The Rocky Mountain Front (Sun River)

Sun River (Part I)

Sun River Canyon allows the Sun River to escape from Gibson Reservoir and the Sawtooth Mountains along Montana’s geological overthrust belt. We Montanans call these abrupt and upturned mountains the “Front Range,” or simply, “the Front.” The Front is a breathtaking sight to behold. This is the exact place where the Rocky Mountains swell suddenly, almost brutishly, against our big sky, lifting themselves upright into the clouds with all the fury of rockets to the moon, powered by tectonic forces that defy comprehension. The mountains here bring to a permanent end the grass and river-stitched Great Plains and mark the edge of the Bob Marshall Wilderness, the oldest established wilderness in the nation. The Front is a wall of green timber and gray-blue stone cliff fronts that accordion across the horizon, standing almost like giant playing cards fanned into full-houses and held upright in display by the knuckles and fingers of earthen hands. Also held upright are crooked sedimentary knives, jagged swords of stone, and whole building blocks dredged from the basement of our geologic structures—all of this smashed together in the sky above us and held in place, seemly, by the clouds. If you drove along the Front only once in your life, you would never forget the mountainous exhibit. If, like me, you live nearby, a single trip will never do.

--Mitchell Hegman