Prickly Pear Canyon ...

Back in the days before the Interstate Highway system, old US 91 was unquestionably one of the great drives in Montana. Between Butte and Great Falls, the route crossed the Continental Divide and wandered through a series of lovely mountain canyons, evocative of the best of Montana.

One of the narrowest and most spectacular stretches of road was along Prickly Pear Creek, north of Helena. Prickly Pear Canyon was narrow and steep-walled and scenic, with barely enough room for the creek, the road, and the tracks of the Great Northern Railway.

Today's photo is an old postcard view of the canyon, probably shot in the 1920s or early 1930s. (The road through the canyon was paved in 1931.) The photo has been retouched a bit and heavily hand-colored, but it's a great view of a scenic spot and a vanished age of travel.

Highway 212 ...

Most people driving east from Montana out to South Dakota will just get on Interstate 90 and stay there ... but a few knowledgeable folks will venture off the freeway and strike out on US 212 instead, which is actually the shorter route. I really like the US 212 drive -- it's a lovely mix of mountains and plains, forest and prairie. And there are some interesting old towns along the way, too.

One of those little towns is called Hammond, down in the southwest corner of Carter County. There was never an awful lot at Hammond, and today the place is just a post office, a one-room school, and a handful of abandoned buildings. Here's a photo I took last year of one of them ... a long-closed gas station. It's definitely the coolest thing in Hammond, and I think it's the coolest gas station in Montana.

Closed for the winter ...

This is how the Going-to-the-Sun Road looked in February ... no cars at all, just me and the snow and a single, inquisitive deer.

I love driving that road as much as anyone, but still ... this is so much better than the endless parade of SUVs that will fill that view a few months from now.

North plains bus ...

Especially in the winter, you need to approach northern travel with a little bit of flexibility ... something that was proven to me when I tried to make it home from Minnesota last week. I was planning to fly, but a blizzard closed the Minneapolis airport on my travel day, so I rebooked myself on Amtrak ... and then my train trip was interrupted when a freight derailed and blocked the tracks ahead. Which explains why I spent part of a day riding across northeastern Montana in a rattletrap charter bus from Rugby, North Dakota.

Buses just aren't the greatest way to see the world, especially on frosty winter days. Here's how the ride looked ... this is downtown Poplar, Montana, as seen through the windshield. Poplar is the agency town for the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, and a pretty nondescript place, indeed.

The Highway ...

Ordinarily, I'm not a fan of people taking quotes out of context ... but I'm going to blatantly do it today, just this once.

I recently re-read a brief essay called "The Highway," written by someone named Chris Jones and published in the December 2009 issue of Esquire. It's an evocative piece celebrating the hypnotic joy of an endless drive through the North Dakota prairies ... but he begins the essay as an unconvinced motorist, starting with an opening paragraph that's completely unreflective of the rest of the story. It made me smile, and here it is:

I've never believed it's about the journey; for me, it's always been the destination that counts. My destination was Montana, so I wanted North Dakota to disappear.

Driving in the rain ...

If you've read this blog for a while, you know that I never get tired of photographing Montana's roads ... usually through the windshield, while I'm zooming along.

Here's another shot in that series ... I took this last June, heading north on Highway 287 between Wolf Creek and Augusta. One of my very favorite drives, even when the weather's lousy.

Reasonable and prudent ...

When I first meet out-of-state people and tell them that I'm from Montana, as often as not the response I get is something like, "Oh, that's where you can drive as fast as you want." This despite the fact that our state's highways have had arbitrary speed limits for over a decade, now. Old stereotypes die hard.

Sadly, my tenure in Montana doesn't go back quite far enough for me to remember those heady, pre-1974 days when our state's daytime speed limit was "reasonable and prudent," but I did get to enjoy the three years back in the late 1990s when that was again the case. Those of us who drove in Montana back then will remember the sign below very well.

Oh, how I miss those days ...

Almost perfect ...

Nowadays, the Montana Department of Transportation is hardly known for its inspired signage ... when it installs a sign that's brilliant enough for a photograph, it's almost certainly accidental. This sign, up at Eddie's Corner in Fergus County, is a perfect example; I think it's the best highway sign in the state, though I'm pretty sure it wasn't intended to be.

But as good as this sign is, it's just not quite perfect. So I think the citizens of Montana need to march on the MDOT building in Helena, demanding that the state assign a fourth highway number to this stretch of road ... one that's heading westbound!

Favorite road ...

After a couple of posts about license plates, it seems appropriate to follow up with one of my road photos ... and it made me ponder which Montana road might actually be my favorite. I can't answer that question for certain -- there are way too many Montana drives that I love -- but this little road is as close to being my favorite as any.

This is a shot of the Inside North Fork Road, up in Glacier Park. Running north from Apgar almost to the Canadian border, the road predates the park's establishment, connecting a series of remote lakes, tiny campgrounds, and log ranger stations ... and many days you can drive it for hours without seeing another soul. It's the antithesis of the overcrowded Going-to-the-Sun Road, where interactions with people and cars sometime overshadow the wonderful setting, and it's why the North Fork country is my favorite part of Glacier.

Up the Clark Fork ...

Though I love taking photographs of Montana roads, not many of my shots include modern highways. Fewer still include the Interstates ... the slash-and-burn construction philosophy behind the things can be devastating to the landscape.

Montana being what it is, though, there are still plenty of settings so lovely they can't be destroyed by even the most malevolent of highway engineers. Here's one of them: this is I-90 a few miles east of Clinton, on a rainy morning in June 2007.

A New Year ...

I was sitting here this morning, trying to think of a photo that would be good to post on the first day of the year ... and this is the one that came to mind. I took it back in 2007, on an old dirt road that headed down from the Bangtails into Bridger Canyon.

Another holiday down ...

Here's a shot in honor of those of you who are facing a long, snowy drive home this weekend, after a Christmas visit to the relatives. (I took this through the windshield a couple years ago, while sliding along I-90 near Logan ... a circumstance that accounts for the blur.)

Highway 12 ...

Depending on how you count, I suppose, there are basically four main east-west highways crossing Montana: US 2, US 12, Montana 200, and the Interstate. My least favorite of those, by far, is the freeway ... the road is a scar on the land, and when you drive on an Interstate you miss the little towns and all the other cool sights that make a roadtrip interesting and fun. All the two-lane roads are great journeys, though US 2 is probably a little less rewarding for me than the others.

For a drive that shows the vastness and emptiness and wide-ranging beauty of Montana, Highway 200 is hard to beat. I'm a particular fan, though, of US 12, which has a great mix of mountains and prairies and Badlands country, along with some of my favorite small towns. The road follows the Musselshell River for 140 miles or so, a valley that's unremarked but surprisingly lovely.

Here's a shot I took last month of US 12, heading east down the Musselshell:

The popping machine ...

Today's quote is an excerpt from a story called, “Grandfather and the Popping Machine,” written by a Northern Cheyenne named Henry Tall Bull. It describes the day, decades ago, that his grandfather purchased his first automobile. I found this quote in the Montana history textbook currently used in many of the state's schools ... it's a little long, but it's a great read.

My grandfather, old man Raven, was one of the first Cheyennes to buy a car. He called it a popping machine because of the pop-pop-pop noise the engine made. Grandfather had always been good at handling horses, but learning to drive a car was something different. This was an adventure!

Grandfather bought his popping machine in Forsyth. The salesman at the garage cranked the engine for us. Bang! Boom! Bang! Pop-pop-pop! The car shook and the noise was awful. Grandfather held tightly to the steering wheel.

“You have to watch out when you crank it to get it started,” shouted the salesman. “Sometimes it kicks.”

Grandfather nodded. “Like horse, only kick at other end,” he said in his broken English . . .

The salesman explained to us about the foot pedals and how to shift gears and where the horn button was located. “Now,” he said, “if you’ll wait a minute I’ll get my tools and fix the brakes.”

Grandfather did what the salesman told him to do. Maybe his foot slipped off the clutch pedal, or maybe he was just anxious to go. The engine roared, and the car jerked and bucked, and suddenly we were moving! I heard a shout and looked back. The salesman was running after us, waving his tools and yelling something, but I couldn’t hear what he was trying to tell us because of all the noise . . .

We made a left turn and came to the railroad tracks. Just ahead, a big steam locomotive was coming down the track. Grandfather blew the horn and the engineer blew his whistle. The locomotive was picking up speed and getting closer. Grandfather decided that he had better stop, so he hit the brake pedal. Nothing happened! . . . Now we knew why the salesman had run after us. The brakes didn’t work! . . . Very slowly I opened my eyes and saw that, somehow, we had made it across the tracks. Behind us, the locomotive thundered past . . .

Then I looked at Grandfather, sitting tall and straight behind the wheel, his braids moving in the wind. He was steering straight down the road. His eyes twinkled with pleasure. He was getting used to driving his popping machine. Somehow I wasn’t so afraid any more . . . When the road flattened out, Grandfather sang his wolf song. This was the same song he had sung as a young warrior when he returned to camp with horses taken from the enemy.

Winter roads ...

Though I'm a true fan of long Montana drives, I'll confess to slightly mixed emotions about doing it in the winter. There's the whole snow thing, of course, and the ridiculously short days, and the frigid north wind that seems to appear every time you stop for a bathroom break. But there are real joys, too, that you just don't experience in the summertime. There are fewer tourists, and the winter light makes for great photographs, and the snow itself is often really lovely.

Here's a photo I took on Saturday to illustrate some of that. This is US 191, somewhere between Big Timber and Harlowton.

Quintessential road ...

This is one of my favorite photos from the last couple of weeks ... I shot it a few miles southwest of Utica, on the road heading up the Judith River towards the sapphire country. Everyone who explores Montana knows scenes like this, and to me it's a quintessential part of the state.

Madison Valley ...

When I sat down this morning I realized I was about to make my 200th post in this blog ... who would have thought? Not me.

Anyhow, since the open road has been such a big part of this journal so far, I thought another highway picture would be a proper commemoration. Here's a shot I took several days ago, driving through the upper Madison Valley just before sunset.

Roads to romance ...

There's no doubt (at least to me) that maps provide the greatest recreational reading imaginable. And old maps can be particularly fascinating, both for their period graphics and because they provide fascinating insights on how the human landscapes of the world are changing.

The Montana map that most people know, of course, is the official highway map that's been published by the state since 1935. The current version is computer-generated and informative and handsome, but for real visual appeal you just can't beat the state's earliest maps. The Department of Transportation website has scans of the cover panels of of those first maps, and all the pre-World War II ones are great. This one, I think, is my favorite:

Montana moonrise ...

Last night was an absolutely stellar Montana evening. Driving east towards Bozeman a little after dark, I marveled at a clear, deep-blue sky and a huge moon, not quite full, rising over the Bridgers. It was gorgeous, and made the whole day worthwhile.

I didn't stop to take a photo, but the evening reminded me of a very similar one when I did, almost exactly two years ago. Here's the shot I took in 2007 ... I was near the top of Cottonwood Hill, a little east of Cardwell.

Autumn sun ...

I'm a summer person, without a doubt ... but there's also no doubt that this is a fine time of year in Montana. The winter light makes for striking photographs, and the snowy mountains can be extraordinarily evocative. And of course the sky is as big as ever.

Here's a shot I took last Saturday, driving south through Beaverhead County. Those are the Centennial Mountains in the distance.