Jet Planes Waiting - Neptune Aviation, Missoula, Montana

Morning comes early when you can't hardly sleep due to anticipation....but flying is always fun! I don't think I'll ever not experience a thrill at the moment of liftoff. We take aircraft flight as a matter of course but, when you stop and think about hurtling through the air at hundreds of miles an hour to arrive in the past (we're headed west), it is still an astonishing feat of engineering. As the snail said when he got to ride on the turtle's back: Wheeee!

Leaning Left - Missoula, Montana

“As I follow the fence line, I am carried even further back in time to when perhaps my great grandfather, or more likely, my grandfather, my granduncles, or a forgotten hired man did as I am doing.…The wire in my hands goes back to the time when my family still used horses to work the fields and pull wagons, and when steam tractors were the advancing technology.…

In those days, cedar posts were often used to make corner posts. Gnarly with age, weathered by wind and rain, and covered with mold and lichen, they often are leaning, as if rotted out. But I know that if I pull them out of the ground, and scrape the dirt away, the wood will look as fresh as the day they were buried. …

Even though the cedar posts haven’t rotted, the pull of the wire over the decades has been slowly, perhaps a hair’s breadth a year, levering them out of the ground, leaving them barely anchored. Too often, I find myself replacing them with new corner posts that won’t last a faction of the time, erasing the mistakes of the past. “ - from Harbingers of the Next CenturyBy Wade Sikorski
For further reflection on his family’s ranching legacy and future, you can access the entire essay
here.

Open To The Sky, Blue Mountain Recreation Area, Missoula, Montana

‘Tis the season in which I avoid forest trails, due to the reemergence of ticks
, migrating slowly upward with the snow line. A lot of people can deal with removing ticks from their person, but I can’t abide the sneaky beggars; they give me the heebie-jeebies for days.  Just writing about it makes me feel a little itch on my leg, now my neck…(shudder!). Hence the dedicated avoidance tactics. Thankfully, Missoula
’s near-to-town Blue Mountain Recreation Area includes a selection of wide, trampled trails for traipsing across open grassland - nary an overhanging branch in sight, no grass brushing your feet or legs. All the benefits of fresh mountain air minus lingering creepy-crawlies. I can live with that until a hot summer week pushes the ticks into an altitude above my adventure level.