School's still out, technically, but for 50 soon-to-be sixth-graders at C.S. Porter Middle School, class has already started. The kids have been taking part in a pioneering orientation program designed to ease the sometimes-daunting transition from elementary to middle school. “This is something we're using to ease the anxiety of coming into sixth grade,” said Porter assistant principal Lisa Hendrix, who will welcome about 180 new sixth-graders next week. “It can be hard, coming from smaller schools and being mixed with kids from all these other schools.”

A.J. Gibson is likely Missoula's most famous architect, so perhaps it's fitting that some of his buildings are undergoing a renaissance of sorts. As condominiums. “I think that the people who will buy into these sorts of places are people who want some part of preserving a part of the past,” said Realtor Ed Coffman, who is selling condos in one of Gibson's buildings. Gibson, who designed the Missoula County Courthouse, the first five buildings built at the University of Montana and the Daly Mansion in Hamilton, was a prolific architect around the turn of the 20th century.

EST GLACIER - These mountains have always been old, weighed heavy with age and rooted in deep time, the kind of place where you can heft a handful of early, early earth and wonder at the world before. Rippled rock at 10,000 feet is sediment laid down 1.6 billion years ago, the oldest rock there is, Proterozoic history heaved up some 170 million years back when the Rocky Mountains pushed skyward. A sheet of stone three miles thick and 160 miles long crashed eastward then, advancing 50 miles and folding old rock over new, creating the block from which vast chisels of ice would carve what we now know as Glacier National Park.

It was a perfect Missoula summer evening for Zane Kuhnhenn's 12th birthday, the day he climbed his first mountain. It was a day his mom Dianna never thought she would see. Zane, 12, has myelomeningocele spina bifida, the most severe type of the birth defect that involves the incomplete development of the spinal cord or its openings. Paralyzed from the waist down, Zane must wear special orthopedic braces and shoes to walk the short distances he can manage before he tires. He has undergone 12 surgeries in his 12 years and Dianna said the future almost certainly holds others.

If sheep could talk, Jack would be speechless. He's a striking and, it turns out, muscular steel-gray wether who just completed a dream week at the Western Montana Fair. “Now I have to let him go,” sighed Tiffany Woldstad, her voice cracking. “It'll be hard. He's my little grand champion boy.” Jack was the top lamb at the fair's 4-H show on Wednesday. On Saturday, he brought top dollar at the 4-H and FFA Livestock Sale among the wool and mutton set - a tidy $6.20 for each of his 151 pounds.

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK - Who knew bacteria could be so beautiful? The heat-loving organisms in Grand Prismatic Spring get credit for making it the most colorful hot spring in Yellowstone National Park. From above, Grand Prismatic is a large oval splash of cornflower blue on the ash white landscape of Middle Geyser Basin, edged by flowing, arm-like strands of yellow, orange and red.

CORVALLIS - There is no respite from the convulsions that make Tyler Boshae a prisoner in his own body. No warning when the body-wracking tremors will erupt and launch him into a seizure of spasms. There's a polite medical name for what happens. They're called “tics.” But in reality, what happens is a brutal, raw expression of a body raging, painfully, against itself.

CONDON - Jerry Black's picky about poo. He's tromping through waist-high grass in a Swan Valley meadow searching for moose poop. But the ungulates are uncooperative on this outing and all he's finding are deer droppings and bear scat. Turns out, dried moose manure smells like willow, red dogwood trees and other woodsy smells.

In the dark-but-getting-brighter recesses of the Carson and Barnes Circus big top, Isa the Asian elephant began to do her thing Thursday morning. Billy Jeffers ran for scoop shovel and garbage can. “I was prepared for the worse,” said Jeffers, a circus employee from Arkansas, after emerging from the tent and what turned out to be - ahem - a dry run.

He was one bad biker. Not bad as in cool - bad as in misbehaving. Eric Mundt, a Missoula bicycle ambassador, spotted the rider on Higgins Avenue, pedaling north in the southbound lane, crossing traffic illegally, dashing in front of a car, and hopping onto a curb, elated at his near-death escape and bound for Charlie B's. Bicycle ambassadors cruise around town in the summer and explain the rules of the road to bikers, walkers and drivers. So Mundt, who works with bike ambassador Brynne Parker, chatted with Mr. Nine Lives and explained how to be a good biker. If you want more bike racks and things for cyclists - especially if you want public money to pay for that stuff - you can't bike on the wrong side of the road and make people angry.