40 miles southwest of Broadus. The fire was reported Wednesday at […]

Good morning and happy International Talk Like a Pirate Day. On the Beacon this morning, local artist Dwayne Harris is drawing the latest Warhammer comic book series, “Crown of Destruction.” Glacier High’s Shay Smithwick-Hann continues the valley’s storied quarterback tradition. While golf’s popularity is declining nationwide, it’s exploding in the Flathead Valley with after-school programs […]

HELENA – Montana’s unemployment rate rose to 4.4 percent in August, up from 4 percent in July, the state Department of Labor and Industry said Friday. Nationally, unemployment in August was 6.1 percent, compared to 5.7 percent the previous month. “Although Montana is still faring better than the rest of the country, this month’s (August’s) […]