History

Winter is the toughest time in Montana and December is when winter asserts itself.  The temperatures drop significantly and the ground hardens.  The daylight hours shrink noticeably each day.  The nights get longer, colder.  The wind.  The merciless, ever-present, relentless wind drives the cold

This has been a very mild winter for us.  For those familiar with the northern Rockies area, that is a fairly unusual thing to hear about us.  Our January was warm and dry, and was a welcome respite from the past couple of years where we’ve been pummeled with nasty winter weather.

Montana, if anything, is a state of well defined seasons.  If you’re here enough years, you can plausibly argue the seasons can be extreme. I think it’s the combination of northern latitude, elevation, and of course mountain influence which fosters the weather behavior. 

The first full moon of the calendar year is called the Wolf Moon.  This year, on January 10 in the northwestern US it was spectacular.  This year’s Wolf Moon was also a lunar eclipse, as the earth passed partly between the moon and the sun.  In this scenario the earth’s atmosphere refracts the su

Early February is probably the toughest part of living in Montana.  Its frigid cold, snow is piling up, rivers are icing over, and the cold north winds put us in -30F windchill territory.

 John Vollertson is a local writer and historian, and accompanied us on a summer pack trip into the North Fork of the Sun River near our summer camp at Gates Park.  He was doing some research for a book on 19th century railroad tie cutters.  The tie cutters were some real tough guys who would spend the winters in the mountains cutting down trees, hewing flat sides on them, and cutting them to length for the railroads that were being built across the West.  John's research was into the men and methods of cutting and transporting these railroad ties from the headwaters of nearby rivers and getting them to railroads.