I’ve been in Montana for the past couple of weeks, Southwest Montana to be exact, in the tiny town of Dillon (population 4,000) where my parents live. I grew up in this part of the world and have made a tradition of spending a few weeks here in the spring and early summer visiting my family and helping them out around their property. My personal roots run deep here and so do my family’s. I’d be the fifth generation to live here if I did live here. My relatives that immigrated from Ireland and Germany in the late 1800s are buried in the cemetery here. It’s pretty incredible to have such a deep connection to a place, and especially one as beautiful as this.
My parents have a cabin on the Continental Divide that is the remnants of my grandparents’ cattle ranch in the area. It’s at about 7,000 feet of elevation set among Lodgepole Pine and rolling Sagebrush hills. Just up the road from the cabin is Lemhi Pass where Lewis and Clark crested the Divide and started their long journey down to the Pacific. According to them, the headwaters of the Missouri River are here starting from a tiny trickle and eventually ending up in the mighty Mississippi.
The cabin was built about 20 years ago close to the site of the original homestead cabin on the property. It’s built with hand hewn and peeled logs from the surrounding land. There’s a spring that’s been developed with a spring box that provides some of the coldest, tastiest drinking water I’ve had anywhere. Perched up on a hill, it has great views down the valley to the Tendoy mountains in the distance. Shortly after they built the cabin, the surrounding forest was hit with a pine beetle infestation that killed many of the trees. My parents, and especially my dad, have spent the better part of two decades stewarding this land, taking out the dead trees, and restoring the forest to health. It’s a beautiful place with healthy trees, open meadows, and abundant wildlife. A testament to all his work over the years and a real legacy. I always enjoy my time with them here which tend to be equal parts chores like sawing up downfall for firewood or mending fences, and more leisurely activities like sitting on the porch reading or hiking around looking at flowers.
Spring and early summer are a dynamic time of year here full of wild flowers and wild weather. It’s been known to snow here this time of year, but it can also get into the 80s, sometimes swinging as much as 40 degrees in a day. The wildflowers are stunning — Balsam Root, Glacier Lily, and my favorite, Mule’s Ear which blankets the meadows around the cabin with huge white flowers that make it look like fresh snow from a distance. The fresh, crisp mountain air is full of birdsong and if you’re lucky you can see new fawns in their spotted coats. And if you’re really lucky, you’ll find some Morels like I did for the first time ever here this year.
I also got out for a hike on the trail where my dad and I did one of my very first backpacking trips: Sawtooth Lake in the Pioneer Mountains. Even though the trip was more than 30 years ago, I still carry vivid memories of that formative experience including the wreckage of a small plane scattered along the lake’s edge and visible on the bottom if the water is calm. The find intrigued and haunted me as a kid. This was pre-internet, so afterward I spent hours in the library scrolling through newspaper microfilm trying to figure out what had happened. I eventually learned a Forest Service plane spraying for spruce budworm crashed at the lake in the late 1950s. Walking around the lake’s edge this time, ringed with snow-covered peaks, I found our old campsite, and the wreckage was still there too, although the water was too choppy to see the bottom this time. I did not, however, take a skinny dip in the frigid water like we did on that first trip.
I love traveling, and I’ve got real roots in Portland and the Pacific Northwest too, after almost half my life there. However, this place pulls at me differently. It’s not just where I’m from, it’s where four generations of my family came before me. It’s part of the tension between rootedness and wandering I’ve been working through since I left my job. These trips are also part of how I’m trying to build a life around service and time outside — in this case, helping my parents with the never-ending list of things that need doing on the property. This one was no exception.
The Crooked Trail 
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