On May 25th, 2017 at 12:30pm, we walked around the town of Livingston, Montana. Our first impression of Livingston was that it was a similar size to Gardiner. However, we overheard people talking on the street about the overpopulation in Livingston so we looked up how much bigger it is. Gardiner has a population of 875 people, while Livingston has a population of 7,044 people. This was very surprising to us because Livingston did not feel much bigger than Gardiner. The town had an old-timey feel because of the state of the buildings and some of the structures in town. We also noticed that the shops throughout town all had art that revolved around trout. We really liked the art because our group is studying trout, but we didn’t understand why it was all over. Our guess is that Livingston is a big fishing town, but we didn’t have a chance to ask anyone.
Our group had our oral history interview in Livingston, so we did not have more than 20 minutes to explore the town unfortunately. However, we did our interview with Orville Bach who has been a season ranger for 43 years. Before the interview, we told him that our issue was about the lake trout and cutthroat trout issue and he was very interested in what we had learned already. During the interview, he then told us that the introduction of the lake trout was one of the worst things he had seen happen to the park in his time as a ranger. He strongly supports the repopulation of cutthroat trout, which was fascinating because he has worked in the park for so long and his view is still in line with all of the younger people we have talked to while on this trip.
Livingston was definitely a very interesting little town and we learned a lot during our short stay there. Whether it was just roaming the streets of Livingston while we had a little bit of spare time, or having our interview with Orville, there was definitely a lot learned. However, we wish that we would have had more time to explore the town and hope that sometime in the future we will be able to go back and visit Livingston. Our interview with Orville definitely helps us out with our stewardship and other insights into the park.
To view pictures of our short journey through Livingston, click the link below!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kzkwqtrkvPh8u-Mu-4ncBf2L2mBM13rZR_90OexnRfs/edit?usp=sharing
#LakeTroutOut
Landscape? The images were not tied to the text. If you are not going to integrate them into the text then you need to use headers to explain how they tie in.