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[clhw AT InfoAve.Net (clhw)]

I can't tell much from the pictures.
Is it brown and little vegetation or what at Livermore? What state is
Livermore in? Why do you keep using it as some sort of example?

There were a few things I decided I wouldn't be able to overcome if we
tried to move to Montana:
Lack of trees was the first one. One of the ranches we looked at, gorgeous
property, 640 acres, had 2 trees. I look out any window of my house here
and see hundreds. The greenry is generally healing and since many of what I
see are evergreen, we get the greenry year-round.

Second, lack of porches. I understand the potential snow load but there is
something friendly about houses with porches where "stoops" or the New
England look of only a couple of steps to the front door is downright
unfriendly to this southern gal.

The third drawback was everyone using natural gas for heat and heating
their building to suffocation levels. I react very negatively to natural
gas fumes so for about 9 months of the year, I couldn't go to motels,
hotels, other people's homes, restaurants, etc., in Montana.

The fourth drawback was the economics. I mean $12,000 per year taxes in
Montana is horrid. $11,000 of that was for water rights, which are free
here. Along with that was restrictions on hunting and woodgathering.

The fifth drawback, really a surprise to me, was the racial problems. I
heard several Montana realtors using very offensive words about the black
population here in the south and how thankful they were that they didn't
have such. And the Native Americans we camped among were very racially
anti-non-Native American. Though I have Choctaw ancestors, I look more like
my Scotch-Irish ancestors and even the children there were not nice unless
we were in the middle of handing them money (like taking their picture,
which we didn't do but once or twice).

The air in Montana was great. I spent the majority of my first 8 years of
life in Austin, Texas, where we had water oaks, pecans, mesquites, and
green grass, but western humidity, or lack of it. When we moved to Atlanta,
I thought I would die of the high humidity. Now I'm used to it and would
have trouble again to move to a try climate. We talk of low humidity here
when it gets below about 40%. My friend in New Mexico thinks it is horridly
humid when it reaches 10% where she lives.

I know there is a small lake about 5 miles from us (site of the county's
only hydroelectric plant) where rain clouds form. One year of drought, they
went over us and dumped about 15 miles away. That place showed normal
rainfall while we were in drought conditions. Of course, it was the year
that a local biologist and I planted 150 tomato plants! But, you do need to
look at individual properties. Whatever the ASCS agency is now named, they
used to have records on specific farmlands which were registered with them.
I don't know if this is still available. The figures I cited are generally
for this part of the state. And the Montana ones I cited were for the land
around Lake Flathead.

>And of course, nothing can be gained from looking at the numbers for a
>specific property.  You meant to say that differences between individual
>properties can be enormous.
>
>If your pasture looked like the picture of Livermore in July, would you
>love it same?
>
>Bill