This week a new adventure awaits on "Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown" when season 7 continues with an episode titled, "Montana," that takes place in the gold and silver state. Tony visits a mine, talks with famous writer, Jim Harrison, who has since died and goes on a pheasant hunting trip with TV host, podcaster and comedian Joe Rogan. Bourdain also sits down with local hunters and land owners to discuss the issues of private and public land in an age of new hunting laws.
Anthony's take on Montana
Bourdain says at the start of the show that some people must live in great spaces and where people must bend to the land.
He's with Jim Harrison, who explains that 100 or 200 years ago the land they're standing on wasn't much different. Harrison, a poet, says that time is a mystery that can tip us upside down. Bourdain says that the talking bobblehead politicians on television want us to think that America is devolving into a burning moronic inferno. They also want us to question the greatness of our nation. Bourdain insists that you should come to Montana and see for yourself that this just isn't the case. Tony goes on to say that Montana is full of the purple mountains of majesty and is the destination that dreamers spoke about when formulating the American experience. Tony calls Montana one of the most beautiful places on earth.
It's certainly an entirely different landscape than two weeks ago when Bourdain visited Chicago.
Private land and hunting laws
Tony asks the big questions about who owns the land in Montana and who gets to use it. Tony meets with Bill Galt, who owns 100,000 acres in Montana of prime hunting and fishing land. Some of the best trout fishing on the planet is on Galt's property.
The Stream Access Law Montana passed in 1985 is a topic of discussion as Bourdain sits down to lunch with Bill and a few of his friends. Basically, if you can access a stream on public land you are entitled to use that same stream as it winds through private land, but only if you stay within the ordinary high water mark of the stream.
Bill asks the question of where the line should be drawn for private property, but his friends support the spirit of the law and politely disagree with his notion that private property should be entirely private in the matter of a river or stream. Galt says the spirit of the law is thievery.
Bourdain explores the mining culture
For 70 years the mining in Montana was hard rock mining, which requires digging deep into the ground with explosives. However, Bourdain explains that by the 1950's the mining moved above ground. The open pit mining operations meant fewer jobs for locals and a more visible footprint in the community. One such operation, the Berkeley pit, was the biggest copper mine in the world by 1955 and it eventually consumed all of the small towns that encompassed it.
When it was eventually flooded in 1983 with 30 billion gallons of water, it turned into a caustic and dangerous pool of sulfuric acid as all of the mine tailings and mineral refuse contaminated the pit. Tony said it was a monument to the greed and exploitation of the earth and at the same time tragically beautiful.
