Kishenehn ...

Nowadays, the park rangers in Glacier mostly spend the winter months holed up in a handful of the larger ranger stations, but back in the early days of the park many of them lived in the wilderness year-round, in primitive log cabins often completely inaccessible by road. It was a rugged and solitary life, especially in the winter.

Kishenehn was one of the most remote of Glacier's backcountry ranger stations, just a few miles from the Canadian border along the North Fork. The park stationed a single ranger there, summer and winter, for nearly thirty years ... the only park employee for miles. The place has been mostly deserted for over seventy years, now, but the old buildings are still up there.

This great old photo recorded the rarest of events at Kishenehn -- a party. The date is Thanksgiving, 1933, and all of Glacier's west-side rangers have gathered at Kishenehn to celebrate. These are the men who protected Glacier park nearly eighty years ago.


(And I need to confess to a self-indulgent reason for posting this particular photo -- I recently wrote an article on Kishenehn for Montana: The Magazine of Western History, and it was published in the Winter 2010 issue. It was a fun project, writing about a part of the world that I love.)

Montana Backroads ...

This blog has developed something of a highway theme over the last few days, and we'll keep that going for one more entry. Here are a few lines from a song called "Montana Backroads," which was featured in Nanci Griffith's 1978 album There's A Light Beyond These Woods. The song was written by a man named Bruce Carlson, a long-time folk guitarist in Missoula.

Those honky-tonk bands still play old-time songs
Remembering how things used to be
Sitting at the bar with his head down in his hands
So alone with his memories
Lord, he's so alone with his memories

Now the bar is getting set to close, they say he's got to leave
But it feels like, Lord, he just arrived
So he downs his last shot as he's heading for the door
Getting ready for that long and lonely drive

In an old pickup truck, with his hat pulled down
He drives them old Montana backroads
Remembering half-forgotten times, and wondering where it's gone
And if he can still carry the load

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!

Butte Imperial ...

I thought I'd follow up yesterday's classic automobile photo with another of my favorites. This stately, down-and-out Chrysler Imperial was photographed in 1966 by William Gedney in uptown Butte.

Gedney was another fascinating twentieth-century American photogapher, known mostly for his rather gritty photos of people in Kentucky, San Francisco, and elsewhere. But he also took some fine roadtrip shots, and I'm glad he paused in Butte long enough to record this old car.

Red Chevrolet ...

I've seen a million photos of the Going-to-the-Sun Road over the years, but I found this one on the web recently and it immediately became one of my favorites. It's from a box of slides taken in June 1963 by an unknown family from Great Falls, on vacation in Glacier. They're heading up the east side of Logan Pass, and that's Going-to-the-Sun mountain in the background.

That old Chevrolet is just so wonderfully red.

Waiting for Godot ...

Today's quote is only partially about Montana, but it's evocative enough that it needs to be posted. This description of Highway 12 in Montana and the Dakotas is from the 1993 volume, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, by Kathleen Norris.

You should have filled your gas tank in Aberdeen, especially if you're planning to travel after dark. For many years there was no gasoline available at night (except in the summer) between Aberdeen and Miles City, Montana, a distance of nearly 400 miles. Currently there are two 24-hour stations in towns nearly 200 miles apart. On the last stretch, the 78 miles from Baker, Montana, to Miles City, there are no towns of all, just a spectacularly desolate moonscape of sagebrush. Farmers will usually give or sell a little gas to stranded travelers, and small-town police forces often have keys to the local service stations so they can sell you enough to get you on your way. But the message is clear: you're in the West now. Pay attention to your gas gauge. Pay attention, period.

But it's hard to pay attention when there is so much nothing to take in, so much open land that evokes in many people a panicked desire to get through it as quickly as possible. A writer whose name I have forgotten once remarked, “Driving through eastern Montana is like waiting for Godot.” I know this only because a Lemmon Public Library patron brought me the quote, wanting to know who or what Godot was.

Sky Motel ...

Here's one more photo from Drummond ... an old advertising sign for the Sky Motel, looming high over the new Conoco station.

I wonder what the movable letters at the bottom of the sign used to advertise ... could you get an espresso with your room at the Sky?

Mountain letters ...

The cultural geography of the American West is unique in many ways ... and one of the most intriguing is our odd habit of building giant letters on local hillsides. It seems like nearly every little town in the Mountain Time Zone has a hilltop monogram nearby -- the towns that have the setting for it, at least. And with Montana's abundance of topography, they're nearly ubiquitous. Only the Hi-line, with its shortage of mountains, misses out on the fad.

Most of the monograms commemorate both the town and the local high school ... usually, the school and its boosters build the letters and maintain them. That connection is particularly obvious in a few places, where the graduating classes annually hike up to their letter and paint the class year on a nearby rock. The result over time is a sea of numbers -- a fascinating combination of graffiti and small-town ritual.

I took this photo of Drummond's monogram yesterday, a grey winter morning with a January rain slowly melting the last of the snow.