Moving daughter #1 into dorm at BHSU moves father

Moving Daughter #1 into the dorm at Black Hills State University ended up being a blast rather than the drudgery that was expected. The fire marshal, however, would have been horrified. A police presence was nowhere to be had as an unsteady stream of grimacing parents and young adults grunted various articles of campus survival through a single door and up stairs. It was a fascinating look into the intersection of liberal arts communitarianism with mostly white sod busters, coal miners and oilfield trash accustomed to control engaging with their progeny as we melted into cooperation.

She is looking forward to her father showing her the lesser-known niches in the Northern Hills that remind some people entering college how the Black Hills is sacred living rock that makes water. She will also see how it is being laid waste by mountaintop-removal mining and retirees from somewhere else building crap as cathedrals to themselves in her climate-stressed human-altered pine monoculture.

One frustration was the amount of cardboard residual from the extravaganza with nowhere to go because Spearditch abandoned its recycling program a number of years ago: it's a town now entertaining the erection of a ceement jayzus and the annexation of Upper and Lower Valley.

Lunch at the Bay Leaf Cafe was perfect, so was the Eleventh Hour IPA being canned locally by Crow Peak Brewing Company although the Porter was a little too syrupy for this taste.

There has been a considerable amount of flap over the US Fish and Wildlife Service move to close the DC Booth Hatchery in Spearditch, especially when facility is well-supported by tourists and locals alike. But, it's hard to imagine the Service continuing to support the raising of hybrid and non-native trout when native species are being threatened in the Missouri River basin.

It is said that trout are not native to the Hills: how that can be remains a mystery as cutthroat lived in the Platte to the south and Powder to the north. One explanation might be the concentrations of dissolved metals in the local hydrology. There is no evidence of native trout in the Little Missouri flowing north out of the Wyoming sage steppe, either. As the Black Hills has never been glaciated, the continual use of fire on the Black Hills by human inhabitants for the last ten thousand years may have rendered ancient fisheries unable to sustain salmonids: perhaps those factors combined.

It's the opinion of this interested party that USFWS should block releasing these fish into any part of the system but preventing the community to find a way to finance rearing for private ponds would be unthinkable.

The Belle Fourche Reservoir (to the locals, it's Orman Dam) has been bivouac for most of the last week as the wind cooled by the lake beats the hell out of triple digits being experienced by those toiling under the grid.