Hiking a Mountain Trail - Pony, Montana

May 15, 2004

Click on any image for a larger view.



Scott and I had arrived at the cabin Friday at about 11 at night, and had decided not long before to spend the following day hiking in the mountains near a little, and I mean little, town called Pony. This town is so small they probably originally wanted to call it Horse, but decided that would have been false advertising.

Actually, Pony is a very pretty town, and I was a little disappointed that we didn't get to explore it a little. But I'm sure we'll be back before too long.

I understand that the picture you see on the left will soon be hanging in the National Gallery in D.C., under the title 'Skip on Rock with Water Underneath No. 6.'

Scott's neighbor Brian had stopped by earlier in the day, and so we invited him along. Having nothing better to do on a Saturday, he quickly accepted the offer.

By the way, Scott took all the photos you'll see on this page, which is sort of why you won't see him in any of them. It's not that we didn't think of taking any of him, but he has this thing about having two heads.

The three of us hiked up the mountain for about two and a half hours, and the trail for the most part follows the stream you'll see in many of these images.

My sorry candy ass is in no way up to handling the extremely thin air up here yet. Having lived my entire life at sea level, I must confess to being the anchor on our trek. I had to make fairly frequent stops just to get my breath back from walking! The grade was not steep at all, in fact barely noticable in many places, but that air: there is simply so little oxygen in it that you have to suck ten times more of it into your lungs to prevent yourself from feeling like a thirteen year old huffing paint thinner. (Not that I would know what that feels like; we only huffed premium unleaded when I was a kid.)

Still, the scenery was absolutely beautiful. Having lived on both coasts, and in fairly large cities at that, I had never seen such wide open spaces and mountains like this. Scott says Montana is his favorite of places, and it's easy to see why when you walk a trail like this one.

Um... I'm not quite sure why Scott took the picture on the left here. He may have been trying to say something like, 'You think you got sticks where you come from? We got sticks here in Montana, too. Just check out these babies.'

If you look through the sticks in this one you can see the stream in the background. As I said, the trail follows the stream most of the way, and the constant sound of rushing water makes for nice background music as you make your way up the mountain.

You'll see in later shots the source of the water. That's right, melting snow. Seeing snow in the middle of May was definitely a new experience for me. I mean, I saw plenty of snow living in New York City, but I'm pretty sure I never saw any in mid May.

Yup. And here it is. The snow. In fact, the plan was basically to just hike up as far as we could until the snow stopped us. Frankly, since I was wheezing like some little kid with asthma, I tried to convince Scott and Brian that the snow you see to the right was absolutely impassible, and any attempt to go beyond it would be no more successful than that guy who died trying to get to the north pole, and probably ate a few of his buddies for good measure. Not that I was going to cook and eat Scott or Brian... there was no way to make a fire out there.

You know how Texans are always bragging about how everything there is bigger? Honestly, I've never quite understood exactly why that's a bragging point. I mean, is everything bigger in Texas? Does that mean that if you get a boil on your bum in Texas it's going to be the size of a watermelon? What about slugs? Are slugs in Texas the size of economy cars? It'd take a lot of salt to melt them if so.

Well, I think Montana folk could definitely brag about the size of some of these rocks they got laying around. But just from the few I've met so far, I just don't think people in Montana are the type to go around bragging about much of anything. They seem to me a much too modest lot.

On a side note, I quickly learned they don't think too highly of prairie dogs. A local store has a sign out front announcing the opening of prairie dog season, and offering discounts on bullets.

Another indicator of the collective Montana psyche is betrayed by a picture Scott showed me he had taken of a bumper sticker tacked onto the wall of a local pub. It read, "Strip mining prevents forest fires." And there are a lot of mines around here.

In fact, just over on the nearest mountain from the cabin is an old gold mine. Scott and I took his truck up there this past Sunday, and saw some pretty interesting stuff. There are large mounds of very dissimilar and weird looking rocks that were blown out of the ground when workers dynamited closed entries to the mine. These are rocks, I would guess, formed way down in the depths of the earth that have never seen the light of day until: BOOM!



The two shots above show very nicely the beautiful, wide open view from the earlier section of the trail. I think they make an interesting pair because the one on the left shows how far you can see from many parts of the trail. And I like the photo on the right because of the contrasting slopes from the foreground to the background.

The two below are just nice shots of some of the more open sections of the trail. That's Brian walking in front, and me behind him, sticking in his draft to make my walk easier. (Present and former motorcycle roadracers will get that one.)



More snow. My warnings of the dire consequences we would face should we become stranded in these treacherous flows were falling on deaf ears. I then began to suspect they were counting on just such a catastrophe, and that I would end up the main course. I considered making a run for it back down the trail to safer ground, but decided against letting on that I knew what they were up to. (The thin air was making me paranoid.)

Actually, I think this was the place on the way back where I was walking out in front, and as I crossed the snow I wondered if Scott was going to peg me with a snowball. I quickly put the thought out of my head; after all, we are now both in our forties, and we left that sort of behavior behind long ago. We are now mature adults, grown men. Then I got smacked square in the back with a snowball.

I really like this shot. The thing that amazed me as we got further up the mountain was the fact that we were in short sleeves most of the time, yet there were icicles hanging from the branches over the stream. I know to those of you who may be used to living in climates like this it is quite common, but to a flat-lander new to Montana it's quite surprising.

You might see a shot like this and think, "Boy, must have been cold up there." But the temperature was in the lower sixties, if I remember correctly. This is the farthest north I've ever been in the states (I once visited Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia, so it's not the absolute farthest north I've ever been), and I've been surprised at how mild it is, at least at this time of year.

Our neighbors tell me that because we're in a valley known as, for some reason I don't know, the banana belt, the area around the cabin doesn't get the kind of big snowstorms they get elsewhere in the state. I haven't decided whether I'm happy or not about that. I guess I'll hold off a decision until winter.

Okay, before anyone gets the wrong idea, I want to make one thing clear about this picture: I am not taking a whiz. My hands are in my coat pockets, not aiming my John Thomas down into the water. I mean, if I was, you think Brian would just be standing there like that?

That bridge was pretty tricky to navigate, at least with the sneakers I was wearing. The bridge has a thin covering of pretty slippery snow, as you can see, and my sneakers are worn just enough to make them perfectly smooth on the bottom. Traction is not in their vocabulary. In fact, they seemed to conspire on any snowy or muddy patch to attempt to plant me square on my zodnik. (Extra points will be awarded for correctly identifying the language and meaning of 'zodnik'.)

A couple of nice shots of two of the bridges follow, sans Brian and the guy taking a whiz. Oh, what a giveaway!



Scott is into pointing his camera very closely at stuff like flowers...







                                                    ...and more flowers...















...and, um, ants.









And finally, a view of the very mountain we hiked up. Scott thinks in the two and half hours we were walking, we probably made it somewhere between halfway and two thirds of the way up. As I said earlier, it was my girly, sissy self that slowed our pace. But once I get used to the perenial oxygen shortage that Montana suffers from, we should be able to make it closer to the top, until we are truly stopped by snow... or eaten by bears.

Yes, I am afraid of bears. I grew up in Florida, where the most dangerous things are harmless, cute and cuddly alligators, copper heads, and sinkholes. Then I went on to Atlanta, where the most dangerous things were the police, and then New York City; the most dangerous thing when I was there was Rudolph Giuliani. From there I ended up in San Franscisco, then Oakland/Berkeley. The most dangerous things out there were hippies. You don't think hippies are dangerous? Then you've never been walking down Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, and had one sneak up behind you and read aloud their poetry.


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