Blogs from Montana, United States, North America - page 85

me and echo have spent most of the last two weeks jumping from mountain to mountain. camping at elevations ranging from 5500' to 8800'. the temperature swings have been extreme going from the mid 90's to low 40's. i've been told that for every 1000' rise in elevation the temperature drops 3.5 degrees but i'm not sure about that. some time at the old montana prison built in 1871, a couple museums and at the bannack ghost town which was the original capitol of montana back in the 1800's. i'll probally be heading into idaho soon and stay in the higher elevations to try and beat the heat. see ya later... read more

Way back in January, even before I went to Panama, I ordered tickets for the final two performances of the Calgary Stampede in July. There was to be a new format-- an invitation only of the top rodeo hands in the US and Canada. We wanted to say "We were there". So after retrieving the tickets from our safety deposit box along with my passport (complete with ugly picture) and Mont's birth certificate, we battened down the hatches on our not -too- trusty '99 Ford pickup (it was having intermittent bouts of clutch problems that Mont hoped his mechanic had fixed), loaded the popup camper with last minute items, and left Wednesday morning July 12. Our first stop was the Missouri River Breaks campground, 333 miles from home. It was horribly hot when we pulled in. ... read more

Two Mathematicians and a 10 year old Dog Go For A Very Long Walk... ...or at least that's how it started. It sounded like an innocent and splendid plan. A plan to hike the entire length of the Bridger Ridge Run hosted yearly in August by the local Bozeman Running Club, The Wind Drinkers. This is a 19.65 (the short way) or 20.55 (the long way) race across the knifes edge of the Bridger Mountain Range and traverses roughly 3 miles of ups and down along the ridge. This ridge is, as stated before, a barren knifes edge with hardly a tree in sight as high up as 9600 feet (Sacajawea Peak) to as low as, well, Bozeman (4800 feet). It runs along the top of 6 of the 8 peaks of the ridge, across ste ... read more

This morning I woke up a 26 year old man, lying on the floor of an outhouse near the Clark Fork River in Tareko, Montana. To some people this may seem like a revolting way to begin a birthday and a low point of life, but I was actually quite thankful for my stinky, but dry little shelter. On the day prior I had climbed up from the St. Joe river in Idaho over the Bitteroot Mountains to an unknown elevation. The sky was darkening and grumbling as I reached the summit, where I met Montana at a gravel road. I decended slowly for fifteen hand-clenching-brakes miles to the valley floor into a dissipating thunderstorm. I waited for it to pass and carried on toward Missoula in the sunshisne, on frontage roads along I-90. Hours down ... read more

Alphabetical Altitudes I spent the fourth of July at the M this year. For those of you who don't know what the M is, it is a large M constructed into the side of the Bridger Mountains facing Bozeman. This is not an unusual thing in Montana. For some reason almost every city and town in Montana has the abbreviation of their name on some Mountain or Hill right next door. Now I know what you're saying, Bozeman doesn't start with an M, and your primary school teacher would be very happy at your correct observation. The M by Bozeman stands for Montana State University, there is a B on the other side of the Mountain, but unfortunately due to time and lack of up-keep it is fairly faded and grown in. Explosions In The City ... read more