Help me pls! Montana vs Washington: The spider situation (and jobs) (Great Falls: showing, vacation)

[normsw]

Spiders are like roaches, they're everywhere on earth; get over it.
Check out Spokane or Boise. Way less rain and plenty of selection of real estate, schools, etc.
Montana is COLD in winter! Western weather is determined largely by elevation. If you're over 3000 ft or so it will be cold and snowy all winter. East of the Cascades is colder winters and hotter summers, moreso in Montana. Research at the library for different climate areas and demographics.

[rickers]

I have had to tell so many friends and neighbors that we don't have Brown Recluse spiders here when they got bitten by a Hobo ! Even a few doctors have been misdiagnosing the bites and telling folks they got a Recluse bite ! I always have hundreds of Hobo funnel holes in my yard every year. I've never been bit and they keep my grasshoppers under control.
Doesn't make it appealing to lay out on the lawn for a suntan though !

[jimj]

We have a guy spray 2 times a year and don't have much of a spider issueb but the above poster was correct, they are everywhere in the world.

[rickers]

I once found a Tarantula cruising through my campsite in the desert once. I put him in a bag and took him home with me. I fixed him up a nice big terrarium and fed him well with live crickets. After about a year I decided to let him go so I took him back to where I found him and he just wanted to sit next to me for a while. After about an hour he wandered off. I guess he figured out that I wasn't going to dump crickets in front of him anymore. Didn't even say goodbye, How's that for gratitude !!!!!

[kassner]

hate to tell ya this but there spiders everywhere in the us weather plays a big thing for spiders i actually like most of them because they kill bugs which are a pain in the butt live in florida or minnasota and you'll be saying yeah spiders bye good luck on your spider problem

[rangerider]

I live in a rural area of the Gallatin Valley, and we have several species of spiders living on our place. I guess the only ones I worry about are the black widows, of which we have few but they do show up in the shop from time to time. I had a trailer in Belgrade for a few years some time ago, and the little buggers were thick under there, but I never bothered them save to check my pipe heaters before wintertime. I'm not a huge spider fan myself, but fortunately I don't have to live in fear of them. I had heard once that the bite of the widow is worse if there happens to be trace amounts of copper in the soil, but I don't know if that translates to water pipes, etc. in the average house - might just be another urban legend.

Good luck in your search; I think the Bozeman area might have what you're looking for in a job market, but may be long in the arachnid department.

[chrismford]

We do have some nasty critters out here in the east. The bigger issue is the isolation and climate. If you don't mind a lack of what many call necessaties and the fact that it's either cold and windy or hot and windy (by hot and windy I mean put you face in front of a furnace with the hot are blasting you) and really no in between.

You have to really love this area or life will suck.

[ElkHunter]

Originally Posted by chrismford

We do have some nasty critters out here in the east. The bigger issue is the isolation and climate. If you don't mind a lack of what many call necessaties and the fact that it's either cold and windy or hot and windy (by hot and windy I mean put you face in front of a furnace with the hot are blasting you) and really no in between.

You have to really love this area or life will suck.

It kinda takes "Special People." I am special, just ask anybody.

[meadowlark3]

I just found this site a couple of days ago, and I am already realizing that one of my favorite things about it is that the members/posters do not make a habit of sarcasm or generally flame-type comments. I attribute that to one of the major principles of life as I have lived it: any time you get in the northern latitudes (where it can get down to 40 below on a semi-regular basis) or above elevations of 10,000 (which we did in CA while backpacking) those very conditions weed out the riffraff and the bad people! Of course, like so many things, that is not totally true any more and I'm well aware of that. We now live in western rural Minnesota and all of those things are changing here as well.

Back to the spidey situation: on our farm near Culbertson (way up on highway 2 north of Sidney) we had daddy long legs, black widows and those horrendously ugly but probably harmless dudes we called "the barn spiders".

The only snakes we ever saw on the farm were bull snakes, but I know that 4 miles south of us, there were certainly rattlesnake dens along the Missouri river.

Hope we don't scare you half to death! My sense would be that the drier (little rainfall) that the area is, the fewer spiders you'd see. However, that also means for sure that you are not looking at the "beautiful Montana scenery"! (unless you like endless horizons and short pasture grass)

[skygal12]

I fight cobwebs everywhere I go. I lived in Costa Rica and made the landlord come over and kill this HUGE banana spider - I've dealt with black widows, tarantulas and hobos - this thing was scary! Huge and poisonous. Every house I have has cobwebs - deal with it.