2005 Road Trip to Montana 07-18-11

One of my best road trips was in July 2005 when I drove to Kalispell, MT, to take a five-day class with Ruth McDowell at The Quilt Gallery.  qg@quiltgallery.net   I traveled from Placentia north to Portland, OR, east to Kalispell,  south to Ft Collins, CO, west on I-70 to I-15 and south through St George, UT, Las Vegas, NV, and home.   I was gone three weeks and stopped along the way to visit friends.  It was a great trip which I would repeat in a second if I had the chance.  I talked a bit about it in a post on July 9, 2011 - http://delquilts.blogspot.com/2011/07/memories-of-montana-2005.html  

 

I am always talking about food, I know.  Obviously from my heft it is one of my favorite things in life. There is a bakery in Kalispell that makes the best bear claws I have ever eaten (I'll dream about them now).  I dubbed them "Grizzly Bear Claws" because of their size.  I put a dollar bill in to give a comparison.  I cannot find the name of the bakery, but I imagine a lot of people in town could point the way if it is still open. 

 

Southern California is tree deprived, so whenever I am out of the LA Basin I look for trees to hug.  After Ruth's class was over I drove east to Glacier National Park, one of the few western parks I had not previously visited.  Along the way I took a stroll on this path in a larch forest - maybe more of a larch wood lot!  The path led off the parking lot of a motel and just pulled me along.  It is surely a short cut to somewhere, but I didn't go far enough to see where.  I hugged a few larches and enjoyed the wildflowers.  

 

Here are the tops of the larches against sunset clouds - being so far north it was quite late, maybe 9pm.  People who have never lived in the very northern states are always dubious when I say that as children we could play outside (in Portland, OR) until 10pm or whenever it got dark.

 

One thing about traveling alone is having to pay attention to where I am driving.  At Glacier they have these reconditioned 1930's "convertible" buses that provide tremendous views for the passengers, so I became a passenger for a few hours. I was very pushy and seated myself first - next to the driver.  Everyone else was with someone so they got to sit together.  Wasn't I thoughtful?  There was a great deal of construction along the way, so I'm not sure I would have wanted to drive the "Going-to-the-Sun" highway anyway - the drop off the unprotected side of the road is thousands of feet.

The little bits of red in the middle of the picture are some of the red buses stopped at a viewpoint.  The views are so expansive that everything man-made seems Lilliputian by comparison.  Gorgeous, gorgeous scenery.

 

These strange plants are bear grasses which seemed to be blooming on every slope.  I had never seen real bear grass before.   Since we were at such a high altitude there were many flowers blooming in late July that bloomed months before at lower levels. 

 

I drove back through Kalispell and south to the National Bison Range National Wildlife Refuge (established in 1908 by edict of the great conservationist President Theodore Roosevelt).  Ruth McDowell had visited earlier in the month and recommended it - she later made a wonderful quilt with a similar view.  http://www.ruthbmcdowell.com/clients/rbm/ShowQuilt.cfm?Quilt=buffaloquilt

It was a long slog on a dirt/gravel road, but I loved it and will go back again someday. 

I think about this trip frequently - especially in July when I long to be somewhere among tall trees and singing streams and slopes of wild flowers.