Drive Business Boulevard on a Thursday in mid-July and you can watch the town rearrange itself in real time. Carnival trailers pull in behind the transit center, a Golden Wheel crew starts bolting ride footings to asphalt, and by dinner the same parking lots that held commuter cars in June are staging a five-day festival. If you have lived here more than one summer, you already know the calendar shifts around this week. What is less obvious is that Bear Paw is not the peak of the local summer so much as the hinge. The three places that shape a resident's July and August all crowd into the same handful of days, and knowing how they overlap is what separates a good weekend from a stuck-in-traffic one.
