Joseph Grady is very proud of his home. Spacious, tidy and decorated with his own colorful artwork, the ground-floor apartment is a perfect place for Grady, a single parent, to raise his young son. And it is conveniently located right below his former recovery home, Next Step Housing, the place that helped him overcome the alcoholism that two years ago left him with nowhere else to go. It took a while to get here.

Diana Bowen watched from across the street as bright orange flames engulfed the house next to hers. But instead of acting nervous or afraid, Bowen stood calmly alongside other spectators as more than a dozen firefighters from the Missoula Fire Department worked to control the blaze. The burning home at 1803 Cooper St. was the subject of a live fire exercise Thursday morning, and the controlled burn caused a dark cloud of smoke curling into the blue sky, attracting neighbors to the scene.

It’s early in the morning as we step onto the trail from Glacier National Park’s Going-to-the-Sun Road. The air is crisp, the sky blue, a few clouds float past the park’s peaks above. The creek rushes under the road before cascading down a steep forested incline. And our car is about 14 miles away. Call it an incentive. The drop-off location at the Siyeh Bend trailhead was my introduction to Glacier National Park’s shuttle system last summer.

Give me an L! Give me an M! Give me a town in Montana, or the rural West for that matter, and I’ll give you a hillside letter! “These letters really are the heart and soul of so many communities,” said Evelyn Corning, who wrote “Hillside Letters A to Z” for Missoula’s Mountain Press Publishing Co. “For so many of us, our hometown just wouldn’t be the same without that letter up on the hill.”

Morgan Valliant, who oversees Missoula's fight against noxious weeds, sifted through the ashes, soil and plants on Mount Sentinel's charred western slope Tuesday. It was his first visit since last week's 390-acre grass fire on the mountainside, which is to be reseeded with native prairie grasses this fall in a pilot revegetation project by the city, the University of Montana and the Missoula County Weed District.

ARLEE - Johnny Sam had to make a choice between driving 408 miles to sing and dance at a powwow in Montana or staying home and saving gas. “It's pretty hard these days,” said Sam who lives in White Swan, Wash. “The drum takes care of our gas money. If we get any money dancing, that's more fun. This summer we almost stayed home, but my mother-in-law lives over here.

High prices and low income rates are making it impossible to survive. What can we do?

Missoula staked out ringside seats Wednesday night as ground crews and a water-dropping helicopter converged on Mount Sentinel to prevent a 300-acre grass fire from spreading into thick timber. But the fire did not easily give up its march across the hillside. At midnight, about 30 firefighters were working up the fire's flanks, digging line in an effort to pinch flames off at the top of Sentinel, expecting to stay on the mountain until dawn.

Crews were close Thursday evening to buttoning up a 390-acre wildfire that charred Mount Sentinel's western slope, but firefighters continued to dry-mop hot spots that smoldered in heavy timber near the mountaintop. “Yay! We're all so happy,” said Cindy Super, fire prevention coordinator and information officer for the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation. “Things are definitely lying down, and we're very optimistic. We've accomplished everything we wanted to this morning and afternoon.”

With his spiky blonde hair, dark tan and shades, Kevin Robinson looks like a California surfer. But the 31-year-old hails from the flatlands of Illinois and has lived no closer to the Pacific Ocean than mountainous Missoula. Still, when a shirtless Robinson peddled up to Brennan’s Wave recently with a surfboard strapped to his cruiser, he looked the part.