Past And Present - Hilltop Above the Dearborn River, Montana

“My mother brought this up in the first week after my father passed away. In a time like that, the past meets you wherever you turn. The days do not use their own hours and minutes, they find ones you have lived through with the person you are missing.” - Jick McCaskill, in English Creek by Ivan Doig (1939-2015), p. 333

Another Day's Climb - Waterworks Trail, Missoula, Montana

This hill is bigger than it looks at first glance - kind of like "objects in mirror are closer than they appear". If you zoom in, you can see three tiny hikers framed in the second standing structure. I've climbed up and over this section of Trail from the other side, and it requires a fair stretch of time and determination- best tackled in dogged and optimistic company. But the. views are (of course) gorgeous - one year we saw a sheepherder's camp, vardo, sheepdog, flock and all! We'll definitely save this climb for another day!

Guest Post: Up Over The Ridge - Corvallis, Montana

Alas, visiting Sister #3 has hied herself home - just ahead of the worsening wildfire smoke infiltrating the Bitterroot valley. Thankfully, plenty of Montana's iconic big sky was in view for most of her stay, as evidenced in today's guest post.

Thanks again, sis, for sharing your Montana perspectives!

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Up over the ridge, adventure lies 

waiting to be discovered. 

Who knows what treasures 

will be found, up over the ridge.

 Up over the ridge, I plan to go, 

someday soon.

 I'll pack my lunch and go 

exploring, up over the ridge.

 - Pat Richards

Windswept Sky - Livingston, Montana

"...Therefore the storm-wind shall his comrade be,
That strips the hills and sweeps the cowering plains.
October, shot with flashing rays and rains,
Inhabits all his pulses; he shall know
The stress and splendor of the roaring gales..."
- May Gillington Byron (1861–1936), "The Storm-Child"

Natural History - Livingston, Montana

"While my interest in natural history has added very little to my sum of achievement, it has added immeasurably to my sum of enjoyment in life." - Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)

A Question of Sunshine - Livingston, Montana

"The sun shines and warms and lights us and we have no curiosity to know why this is so; but we ask the reason of all evil, of pain, and hunger, and mosquitoes and silly people."  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Three Breezy Trees - Missoula, Montana

“Through three cheese trees three free fleas flew. While these fleas flew, freezy breeze blew. Freezy breeze made these three trees freeze. Freezy trees made these trees' cheese freeze. That's what made these three free fleas sneeze.” - from 'Fox In Sox' by Dr. Seuss (1904-1991)

Autumn Gully - Missoula, Montana

"...Mountain people are straight and natural, 
minds level though the road is rugged.
Long wind drives pine and cypress trees, 
skims ten thousand gullies and flows out clear...." 
- From "Visiting Zhongnan Mountain" by Liu Changqing (C. 710 - C. 787)

Looking Back the Way We Came - Mount Jumbo,Missoula, Montana

Descending, these hills appear steeper than in this from-below view, and brought to mind a scene from the movie, The Princess Bride: Tumbling tail over tea kettle, The Dread Pirate Roberts (aka Wesley) bellows, “Aaaas….youuu…wiiiish!” Love that movie! But this Wendell Berry poem is a little more inspiring.

“We travelers, walking to the sun, can’t see

Ahead, but looking back the very light

That blinded us shows us the way we came,…”
From
Reading a Sabbath Poem by Wendell Berry

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.

Blue Heaven, Missoula, Montana

“Sometimes, lying out on Aunt Ivy and Uncle Holt‘s back lawn, it‘d felt as if I could stretch out my arms and my fingertips and rake them across the underside of the heavens and end up with a fistful of stars.
Not even the biggest giant I could imagine could brush this Montana sky with his fingertips.”
- From Hattie Big Sky by Kirby Larson

Sunlight-Shadow (Interplay), Hamilton, Montana

End-of-summer sunshine makes for perfect hiking in Western Montana‘s forests. 
Well, perfect aside from the need to beware of bears in the vicinity. 
And perhaps bow hunters. 
And maybe moose. 
But, there are no ticks! 
And the danger of the others can at least be mitigated and prepared for by wearing obvious colour and keeping your eyes and ears open. 

Wherever you are, plan a way to get out into your own patch of nature and enjoy - even (especially?) if that means lolling in your backyard hammock!

Urban Sheep Herd, Missoula, Montana

Thing I Love About Missoula #137 : You truly never know what you’ll see around the next bend.
 
I’ve heard ("herd" - hah!) that shepherds are contracted to graze their flocks on some public lands because the sheep eat and thrive on noxious weeds. The bucolic scene is delightfully completed by the large white sheepdog to front left of the cozy caravan aka vardo, whose name depends on any preferred region.)

Love it when nature and nurture work together!

Blowing Over, Missoula, Montana

“FAINT winds, and a song fading and leaves falling,

Faint winds, and far away a fading laughter...
And the rain and over the fields a voice calling...

One gray blown cloud scurries and lifts above,

Slides on the sun and flutters there to waft her

Sisters on. ...
And down the valley through the crying trees

The body of the darker storm flies; brings

With its new air the breath of sunken seas

And slender tenuous thunder...

But I wait . . .”

From A POEM AMORY SENT TO ELEANOR AND WHICH HE CALLED "SUMMER STORM" 
by: F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

Pour a cup of joe and sit a spell to enjoy the full text here.

Winding Up To Sky, Missoula, Montana

“The landscape was tidy and bare...Nothing had begun to grow yet in the waiting country side....
It was going to be all right. This was what he had needed, this wide silence, this space, this serenity. 
He had forgotten how benevolent the place was, how satisfying. The near hills were round and green and kind; beyond them were farther ones, stained blue by the distance. And behind all stood the long rampart of the Highland line, white and remote against the calm sky.”- Josephine Tey, from “The Singing Sands”, p. 21

Ascending, Missoula, Montana

“The way to Heaven is ascending; we must be content to travel uphill, though it be hard and tiresome, and contrary to the natural bias of our flesh.” - Jonathan Edwards

A part of me reads this quote and thinks of it as a negative thing, a hard thing, a religious thing with which free spirits should not be encumbered. But literal ascending is the opposite of staying at the same altitude, the easy mediocre status quo levell. When I think of it like that, it puts me more in mind of doing a bit of hard work toward rising above boring, or even above my most average self, toward the best me God has in mind. That knocks the religious right out, and simultaneously reinforces the dreams and hopes and imaginings that ran rampant in the mind and heart of a younger me.
Which is very fitting for Easter, since Jesus challenges what is religious in each of us, and offers something much better than our finiteness would ask or envision.
Happy day, happy Easter.

Woodsy Walk, Missoula, Montana

Moving from rural Alberta to rural Montana, I expected things would be much the same. But I learned that Montana is unique from its neighbors in many ways. Language is a prime example. Looking at the above scene, a Montanan doesn't see trees marching up and over into a gully, but into a draw. Example: "Shhh! The biggest muley in the county just walked down into that draw!" For more Montana vernacular, click here to browse Todd Klassy's list, then be sure to view the stunning photos in his site.