Welcome back to the work week, Flathead Valley. In case you found yourself on the fringe of last Monday’s newsletter, where my coworker Lauren broke down her experience at Under the Big Sky festival, maybe this newsletter is for you. On the east side of the Continental Divide this past weekend, tucked between the aspen groves and rolling hills of Red Eagle Campground on Blackfeet tribal lands, heads banged to an entirely different genre of music as a darker form of revelry took place.
If you’ll allow me, Zoë Buhrmaster here to attempt another articulation of what it’s like to experience Fire on the Mountains, a decade-old heavy music festival, as it stands reborn with its collaboration with the Firekeeper Alliance, a nonprofit force targeting suicide prevention and mental wellness within the Blackfeet Nation. The tribe hosted the festival for the first time last year, an overwhelming success that allegedly received zero negative feedback via Facebook – a feat if there ever was one. To boot, it was also the festival’s first year as a dry event, sans alcohol.
This year, Thursday’s grand entry procession and powwow put on by Blackfeet community members welcomed attendees, followed by a showcase of local artists, including high school bands from Browning and the slightly more seasoned Radiation Candle and Senterline. Friday morning the workshops began – a selection of Indigenous- and music-centered panels participants tuned into while wading in Lower Two Medicine Lake or lounging in the grass, put on by the Firekeeper Alliance. Artists took to the stage mid-afternoon.
The draw of the people, the place, and the purpose behind the festival feels strong enough to pull anyone in. That much is true for the multiple bands who showed up to Red Eagle Campground for their only U.S. performance of the year, including grindcore band Full of Hell, black and folk metal Gallowbraid, and Norwegian progressive metal band Borknagar.
More than that, the festival served as a reunion for several bands. Gothic country band 16 Horsepower performed together for the first time in over two decades, chamber-doom collective SubRosa (pictured above) returned to the stage after a seven-year hiatus, and post-metal groundbreaking band Neurosis (pictured below) reunited under a smokey blood-colored moon, performing their new album, “An Undying Love for a Burning World.”
Introducing Neurosis, whose lead singer Steve Von Till also serves on the Firekeeper Alliance board, Firekeeper Alliance Director Charlie Speicher homed in on the nonprofit’s mission and relationship to heavy music.
“We know that predicting suicide is incredibly difficult,” he said looking out on the crowd. “Traditional western approaches have often focused on identifying who is most at risk. Compassionately accessing that risk is important and it always will be. But at Firekeeper Alliance, we believe it is equally, if not more important, to ask a different question. What keeps people here? What reminds us that we belong?
“The answers to those questions are called protective factors, and they are found in our families and our culture and our language, ceremonies, our friendships,” he continued. “And they’re found in places like this.”
Creston School Enrolling Students for Seventh and Eighth Grades
The state’s Board of Public Education approved the school’s provisional accreditation, which means Creston falls in line with the Office of Public Instruction’s standards as it begins its first year as a K-8 school, instead of a K-6
For nearly a century, Glacier and Waterton have shared a connection beyond borders. The National Park Service’s new non-resident fee policy might represent a turning point.
City of Whitefish Releases Draft of 2026 Community Wildfire Protection Plan
Community members have until Aug. 2 to review and leave comments on the document, which identifies wildfire hazards and recommendations to reduce wildfire risk in the city.
A modern craftsman on Flathead Lake’s north shore in Somers; a private wooded retreat on 5 acres in Olney; and a one-of-a-kind creekside cabin in Columbia Falls
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