(I originally
posted this in June of 2010. I have had
no time for writing for the last two days and am reposting this blog because it
is one of my personal favorites.)
Montana’s plate is set with a staggering relief of sixty-seven clearly
identifiable mountain ranges, some flaring up, almost inexplicably, at center
of vast and thoroughly encompassing plains.
Within Montana’s far-flung ranges, nearly six-hundred peaks
scramble to elevations above 10,000 feet above sea level. The lofty Beartooth Mountains, located in the
southeastern part of the state near Red Lodge, are far and away the altitude
kings, having some twenty-seven stony peaks that scrape clouds well above
12,000 feet. As a point of fact (one
that often evades the folks in western Montana) the only peaks in the entire
state that rise above 12,000 feet are those within the Beartooth Range near
Billings.
Interestingly, some of our more dramatic chains—those that seem
freshly axed from stone and on the verge of toppling over due to imbalance—lack
utterly any peaks above the 10,000 foot mark.
The Swans, the Missions, and even our Front Range, three of the most
rugged and arresting strings, are included in this. These ranges do, however, offer some of the
greatest relief. The most relief can be
found in Glacier Park, where some mountains climb a full 7,000 feet from valley
floor to powder horn peak.
The theatrical ambitions of our mountains ends with neither the
handsome nor the enterprising climbs and runs of landscape. These vertical ranges both breed and grapple
with stormfronts. The peaks continuously
bat clouds back and forth. Chill winds
spill down into the warmer valleys from ice fields. Ranges gobble up entire lightning
storms. Water leaps down from chevron
plates and overhanging shelves and shreds down toward creeks and rivers
below. Whole forests of trees sway in
unison. Herds of elk flow into meadows
like tide waters into open bays.
Implausible differences in annual rainfall can be found in the
vicinity of our mountains. The highest
summits might claw from the stormy skies up to four-hundred inches of snow in a
single season, while the long valleys below remain mostly empty and dry. This, wedded with wildly unpredictable summer
rains often accounts for improbable variance, ranging from a total of sixty
inches of rainfall per year in the peaks, to well below fourteen inches of
annual moisture on the plains. A drive
of only thirty miles might take you from landscapes that gather fifty inches of
rain each year to land that survives on merely a dozen. Here in Helena, where I live, we average just
slightly less than a dozen inches of rain.
Conversely, the deep green forests just off Lake McDonald, in Glacier
Park, is the furthest inland rain forest in the West. Certain locations within that small area
receive over two-hundred inches of rain a year.
I find the isolated ranges at center of plains, the so-called
island ranges the most fascinating. And
they are, in nearly every sense, like an island, rising in stark clarity from
our extended plains—blue castles massed above blonde oceans of grass. These islands hold in isolation conifer
forests and elk and wolverine and moose and bear. They generate and sustain their own
weather. You have to hold in awe anything
capable of that.
— Mitchell Hegman
photos?
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