Bill Muhlenfeld is owner and publisher of Distinctly Montana magazine and other publications. He lives in Bozeman with his partner, Anthea, and always finds time to enjoy the great outdoors, when he is not writing about it.... 

There are many stars in Montana.

No, I’m not talking about Jeff Bridges, Andie McDowell, David Letterman, Phil Jackson or Ted Turner. They are mere stars of the moment, flashes of fleshy brilliance in the bottomless void of space and time. The stars I speak of are those in Montana’s night sky, where they mingle with other, nearer bright objects—the moon, Venus, Jupiter and the like. These are, perhaps, also just flashes against a backdrop of infinity; but in human terms they hold permanence and marvel.

Upwards of 70% or more of the U.S. population cannot see the night sky, the very same heavens that we in Montana can enjoy every clear and cloudless night. There are most definitely exceptions. When standing outdoors one side of my home the sky is brilliant, magical, the Milky Way curling its smokiness though the dark pitch of eternity. On the other side of my home the nearby city’s lights refract in an unearthly glow, and the stars cower from dimness to invisibility. I sometimes wonder if the people living in town venture out just a few miles to view the night sky, or if they are part of that unknowing 70%.

Does it matter? Well, I think yes. It is a powerful reminder of life’s connectedness, our insignificance, and the impossible brevity of our own existence, individually, and as a species. My own life takes on a different shade of being when I take time to notice Montana’s night sky, which makes me wonder if others experience the same thing, and if we all wouldn’t be much better off if the world just turned off all its lights at night.

Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

Repeatedly stifled in efforts to transplant bighorn sheep in new locations in Montana over the past few years, the state’s wildlife commission chairman said it may be time to rethink the state’s conservation strategy for the popular big game species.

“I guess what I’m hearing is we don’t have any place in Montana to place sheep,” said Dan Vermillion, Fish and Wildlife Commission chairman, at the group’s last meeting.

“Not with the criteria we’ve established,” said John Vore, FWP’s game management bureau chief. “Much of our historic sheep habitat didn’t have domestic sheep.”

Vore said recently that he’s preparing a presentation for the commission that outlines the criteria for where sheep can be established and places that the department has already looked at that don’t meet those guidelines.

“We keep looking at areas, and we’ve looked at many, many,” he said.

Under the state’s conservation plan – adopted in 2010 – FWP set a goal of creating five new huntable populations of bighorn sheep in the state by 2022. Yet time and again the department’s attempts to transplant wild sheep have been thwarted.

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