Topography ...

As far as those maps go, I haven't been to either Gallup City or Lonesome Prairie (yet) ... but I have made a couple of visits to Boulder Pass. This is a photo from a backpacking trip in 2003, looking across Hole in the Wall Basin. Boulder Pass is in the center of the photo, with Boulder Peak off to the left.

Talk about topography!

Boulder Pass ...

This is the last old topo map that I'll post here for a long while ... a clipping to contrast with yesterday's relatively flat landscape.

Based on late 1930s cartography, the the image below shows the Boulder Pass and Hole in the Wall areas, in the far north edge of Glacier National Park. It's one of the most spectacular spots in a spectacular state, and creates a map that fulfills most peoples' image of what a topo should look like.

Lonesome Prairie ...

Here's a clipping from another old topographic map, with a place name and a look that's the quintessence of big chunks of eastern Montana. The location is a little northwest of Big Sandy, and the map is from 1906 ... and I bet the country is even more lonesome today.

Gallup City ...

As someone with an incurable case of wanderlust, I've long maintained that a good map is the greatest recreational reading there is. Topo maps are especially fascinating for someone enamored of a place as vast as Montana, in part because they reveal so many obscure place names that few of us have ever heard of.

I was looking through a list of old Montana topos recently, for example, and came across one titled "Gallup City" ... a name I didn't recognize at all, though it sounded it at least had the potential to be a fairly big deal. So I downloaded the map and took a look, and there it was, far off the beaten track between Conrad and Choteau. The map was from 1938, and just showed a small maze of random dirt roads and a few buildings ... pretty obviously an old oilfield camp.

And from the looks of things there's absolutely nothing left of Gallup City today ... but now I still want to drive up there and check the place out sometime.

The Crystal ...

One more neon photo for today ... this is the Crystal, a dark, blue-collar bar that's been on Bozeman's Main Street for decades.

This is a great sign, though it's actually a fairly recent creation ... the Crystal's original neon sign is now hanging inside the barroom. I confess that I know this because part of my misspent youth was mis-spent at the Crystal. Anticipatory historical research, I suppose ...

Bozeman neon ...

I love taking photos of old signs, and I've been doing that in Bozeman for years, now. The neon ones are the best, of course, and Bozeman has a few really great ones ... like this one, up on North 7th. Who wouldn't want to stay at a motel that has a sign lit up like that?

Campbell Lodge ...

I'm sure that if one's starting a business in a town named Glasgow, there can be an almost-irrestible temptation to market the enterprise using a Scottish theme. Hence the Campbell Lodge in Glasgow, Montana ... complete with a huge signboard featuring an improbable kilt.

The building itself is a standard piece of 1960s architecture -- something that Glasgow has in abundance, thanks to the short-lived boom caused by the brief life of Glasgow Air Force Base. And that's another story worthy of exploration someday ...

Sam Peckinpah ...

Mentioning Richard Brautigan here a few days ago brought to mind a few of the other celebrities who have called Livingston home since the 1970s. The list of literary and Hollywood figures with Livingston connections is impressive and long: Tom McGuane, Jimmy Buffet, Margot Kidder, Michael Keaton, Peter Fonda, Dennis Quaid, and on and on.

One of the most intriguing members of that group was Sam Peckinpah, the Hollywood director responsible for films such as The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs. Peckinpah leased a residential suite at the Murray Hotel in Livingston for years, and was a regular at the local bars, shooting pool and playing poker and drinking. He was quite a character, his activities providing the source material for stories that are still told in Livingston today. Here's one of the best-known, as recounted in a 2001 article written for the Missoulian by Vince Devlin. This version of the story came from an interview with Patty Miller, a former owner of the Murray:

Peckinpah loved to play poker, but, says Miller, "he was a terrible poker player - the worst." . . . A plaque in "Peck's Place" in the Murray Hotel tells of Peckinpah taking $1,000 into a high-stakes poker game in Livingston, and quickly losing $700 of it.

"Well boys," Peckinpah said, standing and picking up his last three hundred-dollar bills. "You ain't gonna get these."

And then he ate them.