Across the Hi Line to the Rockies

Day 6, 5^th July

Distance travelled, 770kms

Wildlife spotted, a mountain goat, finally!

The landscape in Eastern Montana is highland prairie.  There were no farms along most of our journey into the state, as it is Sioux Nation.  We pulled into Wolf Point late.  The town was a melee of trucks and people cruising Main St in old cars, kids hanging out the back.  The Fourth of July fireworks had already started.

I stopped at a gas station and asked a very frazzled-looking young cop about camping options.  For a tent?  You could camp in the park, I suppose, he said.  He gestured towards the sound of the fireworks.  We decided to check into the motel instead.

After a shower and some laundry, we got spruced up and went looking for a Montana steak.  Of course, everything was closed for the Fourth.  We gave up and headed for McDonalds, trudging through town in the stifling heat.  It was closed.

Catastrophe!

Then we noticed the drive thru was still open. But only for a few more minutes.  We raced back to the motel, got the car and swung through just in time.

We ate our burgers with beers in our hotel room and then Himself stretched out on the comfy bed and slept and I typed for a couple of hours and watched the fireworks from my window and listened to the cacophany.   

As I watched the moon come up over the railway tracks and listened to the haunting whistle of the incoming trains, Himself dreamed he was in a gunfight.

Next day we hit the Hi-Line.  It had felt good to sleep in a bed, and as we were a little higher up the air wasn’t so heavy.

The Hi-Line stretches from Glasgow to Shelby, across eastern Montana, and was one of the last parts of America to be settled.  And one of the first to be abandoned.  Although it wawsfirst settled in the 1870s, there were few here until the railway went through the Marias Pass to Spokane and beyond.  In the early years of the twentieth century, newspaper ads extolling the virtues of the soil here were posted by railway companies in need of populations along their lines.  Glossy brochures showing bumper crops and full of ‘scientific data’ were mailed to gullible city dwellers across the US and Europe.  They came on the train.  They leased land from the train company.  They borrowed seed money.  By the twenties the water had gone and so had most everyone else.  Driven out by the drought.  By the wind.  By the winters.  By the hailstones.  By the isolation.  This is big, empty  country.

Everywhere there is barbed wire fencing, in various stages of decay, guarding fields empty of everything except rough grass and wildflowers.  Between Indian lands, there are a few hardy souls farming cattle on the dry pasture land.  The road follows James Hill’s Northern Pacific railway.  Occasionally we would veer towards the Missouri river, ambling through the hills and then trees would provide some vertical perspective.  But mostly it was just straight lines headed west.  The railway tracks.  The power lines.  The barbed wire.  The road.  All of them a palimpsest on fainter tracks laid before us.  The buffalo.  Blackfeet and Sioux following them.  Ranchers moving cattle south to water.  Londoners struggling with a plough in their new world.

The palette is subtle.  Along the buttes the earthen tones are washed with a summer glaze of green, and in the vast pastures, pale pastel wildflowers break up the green.

Abandoned Mission, Montana

We stopped at a boarded up mission church.  Built to convert the Assinaboine and teach them western ways.  A flock of martins burst out from the eaves in protest.  The graveyard was full of plastic flowers and other markers.  I found a pair of men’s shoes lying in the grass.  Then a horde of angry biting flies descended on us and we beat a retreat to the car.  Leaving the dead lying on their hill overlooking the plains. 

A little further on in Havre, we had to drive around the back of the Holiday Plaza shopping mall to find the Wa’khpau Chu’kun buffalo jump.  This 2,000 year old kill site was where Assinaboine hunters drove a winter’s worth of buffalo over a butte and into a cleft near the Milk river every Fall.  Then they processed every part of the animal for use through communal effort. 

What must they think to see their Newgrange, their Stonehenge, almost covered over by a mall?

Soon we saw the Sweetgrass Mountains emerge to our north.  The Blackfeet believe that Rapi created them out of boulders left over when he made the Rockies. 

A few minutes out of Shelby, the road rose and turned slightly northward and we could see the salamander crest outline of the American Rockies.  At once strange and familiar, like so many American landmarks, there is very little left of the glaciers that once crowned them.  It took us another hour to draw near at Browning, centre of the Blackfeet Nation.  Then we turned south and went over the Marias Pass, the most northerly year round route through the mountains. 

We had to stop for construction, so I got out of the car and looked across the reserve to the mountains. Cabins and trailers hugged the slopes her and there, most with some horses corralled alongside.  Behind them, the peaks rose; blue and shadowy.  Without definition.

Then we got going again into a switchback and over a gorge with a blue green river running through it. 

Just past the summit of the pass, we saw a mountain goat standing on a ledge overlooking the tumultuous river.  Then it was down again into the trees and a landscape I feel has been imprinted on me by so many films since the first movie trip I took with my father to see Grizzly Adams. 

We skirted Glacier Park, our destination tomorrow, and headed for Corom and the Packer’s Roost bar.  We scored a campsite just down the road, which meant we could walk up and let our hair down a bit.  After a long drive.

The first guy we met had no shirt, no front teeth, and a bear claw hanging from a leather thong around his neck.

“Don’t just look forward for bears!” he screamed.  “Look up for mountain lions too.  They’re in the trees!”

The second guy we met was a biker from the Yaak Valley.

Owner of the Packer's Roost

The third guy we met was a Blackfoot who had spent fifteen years fishing in the Bering Sea.  Himself and Jim spent the rest of the evening talking about fishing.  As the night closed in, so so slowly, we went inside through a smoking area full of stoned bikers leaning on leather car seats with haggard women in leather trousers drinking daquaris and smoking cigars.

We stumbled home under a big moon and slept until the cold woke us up before dawn and we had to get a blanket out.

We were in the mountains at last.