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KXXO Mixx 96.1 signed on the air at 7am January 16, 1990. It was locally owned by the same couple for its entire duration. It remained a stand-alone operation all 35+ years, broadcasting from the same downtown Olympia location, never changing its Adult Contemporary format. At the time of the sale, there were 8 employees who had been there from the start. I neglected to mention two key people in this final hour and I regret not including them: Business Manager Adam and Traffic Director/Evening Host Jeff. Both are amazing at their jobs and both had extra work dealing with the sale and wrapping things up in the final weeks (and, unlike the rest of us, still had work to do after the sign-off.)
Below is the audio from Mixx 96’s final hour of broadcasting: 11pm-midnight on October 26, 2025.
Here’s the full hour:
In case there’s a copyright challenge, here’s the final hour with the songs removed:
Tonight (October 26) at 11 a bunch of us are going to hang out in the KXXO studio. We’ll chat, on and off air. Some employees have requested songs. Then at midnight Mixx 96.1 will go out the same way it came in, playing “The Long And Winding Road.” Although, in deference to Sir Paul, we’ll be playing the “Naked” version. Back in 1990 no one knew how much he hated what they’d done to his song.
I’ve written elsewhere about how blown away I’ve been by our audience reaction to the station sale. The last couple weeks have been spent answering the phone, replying to emails, and even answering our doorbell – where I’ve met more than one tearful listener. One day I’m going to compile many of the hundreds of notes we’ve received. So many came with personal stories of how the station impacted their lives. But, I guess the reaction makes sense. We were a 100,000-watt station in a populated area. We spent all 35+ years with the same broad-appeal format. Many personalities stayed for years and years. And we were full-service: news/traffic/weather/local events/school closings, etc. AND…we were warm and personal. No pukers. No egos. (at least not in my era.)
Which leads me to my point. I finally understand that passionate response, as many of our listeners are losing one of their last, real, friends. Oh, we’re real…and VERY real by today’s standards. Our audience skews older. Many of our listeners are at the stage where their friends, relatives, and partners have passed. Their kids have moved miles away. They’re retired and don’t get the social interaction of an office any longer (or they started working from home in 2020 and never returned to an office setting.) Maybe they’re disabled and don’t get out much in general. We’ve been their connection to so many things.
This note was fairly typical of illustrating how KXXO filled in some of the empty spaces in our listener’s lives. Their world, really all of our worlds, is becoming more artificial at an exponential rate. Last week I noticed that ChatGPT is adding erotic features. Meeting real partners in real life is apparently nearly impossible now. Also last week I received a press release announcing the launch of three oxymoronic “hyper-local” AI radio stations. An old friend of mine who I very much respect is highly involved. Read about it here and link through to hear the demos. I’m sorry, but Phoebe is not “a captivating virtual with real talent.” She ‘s not local, much less hyper-local. Again, with all apologies, Dennis (should you read this) these stations are soulless. These robot-powered jukeboxes programmed by MEN in their 70s are destined to fail.
I get it. The landscape today will never support a new version of the live, local, personality-driven station that KXXO was. Although I think that KXXO (with it’s built-in advantages of strong signal and heritage) could have survived for several more years. That’s fine. I’m just happy I was a part of it these past years. What I am lamenting is how detached and artificial our lives are becoming. I urge you to fight it. Support real artists. Support local businesses. Don’t fall for, much less share, AI slop…even if it’s funny in the moment. Touch grass, see a play, watch the Devo documentary, go to your town’s free “Music In The Park” event. Find a radio station with real heart and passion in your community and support it.
Many of us recorded a farewell message to be played in rotation the final two weeks of Mixx 96.1. Here’s mine:
This is our morning team: Lorri & Ty. Ty began his radio career in high school around 1970 and was part of Seattle’s most popular radio team “Charlie & Ty” at KUBE FM in the 80’s. Lorri was hired three years ago with no radio experience and thrown into the morning show Mixx. Her acting background more than made up for her lack of on-air exposure. To say that these two opposites have really jelled is an understatement. One of my very favorite things to do at KXXO is writing and producing our weekly Good Morning Mixx promos designed to spotlight the prizes we’ll be giving away each week. It’s so fun writing for such professional and flexible personalities. I’ve shared audio of some of my favorite weekly promos we’ve created below.
Santana tickets:
Sofie’s Scoops Gelato:
Serial Killers Lecture:
Hey, we can make amateur wrestling tickets in a gym sound fun:
Meghan Trainor tickets:
Tickets to a sunflower farm???
Willie Nelson at the Gorge:
Paula Poundstone:
Ty auditions for a job with the new owners:
And our very final promo…must listen to the end:
I hope you “saw” these scenes as you were listening to them. Ever since the RAB ran their “I Saw It On The Radio” campaign back in the ’80s, I’ve been sort of obsessed with the visual power of radio.
I’m in Missoula a couple days out from the official 20th anniversary celebration of the Trail 103.3 and getting nostalgic about some of the long-surviving stations that I was present in the studio at the moment they signed on.
WROV-FM February 14, 1989.
WROV-AM had existed for decades at 15th and Cleveland in Roanoke. It once ruled the market, but like most AM stations it came upon hard times in the ’80s. I actually worked there (my first commercial radio job!) briefly in 1985. In 1988 new owners bought WROV-AM and an FM station licensed to Martinsville, VA (an hour away) with plans to move the Martinsville signal and operation to Roanoke and run it all from the modest existing facilities. I’ve worked in all sorts of buildings, but none as funky as WROV. Initially a Quonset hut that was dressed up with a false front. Later a small cinder-block “building” was attached to the hut followed later by a small prefab “home” that was constructed adjacent and attached by a small reception area. Finally, when the FM was added so was a double-wide trailer tacked on. Now, that’s funky. WROV-AM already had two perfect people for a new Album-oriented FM station; morning guy Sam Giles and PD Mike Bell. WROV-FM was going to be Roanoke-Lynchburg’s first true rock FM. The rest of the staff was hired and I was set to do middays and be the Music Director. The station signed on the afternoon of Valentine’s Day, 1989. Sam was at the board and I peered in from the hallway because there were TV stations shooting as Sam pushed the start button on the CD cued to Led Zep’s “Rock and Roll.” It really had been a long time waiting for FM rock.
While we were celebrating at the sign-on party that night at the Sheraton Hotel the station went off air due to a technical issue exacerbated by the generator not functioning. We were back on the air by the morning and though the funky home was mercifully razed in 2004 the station is still going strong as Roanoke-Lynchburg’s leading rock radio station 36 years after its debut.
KMMS-FM June 7, 1991
In 1991 Bozeman, MT had two commercial FM stations. One decent top-40 station and one crappy top-40 station. The crappy top-40 station was KUUB, a copycat of Seattle’s KUBE down to the logo, albeit it with a fraction of the talent and promotional budget. In from Denver came Kip and Joan Gilbert who moved to Bozeman to buy their first radio station. Obviously the format would be changed. The call letters were changed to KMMS and “The Moose” was chosen as the slogan and mascot. Bozeman’s first commercial Country format FM was set to debut. Wait, what? Yeah, it was going to be country, but it was gnawing at Kip, who was a huge fan of Denver’s adult-alternative KBCO. Could a similar station succeed in little Bozeman, MT?
Kip flew in consultant Charlie West who was best known as the Program Director who plucked Mark and Brian out of Alabama and put them on KLOS in L.A. Charlie set up in Bozeman’s Main Mall with a clipboard and asked locals what radio format they’d like to hear. Enough expressed interest in some sort of rock format to nudge a very willing Kip to scrap his country music plans. Now he needed a Program Director – in a hurry. Kip hired me over the phone from Roanoke and I was in town in two weeks, leaving behind anything I couldn’t fit into my Mustang. Oh, I shipped out a couple hundred of my CDs just before I left. I arrived Saturday June 1st and we changed the format at 6am on Friday the 7th with the very cliched Rolling Stones “Start Me Up” (not my finest moment) following 24 hours of construction noises interrupted occasionally by an announcer informing that we were busy building a new radio station. KUUB played only carts, they never had a CD player. We grabbed a couple retail CD decks and the engineer wired them into the board. Out of phase. Meaning? Meaning that for roughly 45 minutes we signed on a 100,000-watt karaoke machine. We swapped the cables and the vocals reappeared. We were off and stumbling! I stayed longer this time…14 years in all, bouncing between middays, afternoons, and mornings not to mention a couple of ownership changes and the addition of several other stations to the cluster. I was the General Manager when I left. 34 years later, the Moose is still bringing a very unique blend of adult rock to Bozeman from the very same studio where it all began in 1991.
KDTR Missoula July 2nd 2005
No one plans on signing on a radio station at 9:13 pm on a Saturday, but that’s what we did. More on that a bit later. In 1994 the FCC began to allocate new FM radio licenses through an auction process. Every year or two dozens of new FM allocations would come up for auction. Eventually you could track the bidding online. It was fascinating. There was a time when an FM license was more than just permission to broadcast…it was a license to print money. By 2003 things had cooled a bit and the 2003 FCC auction may have been the last frenzied affair.
My friend Kevin, seen here sorting receipts for stuff purchased towards our build out, had boldly prevailed in the 2003 auction picking up three allocations that would serve Missoula. Never mind that Missoula was approaching radio saturation. We had the (over)confidence of a small python swallowing a large pig.
I left Bozeman to be the manager of the three new Missoula signals that were going to be built from the ground up. I don’t think that anyone, before or since, has signed on three brand new radio stations at once. Well, not exactly at once, but almost exactly two weeks between them. Kevin found office space that would be built out from scratch. We went to the NAB convention in Vegas and spent Kevin’s money like drunken sailors on fancy, digital consoles and transmitters for all three stations. We would be Montana’s first all-digital (HD) operation. I set out to hire sales, office and on-air staff. To say we disrupted the market would be an understatement. We did steal several folks from our established competitors prompting a tense lunch invite a couple months later from two of those managers who reamed me for taking their employees. I told them (in so many words) that it was easy because they had been treated poorly.
There was an incredible amount of speculation and rumor about our pending formats as we were preparing to launch. The stuff I was hearing was either dead on or wildly incorrect and we tried our best to hire people while being vague on exactly what the stations would be. We had long planned our formats – an Adult Album Alternative similar to the Moose in Bozeman, a Soft Adult Contemporary Station and a News/Talk station with primarily Air America programming. Another market competitor was then owned by Clear Channel, who also now owned the Bozeman stations I had just left. They assumed correctly that we’d launch a station similar to the Moose and they also assumed correctly that it would be successful in Missoula. We knew that they knew, and we hurried as fast as possible to build the Trail 103.3 and sign it on first. (in one of my finest creative moments the idea of “The Trail” as a nickname and the Forest Service emblem as a logo came to me months earlier at 1am and I’d gotten out of bed to scribble it down before I forgot)
Clear Channel Missoula had gotten the master song list from The Moose in Bozeman and hired a guy from Ohio to format-flip one of their Missoula stations and beat us to the punch. We were waiting for one final piece of transmitting equipment to arrive and they beat us by two days. I was beside myself. However my disappointment quickly turned to joy as I listened and realized how poorly they had botched their attempt at the AAA format. Good God, they signed on a soulless, horribly programmed station and I knew we were going to clean their clock. Our final piece of equipment arrived and Kevin went to the mountain to install it. Scott Hawk (pictured above one minute after sign on) and I were in the still unfinished studio waiting for his signal. Shortly after 9pm Kevin called and said he was turning on the transmitter and we could soon hit the music. I had not even planned what the first song would be. I sorted the available tunes by artist and scrolled the mouse through the list. John Lennon’s “Mind Games” jumped out. There had been so many rumors and so much commotion in the market leading up to this moment. And yes, I even believe there were spies (!!) who “applied” for jobs with us but who were really fishing for info for their employers. “Mind Games” seemed like a perfect last minute choice. I moved the mouse and clicked “play” at 9:13pm. I wish I could say that it was “happy ever after.” In a sense it was, but there were clouds on the horizon. That’s a subject for a future blog. The Trail survived that storm and others and remains strong, and truthfully, beloved 20 years later. It’s THE station with the most of my DNA.
Jackie got me a camera for my birthday. It’s fancy and I’m still learning more about it. But I know how to take the lens cap off and set it to shoot on “auto” just fine. Jump in, click a photo to launch the slideshow.
That new restaurant you’ve been reading about on social media…the streaming series finale that you’ve followed faithfully for three seasons…the new album from that band you loved back in the day. How often does reality meet our expectations? Maybe half of the time, if you’re lucky. This week I traveled 2,700 miles (one way) to attend the 75th reunion of my college radio station. I’ve never attended a high school reunion, nor have I wanted to. A few of us did get together pretty casually 5 or 6 years ago in Washington, D.C., but this reunion was BIG. It was in the works for nearly a year. It was aimed at a wide audience, hyped and promoted. It seemed that a fair amount of folks were coming and that a large percentage were from “my” period at the station: the early-mid ’80s. I had high expectations… and they were exceeded.
WUVT is the student radio station at Virginia Tech. It’s more powerful than most student stations. It’s more autonomous than a lot of student radio stations. I’d like to think it’s more respected than a lot of student stations. It’s still actually transmitting wattage out of a transmitter and into an antenna, unlike a lot of student stations who’ve just decided to save on the power bill and go 100% streaming.
I joined up shortly after I arrived on campus in the fall of 1981. I started in news because the news department had the shortest line when I attended the organizational meeting. I began doing Virginia Tech baseball play by play because I loved it and one of the guys who was doing the announcing didn’t want anything to do with the actual setting up and tearing down of the equipment or the study and planning that went into a broadcast. I became the Chief Engineer in my second year because all the previous engineers moved on and I was an engineering student and because no one else wanted the job. That’s me in 1983.
Our reunion was so well attended. There were dozens of friends I had not seen for 35-40 years. I met some people who came along just before or just after I did and they were able to add a lot of context to those adjacent years. I’m amazed (yet not surprised) at the holes that have developed in my memory over the years, so for me the best thing of all was having folks fill me in on key events that I wasn’t remembering completely . For example, I was pretty sure that the new BE transmitter arrived in Spring of 1984.
I was also pretty sure that I had withdrawn from Tech that quarter and went home after my father had been given just a few months to live. When I read this note that I’d written to Dave Everett (he SAVED it!) it finally became clear. “I’ll be in my old room…” I must have returned to Tech during the week of the install and slept in my “vacated” dorm room. Not that there was much sleeping that week. Our radio generations are measured in transmitter lives. The transmitter I helped install in 1984 to replace the failing 1950’s-vintage RCA was failing by the aughts, and its replacement is beginning to fail today.
I left WUVT in 1985 and spent 31 of the following 38 years working in radio. I made lifelong friends at WUVT. It was there I learned how to work as a team. I learned how to respect and work with people who were different than me. I learned how to do more with less. I learned how to write proposals. I learned a lot about music and sportscasting and engineering. I learned a lot about radio. I learned a lot about me. My strengths and my weaknesses. And this weekend I learned all over again just how much it all meant to me.
Thanks WUVT, thanks Virginia Tech. You filled my cup. What a special place this is. It was great to see each and every one of you this weekend.
Things have their cycles, I guess. Sports dynasties, restaurants, celebrity staying power, fashion, and lots more. Dynasties end due to changing technology, changing tastes, old age, or occasionally by choice. Some things just run their course while others die from a lack of attention and nurture. Usually it’s a combination of things. This story is about something cool that died and how I contributed to that death.
@StroeJummer is a Montana photographer I follow on Twitter for his political thoughts and his beautiful photos. I gather that he pays his bills by photographing homes for sale for realtors and fills his cup and his tip jar by shooting unique Montana scenery, wildlife and places. A couple weeks ago I immediately stopped scrolling when I saw this amazing photo he posted…
It’s the 1947 Art Deco home of AM 1340, KPRK, on the banks of the Yellowstone River in Livingston, Montana. In 30+ years in radio I’ve worked in Quonset huts, double-wides, windowless administration buildings, and a couple pretty swanky modern office spaces. But KPRK was the coolest place to ever regularly originate modulated music and information. In 1995 KPRK was owned by the Holter family who had decades of success owning a handful of small town Montana stations and super-serving those communities. They had a full-time, live airstaff, one and one-half news people, and covered a LOT of Park High sporting events live. The mid-morning Swap Shop show was appointment listening – they even let you call in live to personally describe your old mattress, grill, Ford pickup, or goat that you were peddling. That was the year that a mutual friend set me up with my (future) wife Jackie…who happened to be the one-half member of the news staff referenced above. I was working 20 miles away in Bozeman at the time. Working for a slightly larger Mom and Pop radio operation.
In a few years my Mom & Pop station was sold to a regional aggregator of radio signals. Mom & Pop moved on and I was promoted to station manager. The regional radio aggregator also bought KPRK – not because they wanted it, but because the Holters had managed to also obtain a new Construction Permit (FCC license) for an FM station licensed to Livingston. KPRK and what would soon become KXLB 100.7 FM were added to our Bozeman “cluster” of stations and now I was the boss of 5 signals (though KXLB would never be operated out of Livingston.) Poor KPRK became the 5th (honestly the 6th behind the elusive NTR*) priority in our group. I mean, I couldn’t even really receive the station in Bozeman. Pretty soon the regional radio aggregator sold off their hundred or so stations to THE national radio aggregator. The national radio aggregator was in 49 states, but not Montana, so this sale gave them a nice opening line for their press release announcing the acquisition.
Look at the above picture again. I see the past, present, and future in that shot. The sign at the right proudly announcing KPRK’s inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places only slightly diminishes the harshness of the decay that is evident. Oh, there’s still audio coming out of the tower in the background, but it originates from KMMS-AM in Bozeman…which, actually, hardly originates anything, rather surviving on satellite-delivered right-wing vengeance talk served up by syndicators and (now further) relayed one final hop over the mountain pass to Livingston. When I left Bozeman in 2005 there was already corporate pressure to turn out the lights, free the final few Livingston-based humans of any responsibility and simulcast KPRK. And despite some earnest, Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney efforts to buy KPRK and put on a local show, that was never happening. In fact, when I suggested to my Regional VP that we really should sell KPRK for the benefit of all involved, I was admonished: “We are in the business of buying stations, not selling them.” (This is the same company that now regularly just turns in AM radio licenses back to the FCC.)
I get it. Honestly, I. Get. It. There’s really no place for a 1,000-watt AM station in a 10,000 person town in 2022. However (for those who don’t know) Livingston is pretty unique and extremely artsy. Imagine if they had managed to obtain a 10-watt FM translator and rebroadcast KPRK-AM on the FM band (as is a common practice today to save AM stations). And imagine if the cool, old art-Deco building had been re-imagined as some sort of artsy co-op place where a dozen of Livingston’s creators could affordably rent a small place to make their jewelry, write their novels or design their dwellings…all while keeping that one studio operational for the locals to take 2-hour turns playing their music, or preaching their gospel, or announcing their high school sports clashes to the community. That could have worked.
What a location! (see the tower?) And neither photo shows the backdrop of the Absaroka Mountains across the river to the south. I can still remember one of the DJs there telling me how he used to walk out back and fish for a few minutes before his shift started (or even during Paul Harvey). And I laughed this week when my wife reminded me how back in the 90s the boss used to leave her notes reminding her to (illegally) turn up the power at night while she engineered the basketball and football play by play.
“We” owned it, didn’t appreciate it, and chose to let it wither and die. Sigh. I however did buy a print of the photo from @StroeJummer.
2025 UPDATE: The station is now locally owned (currently dark) and the building is being raised (above potential flood waters) and renovated. Programming will hopefully resume in 2026. Follow KPRK on Instagram to keep up on their progress.
* NTR = Non Traditional Revenue… and was a corporate priority back before national radio aggregators shifted to trying to make extra money from their radio station websites. For a while there radio managers were encouraged to make extra money in any way possible. Put on a show! Sell the naming rights to your studio (broadcasting from the Les Schwab Tires studio….while the station down the hall was broadcasting from the Stockman’s Bank Studio) or maybe lease your AM tower site to a farmer to grow hay (not even kidding)
It was (roughly) 20 years ago today…I got up at oh dark thirty and drove through the snow 35 miles to the airport to catch the early Delta flight from Bozeman to SLC. From there it was on to Atlanta. Then finally, the coach, his assistant, a trainer, 18 teen hockey players and their play-by-play guy (me) would take a bus into and clear across Alabama before finally ending our day in Tupelo, Mississippi, the birthplace of Elvis Aaron Presley and the host city of a three game series between one of the best Junior Hockey squads and one of the worst teams in the history of team sports.
Roughly six months prior I had read on a primitive internet hockey message board that the Tupelo T-Rex would be joining the America West Hockey League for the coming season. I figured we were all being punked…I mean why would Tupelo join a league based in the Rocky Mountain West? The travel was already brutal with bus rides to Bismarck and Fernie, B.C. as well as to closer Montana cities. Not to mention a 2,500 mile flight when the Bozeman IceDogs (one word) traveled to play the Fairbanks Ice Dogs (two words). An insane amount of travel given the 60 game schedule and the fact that these players were almost all high school kids hoping at best for a Division 3 merit scholarship. Turns out the internet rumor was true. Tupelo had lost their professional minor league hockey team and the AWHL had lost a couple of franchises, so voilà, Tupelo became a full member.
I’m not sure anyone really thought this through. I cannot think of any sports league with two “franchises” as insanely far apart as Tupelo and Fairbanks. And the T-Rex were BAD. Bad News Bears bad. Badder than that even. Imagine the Bad News Bears but with no improvement over the season (actually over the two seasons that they somehow managed to tough it out.) This badness was somehow exaggerated by the fact that the T-Rex played in the cavernous, 10,000 seat Bancorp South Arena. Further exaggerated by the fact that their coach, one “Billy Kidd” from Reno was really only coaching the team so his son Billy Jr. could play.
This was my fifth season doing play-by-play for the IceDogs. I started as an employee of a Mom & Pop radio station but now I was the General Manager of a cluster of four stations owned by a huge corporation. I had no business taking five days to travel 5,000 miles to announce the ritual humiliation of a group of teenagers at the hands of a more skilled group of teenagers. I don’t remember much about the long weekend in Tupelo. I can recall our team visit to Elvis’ boyhood home better than the actual contests. I do remember wishing that I had packed my binoculars as my broadcast position was clear at the top of the huge, empty arena. I know that Bozeman won all three games, the first was 8-1 and I’m pretty sure I recall the IceDogs tallying double-digits in at least one of the others. Tupelo would finish the season with a 2-54 record scoring 98 goals and allowing 489. They did lead the league in penalty minutes. The coach’s kid managed no goals, one assist and 90 penalty minutes for the entire season. The following season they improved to 2-53-0-1.
I’m at the point in my life where I spend too much time looking back and evaluating my life choices and how well I used the finite amount of time we’re all granted here. Traveling 5,000 miles to broadcast a teenage hockey mismatch seems a rather inefficient use of resources. So does renting a 10,000 seat arena for 28 nights with full concessions, security, three officials and one sober Zamboni driver while only selling 75 tickets. I guess we all have our dreams and big plans so credit should be given to those who sew the kids’ names on the back of their sweaters and to those who print out the rosters, stats and standings and play Euchre as the bus cruises past Talladega just to be able to describe the action to the 15 billet families back in Bozeman and the players parents listening online in Edina or wherever. My long radio career was a succession of failing upwards; I was a Jack of all Trades and a master of nearly none…although for a brief time I was a damn good sports announcer and I’d like to think I approached it with the same diligence and effort as Vin Scully or Joe Buck.
This picture is now exactly 10 years old…taken at 9:14pm on Saturday July 2nd, 2005. We had just that moment signed on “The Trail” 103.3 FM in Missoula. There’s more of my DNA in the Trail than in any station I worked at in my 30 year radio career. I had already been a part of many start-ups and format changes, but this one really was from scratch. New building and studios….brand new frequencies (2 more sign-ons would follow that summer)….shiny new equipment. HD audio chain, too. I was tired. I was proud.
It’s hard to look at this photo. My experiences in this building were some of the most fulfilling and yet most frustrating of my career. It was the site of my biggest success and probably my biggest failure. I do remember one thing clearly from that night. I told Scott Hawk (who took the above picture) that it “may never get any better than this.” In some ways, it didn’t. I could write a book on the entire experience but for now I’ll just say that while I’m very proud of the Trail, its sister stations and especially the people that I worked with, the next nine years (including 3 years in the middle spent elsewhere) were trying and frustrating. I left radio a year ago, and that was probably 7 or 8 years too late.
We’ve been here not even 2 weeks…we still have a ton of stuff strewn across two storage units in town and we’re not close to organizing the stuff not in storage. But it finally feels like we’re “moved in” after Jackie flew back to Missoula and returned with the horse, llama, truck and trailer. We couldn’t have picked a more different place to live….in our last place in the middle of the Bitterroot Valley on a clear day you could see nearly 50 miles to the north and south and to the Bitterroot range 15 miles to the west and to the Sapphires 15 miles to the east. As you can see from this Google Earth image, our horizon at our new home is vastly 
more limited.
Lots of people tell us that we’ve “moved to the rainiest place in Washington”, but we haven’t seen a drop yet. Supposedly it’s a very dry summer….probably accounting for issues we have been having with our well at home and at the kennel. Running out of water would have been at the bottom of my list of anticipated problems. We seem to be getting a handle on the water issue – I think. We have also seen a lot of weird faces when we tell people that we moved from Montana to Grays Harbor County. I don’t think this area has seen much of an influx of fresh faces in recent years. There’s not much to McCleary…there’s a little more in Elma (8 miles away) and everything
you could possibly need is 15-25 miles away in Olympia/Lacey/Tumwater. We haven’t yet had time to drive 45 minutes west to the coast.
In Bozeman, Dave had a 45 mile round-trip commute each day and in Missoula it was 65 miles a day. That’s about 300,000 miles to and from work the past 20 years. Careful what you wish for….but the commuting time has been cut drastically. Below (left) you can just see the house in the background from the kennel and below (right) you can see our view of the kennel from our porch.
We’re getting the hang of the kennel…Amanda and Marc – the two employees we inherited – are awesome. I’ve always thought of myself as a great employee over the past 30 years, but I really do notice a “pride of ownership” that I never have really felt before. Country Inn Pet Resort is on Facebook and I’m just beginning to get the website up and functional. We’ll check back in soon. Here’s a few more photos….
p.s. Miss you all in Montana….
Fragile Eggshell Mind 