Landmark ...

Highway 89 is my favorite north-south drive across Montana, and here's a photo of my favorite landmark among the way. This is the old St. John's Catholic Church in Ringling, resting atop a little hill overlooking the dying town.

It's been decades since the church saw regular use, and when I took this shot 15 years ago the place was looking pretty rough. But people have been taking more of an interest in the building since then, and today it's looking sharp with fresh paint and a new roof. I'm very glad the church is being taken care of, of course ... but still, I have to say it looked way more atmospheric back then.

Heartland ...

Here's another still image from a Montana-made film ... and another railroad shot, since I'm a fan of those.

This is from the opening of an obscure 1979 art-house film called Heartland, which was based on an autobiographical volume called Letters of a Woman Homesteader. It's a powerful and poignant movie about a pioneer woman's life on an early twentieth-century homestead ... very much recommended. And though the story takes place in southwestern Wyoming, the film itself was shot here in Montana, in Meagher and Wheatland Counties. (The homestead used in the filming is reportedly up by Judith Gap somewhere.)

The little train in this wonderful image was running on the White Sulphur Springs & Yellowstone Park Railway, which ran from White Sulphur down to Ringling. (Nope, it never made it to Yellowstone.) By the 1970s the railroad's days were numbered, the freight traffic almost gone. A promoter named "King" Wilson acquired the line, brought in a steam locomotive and some passenger cars, and tried to turn it all into a tourist attraction. It wasn't a success, though, and the railroad closed down after the Milwaukee Road -- its connection to the outside world -- was abandoned in 1980. The Heartland movie shoot was probably the highlight of the little railway's life.

From what I can tell, the old locomotive is at a railroad museum in Nebraska these days, though it hasn't run in years. And a few of Willson's old railway cars are still sitting up in White Sulphur, just where he left them back in 1980.

Lonely road ...

It's hard to think of an image more evocative of rural Montana than that of a lonely pickup truck, heading out along an empty dirt road through the rangeland. I took this shot a little over a year ago, on the road that heads west from Ringling towards Battle Creek and the old town of Sixteen.

Ringling, Ringling ...

This is a photo I took a couple of years ago, of the old Milwaukee Road depot in Ringling. I have a fondness for Ringling ... it's got a great setting, and there's still a good little bar there. And Jimmy Buffett wrote a song about the place! Hard to beat that.