An Eastern Montana View

I attended a social gathering several years ago in the Bitterroot Valley. As the hostess stood nearby, I admired the mountains framed by the tall windows in her home. “The view out my window is the most stunning in the state!” she said. “It’s why we moved here!”

I told her I had an ocean view out my window and she looked puzzled. “I thought you lived in eastern Montana?”

“I do!” I replied.

My genetic roots run deep in the high plains of northern and southeastern Montana. In the early 1900s, when my homesteader grandparents stepped off the Empire Builder in Rudyard, a small town on the Hi-Line, the open space that swallowed them up must have felt as immense as the Atlantic Ocean they had just crossed. I’ve lived all of my life in and around Rudyard, Great Falls, Billings, Birney and now Miles City. I love the long views of landscape and skyscape.

People often form an opinion of eastern Montana as they sail down the interstate on cruise control. Through this myopic windshield view, I’ve heard words to describe this part of the state: boring, dull, empty and endless.

We boast about iconic landscapes like Yellowstone and Glacier National parks and the Bob Marshall Wilderness complex, and rightly so, but there is plenty to boast about in eastern Montana in regards to the scenery.

All you have to do is slow down ... and look. Cloud shadows skim across grasslands, buttes and breaks, badlands, island mountain ranges, rivers and creek bottoms. A prairie pothole, one of many that dot the northeastern tier of the state, can mirror a brilliant sunset or float the moon on its shimmering surface.

Thunderclouds sprout on the horizon as suddenly as a puffball on the prairie. Sandstone pinnacles glow in the golden light of late afternoon. Evelyn Cameron, British pioneer and photographer who settled in Terry, Mont., noted in her 1883 diary: Ate lunch amongst curios sandstone formations. Such beautiful coloured scoria stones lie over these divide buttes, various shades of red, peacock blue, mauve, green, grey and browns. And in a letter to her mother she wrote, “…summer thunderstorms provide a rather good show.”

Over a century later, I stood with a relative of Cameron’s on a ridge overlooking the Terry Badlands, her first trip to Montana from England. The only sound was a red-tail hawk’s piercing call that floated on the wind. She took in that oceanic view and said, “I can see why she [Evelyn Cameron] stayed.”

The Montana Wilderness Association provides several resources to help people get out and explore public lands across the state, even in far-flung eastern Montana. A map guide, Buttes, Breaks, and Badlands, focuses on southeastern Montana and aims to promote geotourism by highlighting the area’s little-known wildlands, small towns, their history and culture. The Summer Wilderness Walks program offers guided hikes by experienced volunteers into public lands with wilderness characteristics. The on-line site, hikewildmontana.org, features a statewide trail guide to public lands, including information about nearby towns that offer a variety of enmities from the best milk shakes ever to directions to museums, restaurants, historic hotels, and local events.

Montana public lands, maintained by the Bureau of Land Management, are unique and of intrinsic worth. The communities that value and promote the Montana landscapes for its quiet recreational opportunities - hiking, camping, birding, hunting and bike riding - benefit from the growing tourism industry, both west and east of the divide. It’s a reason some people come, and stay.

Karen Aspevig Stevenson has portrayed Evelyn Cameron in a one-woman show throughout the state and was the silhouette actress in the MT PBS documentary, “Evelyn Cameron: Portrait of a Worthy Life.” She is also the author of the book, “Elsie Fox: Portrait of an Activist.”