October 5, 2010
We’ve just crossed the border into Montana, leaving our quick Idaho driving experience behind. We took the Idaho scenic byway and saw the Tetons from their western side, we drove through caverns, up a mountain, and back down to the plains at a 10 % grade.
The clouds here are so arresting. They are layered and full, they go on forever in defined strata, a variety of shades of grays and whites, they are stark against the landscape, which is long and everlasting. The hills are rolling and still covered in sage bush platte, like the plains of Yellowstone and Grand Tetons, but very different from the potato field flats of Idaho. In Idaho, we saw many trucks full of delicious fresh spuds carousing down the highway. Straight out of the ground taters have got to have a superior taste to those we buy in grocery stores, I wanted to pull over and start digging until I found one.
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| Check out a truck full of potatoes. |
We are in and out of valleys, and the clouds sit on the horizon. They look like toppers on a hill cake, their bottoms unseen because they dip below the hill. I am sure we’ve seen examples of all of the types of clouds, cumulus, cirrus, stratus. I remember learning about the 3 different cloud types in John Berno’s class at North Avondale. Leftover bits hang in the air, waiting to be burned off by the sun. Billowing, windswept, stretched cotton, painterly, the clouds are so low you could trace their shadows on the land and it would be accurate.
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| Quick gas station cumulus panorama, briefly out of the mountains. |
I can’t say enough that we are stunned by Montana, breath taken away by what surrounds us.
I can smell the eau de campfire that we’ve carried with us, I hope we can keep it up.
