Keeping Busy & Paying Attention

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Crazy Mountains from Big Timber

Mountains are supposed to look like mountains: a chain of peaks miles in length that, in North America, generally trend north and south. Any isolated high terrain is: a butte—not as high as nearby mountains and less rugged; or a mesa—flat-topped, capped with some type of resistant rock. But driving through an area identified on maps as Central Montana, the rough definitions I have don’t fit.

The broad, rolling valleys of the Shields and Smith rivers have numerous examples of mountains that don’t fit: the Crazy, Castle, and Little Belt mountains. They are isolated clumps of mountains, but the Crazys  have a glacier-carved peak over 11,000 feet high. They all share a random placement in these valleys and the same or similar type of rock with similar ages. The Bearpaw, Judith, Little Rocky, Highwood and Adel mountains are also part of these 50 million year old islands within a sweeping plain. Younger than the burst of geologic activity that over millions of years formed the Rocky Mountains, these magma intrusions are outliers and punctuate the landscape with forested and snow covered slopes, cloud washed peaks, and intrigue.


The Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, originally the McGill Museum, was founded in 1957, it was renamed in 1965, and began it’s claim to fame in 1982 when Jack Horner was hired as the curator of paleontology. At that time, I was a very minor someone on the fringes of regional paleontological comings and goings, and remember the stir that this caused and the subsequent ascent of the museum and it’s work on the national scene.

The other day was the first time I visited the Museum of the Rockies; I plan on recommending everyone take the time to do the same—it visually, educationally, and scientifically contributes to our understanding of paleontology and the regional landscape that these early creatures, from smallest to largest, inhabited.

What has stayed with me from that visit is the extreme range from the immense scale of the largest dinosaurs to the smallest. That and the processes on the vertebrae that kept the tail from dragging on the ground or whipping around.


For some of us, becoming aware of our natural surroundings started with wildflowers; they allow you to take all the time you need to observe, shuffle through a guide book, read and re-read, until you have figured out what it is that you are looking at so studiously. Maybe you then progress through the larger then smaller species of wildlife or those that visit your space most often, then graduate to identifying birds. Somewhere in the mix might be mushrooms, or constellations, or grasses; but if you catch the bug (which is another direction your explorations can take you) you will find yourself engrossed in learning about something you have seen or are hoping to see.

The other day I saw the greatest number of glacier lilies that I have ever seen! Not just a small patch or several small patches, but thousands of blooming, yellow, glacier lilies. Photographs did not do them justice, maybe due to the fact that I attempted to photograph them during the grey, drizzly morning and not the brief sunshiny afternoon before when I didn’t have a camera with me. Take my word for it—it was an awesome sight.

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