Dear Friends,
I hope 2021 will be a better year for the museum and for all of us. With Jo’s hard work and all the ones that pitched in to help, the museum made it through a difficult year in pretty good shape despite the Covid-19. The winter here on the ranch has been mostly uneventful. Some real cold then warm weather not much snow, but some hard winds that took down some big trees. The bears are of course asleep, but we are overrun with deer and coyotes. The coyotes come by every day checking for barn cats, and they manage to get one every so often. I went to the barn a while back, and as I opened the door; I heard a lot of noise upstairs. I hurried up the stairs, and as I got to the top, I saw two stray dogs after the cats. My favorite cat, Patches made a run for the stack of hay bales, but they caught her just as she got there. I was running and hollering, but she was dead before I could stop them. I was trying to kick them, but I’m too old and slow. They got back downstairs and jumped through the window where they came in. They also killed my big brave black tom who had stood up to a coyote a couple weeks before. Through out the years the stray dog packs have killed way more pets and livestock than the bears and wild predators.
We have had two bad wind storms hit the ranch this past year, and it’s kept me busy cleaning up the downed trees. It 
took some big 200-year-old pine trees, and many smaller trees mostly spruce. I salvaged all that I could and sent them to Stoltze mill near Columbia Falls Montana.
