August 1997

Still heading westward but in Montana it takes awhile. We are learning to measure distance not in linear terms but in time. For example, Bozeman to Butte is 20 minutes about 30 miles. A turn off the Interstate, on a dirt roadway and that distance could take an hour. You see distance in MT, relates to road conditions, weather, and the movement of cattle and farm equipment and not the necessarily the linear space covered.

Plus, the size of a mile seems to vary from one place to another. The Big Hole Valley is roughly crescent shape, with the Pioneer Range to the east and the Bitterroot Range to the west. It is approximately 60 miles long and maybe 20 miles wide at the broadest point. But one mile on the odometer here feels more akin to two. There are few houses, no trees, and only the vista of the distant mountains to entertain your eyes. Just east of the Continental Divide, in southwest Montana, Big Hole Valley has that nickname is the Land of Ten-thousand Haystacks. Why, because as far as the eye can see, the fields are filled with haystacks looking like humongous loaves of homemade bread. These "loaves" are prepared all summer to feed cattle in the winter.

Dillon, with a population of about 4,000, is the largest town in the area of the Big Hole Valley. The Valley is so sparsely populated, many of the 7th through 12th grade students are "fostered" by families in Dillon during the school week. That's because the high school is in Dillon, which is up to 75 miles away for some of the students.

West of the Continental Divide is the Bitterroot Valley. This valley is about a third the size of the Big Hole and about as different as can be imagined. Big Hole is far colder and more arid when compared to the Bitterroot. In the Bitterroot you'll find garden plots of corn, tomatoes, and peppers all over the Bitterroot. And flowers everywhere! The scent of butterscotch from the Ponderosa pines floats on the air. It is also more densely populated but most are not native Montanans. We really, really liked it - especially the small town of Darby.

August is a month of fairs and festivals in Montana. While we were in the Big Hole Valley, the town of Wisdom (which claims to be the third coldest place in the USA) had its Annual Gun Show. The town's main street is about the size of a football field. The festivities kicked off not with a parade but a barbeque -- in front of an auto repair shop right on the main street! This town is one of Fred's favorites. It is not supported by tourism, but rather by the Ranchers themselves. We went to one of the three bars on a Friday evening and listened to the ranchers talking about their haying challenges, problems with cattle and other ranching issues. It was fun - not exactly the same conversation one would hear at a bar on Wall Street or at Georgetown's Nathans.

Along with Wisdom's Gun Show we had the opportunity to attend Bozeman's Sweetpea Festival. It was something like a County Fair but at the town level. The best parts of this Festival were the variety and quality of the "crafts" (it would appear Bozeman is a very artsy community) and the focus on activities for children. Now, we're not talking about pony rides and clowns but about an acre of button-making, face painting, scrap-wood-nailed-into-sculpture than painted, poster paint picture painting, and general participation in several stage productions. Overall, the Sweetpea Festival was one fun day for us just watching everyone else having fun. But perhaps the strongest image we took from the Festival was the interaction of the police with the children - it was always at an eye-level no matter the age or the quest.

Toward the end of the month we attended the Bitterroot Valley's Hamilton County Fair, specifically to see the rodeo. Are there people who actually make a living doing this? The answer is "Yes." And some people think we are crazy!

All the fairs, festivals and gatherings were fun but they don't compare to the sights we saw. Imagine driving for more than an hour across the dry, dusty prairie where its just you and a few soft-eyed cows and occasionally an abandon homestead. Then, suddenly you turn a corner and there is nothing but towering pine trees. You crown another hill and look down into twin lakes that are the bluest and clearest imaginable. An osprey, resting at the top of a magnificent pine, looks over its shoulder at you as if to say, "Impressive." Then, there is driving along side mound after mound after mound of rocks taken from the earth by man in the search for wealth. And finally, a towering mountain range, totally black, outlined by zillions of stars. Wow!

It hasn't been all fun. There were a few problems. We lost the brakes on the trailer one morning. It took longer to find the broken brake line (electric) than to fix it. Fred's laptop got sick again, right after our backup system went belly-up. Of course, the UPS strike was on at the time, and Gateway would not use any carrier except UPS. So, it took two weeks to get a replacement hard-drive and another week to reload the stuff back on it! Oh, and the backup device had to be replaced too. But that worked out because Suzi picked up some kind of bug. At first, the clinic thought it was a nasty bug you get from drinking the water "au natural" but it wasn't. Anyway, we suffered through a week of Kaopectate cocktails and never getting too far from the bathroom. However, with September, the laptop, Suzi, and the trailer are all back to full operational status.

With so much time going from here to there and than back, you start asking a lot of questions. Like? Where do rainbow trout go when a cloudburst turns their crystal-clear stream into mud soup? What causes a towering mountain range in the middle of flat land? Which came first - the mountain or the valley? Do cows ever stop eating? Do mules speak horse or donkey? Where does all the dirt go that washes off mountains? Why are the shape of haystacks in Montana like loaves of homemade bread? If oceans are filling with dirt, does that mean their water level is rising? By now, you probably are saying, "These folks are spending far too much time alone."

So we have finished surveying Beaverhead, Deerlodge, and Bitterroot National Forests in MT. Next we head for Idaho and its national forests. Early October we'll be heading for Seattle and away from the risk of snow. All in all, it has been a full and busy summer for us. Our Web site is getting a lot of "visitors" and very good responses. Now, if we can just find a publisher. Hope your summer was all you wanted and the autumn months just as pleasant.

From the other side of somewhere and just over the next ridge,

Suzi and Fred