Missoula to Wolf Creek Campground

Thinking I would run down along the west side of Yellowstone and the Tetons and pick up the Oregon trail, I left Missoula on I 90, driving east up the Clark Fork River valley on a smokey early September morning, the Clark Fork drifting west to eventually join the Columbia. Outside of the Missoula sprawl, the valley is remarkably unchanged. Like many western valleys, there is still a little ranching and a little hay or alfalfa, a little more with irrigation, but the scale is about as much as the land and water will ever allow.

Past Butte

a reminder of what what you are left with after the biggest of the booms and then inevitable biggest of the busts. Perhaps all western towns will one day be theme towns at the end of the day. Up over the Continental Divide at Homestake Pass through weathered granite boulders, part of the huge batholith beneath much of this part of Montana.

 Off the interstate at Cardwell, across the Jefferson River, (thanks to Lewis and Clark for uniting Virginia and Montana) south on a part of the Bozeman Trail across big hay and alfalfa fields

and first of many, many snow fences

to Ennis. Sitting on the banks of the renowned Madison River, with the Jefferson one of the headwaters of the Missouri, Ennis is seriously western fly fishing tourist lodgy and seems to be doing right well by it. South of Ennis, the unusually broad valley, thick with smoke, dotted with lodges and lodgettes of folks who want a part of the western experience, whatever they imagine that might be. An abundance of huge perched log entryways – maybe this comes from Bonanza? The river full of driftboats: I saw five in one quarter mile stretch. At the end of a long, hot, dry summer, the trout must be weary.

Turning south just before the Madison Canyon and the earthquake slide lake of 1959, pretty drive up to Raynolds Pass, Continental Divide and the headwaters of the Henry's Fork of the Snake River. Broad, high aspen country, big lake, lots of water in the river, surprising the spread of vacation homes and cabins, it seems remote but maybe it is all around Yellowstone and the Tetons. Lower down, ranching and hay in the broad, wet valley, a group of sandhill cranes and a couple of antelope, then quickly down a little canyon and suddenly onto the flat and enormously fertile Snake River plain, big farms, irrigated wheat and potatoes, many new granaries. A back road east and south from Ashton, spectacular view of the Tetons across farm and open land, if the farming goes to hell, you could live on the view.

 Nice to be reminded that the Tetons are young mountains resting on Precambrian (think a billion years old) basement rocks – we all come from somewhere.

 And also most pleased to see a shout out to John Colter, by all accounts the bravest and maybe craziest of the mountain men. 

 Reminds me I'm traveling in the heartland of the so brief mountain man country, here once upon a time Pierre's Hole, land of beaver, bears, wild men and harsh, wild times of all kinds.

More and more homes further along, some clearly vacation places, others subdivisions although hard to see what the small towns have to support many people. Stopped for glass of Ale Slayer IPA – heavy on hops and malt - in Victor, 

in the shadow of the mountains, feeling the human spread around the mountains from Jackson, then dropped further south over Pine Creek hill into the Swan Valley and another fork of the Snake, beautiful clear river coming out of Yellowstone and Grand Teton country,many rafting put ins, driftboats aplenty, past a reservoir drawn way down, what seems like thousands of sheep turned out on the green plain at the head. Into Wyoming at Alpine and after a long day, up the canyon of the Snake, everything picked out and gleaming in the evening light.

 Up a rocky hillside to a rocky site in Wolf Creek Campground and an early night of it, the end of the season, just me and the camp hosts from La Grande ready to close it up and head home Saturday.