Small world

K.J. HASCALL / Hungry Horse News

As I've mentioned before, I grew up in Colorado and was educated in Nebraska. So Montana was the last place I imagined I'd find family. Last summer, Mike Hascall contacted me. He wrote in an e-mail that he thought we might be related. We share an unusual spelling of an uncommon last name after all.

Turns out he was right. My great-great grandfather and his great-grandfather were brothers. They farmed across the road from each other near the small western Nebraska town of Bridgeport.

So here we are, living in the same town in western Montana. He came here by way of Oregon. Small world.

Thursday night, we finally met for the first time at the Back Room restaurant. Shawn and I were also privileged to meet his lovely wife, Sue, and daughter, Beth. Following dinner, we went to the Columbians concert. Beth is a former Columbian. She is a talented pianist and flutist.

I thoroughly enjoyed the concert. I am a huge fan of jazz music. I am also a huge fan of equipping students with great musical skills. There are a number of young musicians in the Columbians who are going far.

My favorite musical numbers during the show were "Haitian Fight Song" by Charles Mingus, "Getaway" (I'm a shameless Earth, Wind & Fire fan), Woody Herman's "Pontieo" and "Cry Me a River" by Arthur Hamilton. I was blown away by Laura Burgess' singing abilities on the latter number. Band geek and soloist are not often hand-in-hand. The community of Columbia Falls High School has much to be proud of.

SUNDAY, friends and yours truly embarked on the promised return hike to Logging Lake. And you won't believe what happened.

After the necessary stop at the Polebridge Mercantile for a huckleberry turnover — owner Stuart wryly noted that my fiance and I are becoming 'North Fork groupies' — we set out for the hike.

All along the trail, the six of us joked about encountering bears and about making the headlines ourselves (all of us work at area newspapers' because we'd become snacks for Yogi and company. We also talked about the flora we saw — several new flowers have popped up since last week's excursion, including tiny blue flax, paintbrush, even more Glacier lilies, salsify and trillium.

We passed through the woods, around the burn, moved back into the woods and again we began seeing copious amounts of bear scat.

This can't be happening, I thought to myself.

Again, I started singing, though several friends joined me in the noise-making this time. No one else knew the lyrics to "Have a Cuppa Tea," so we made do with a tune everyone knows since about age 8: "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall."

We made it to 86 bottles of beer on the wall when we saw the bear. Pretty sure it's the same one as last week. It stood up on two feet to have a better look at our group, then lowered itself down and waddled along the trail at a glacial pace. Did I mention this was the exact same spot where we saw Boo Boo last week?

"What do we do?" one member of the group asked.

"Go around it, throw rocks at it, yell louder," I suggested.

Miss Logging Lake a second time? Lame.

Seeing that the black bear wasn't too interested in us humans (except for blocking our path), a number of people in our party whipped out cameras and proceeded to snap away for several minutes. The bear moved about three feet.

No amount of cajoling could force the bear into the brush or make it deviate from its path.

"I don't think it's feeling well," suggested one friend, warily eyeing a sizable pile of scat.

In the end, I was overruled. We turned around and it's a good thing too, or we would have been caught in the rain/snow shower that swept the area not long after.

So I guess we'll make yet another trek to Logging Lake at some point, though we plan to change the hour at which we arrive to avoid the bear doing its rounds. Until then, the bear appears to wear the pants in this relationship.