I heart Montana

The big sky country.

I’ve wanted to see it for ever. Now, I pinch myself. This is it.

And, it is everything I have seen and read about it, except that it is tactile and immediate.

Montana is beautiful.

It is historic frontier country. It is the massive Rocky Mountains and the wide open spaces, all rolled into one massive piece of geography.

Luckily for her who has a passionate aversion to winding vertiginous mountain roads, the explorers Lewis and Clark traversed through Montana and they used rivers to guide them through the vast ranges. America’s road-builders also have used the rivers.

The result is some not too terrifying and utterly beautiful roads following the Clark Fork.

Oh, the gorgeous changing landscape.

One can just sit in the car sighing "aaah".

The river, wide and winding, shallow and flat with broad pebble bases and beaches, with lush little islands and little tributaries tinted yellow with green weed and algae. The water so bright and clean, rushing and darting and swirling over rocks, then spreading peacefully in places, rarely very deep at this time of the year.

The people use it a lot. They raft and fish and canoe. One spots fly fishermen here, a canoe there, kids playing there…

In Missoula where the river narrows a bit and rushes around an island, I saw them surfing. Yes, surfboards.

Young people throwing their surfboards into the rapids and then jumping in and riding them on the spot in the swirling torrent of rapid. Truly. I took photos.

They must be the world’s most inland surfers, the kids of Missoula.

Missoula is a university town spread across one of those perfect Rocky Mountain valleys. The mountains rise, peeking snow-spotted peaks in the distance, all around the town. As seems to be a fashion, a big M has been marked on one of the steep slopes above the town. It stands for the University of Montana. The kids of a local catholic school have copied and put an L on another hill. Naughty, I say.

We stay at a LaQuinta on the edge of town. They’re reliable, quality traveller accommodation and we like them. They always have a pool, a guest laundry and an excellent all-included breakfast, as well as good beds and fast, free wireless Internet. This one is beside a wonderful fast-running gurgling stream - another source of mountain water running into the river and then off eventually to the Pacific ocean.

Missoula is a town with a slightly arty bent. It has an old historic section of town with some splendid architecture and a controversy raging over its preservation. It has a big theatre called The Wilma. It has stunning bookshops. It has an Insectorium which we visit (of course) to see spiders and stick insects and even this charming tobacco caterpillar.

It has the most adorable public ashtray I have ever seen - beautified by a bed of flowers, right there on the pavement of the main street.

Oh, and it has parking meters. They don’t charge much but, oh my, they must have cost a lot. Missoula is so far ahead in the city parking business it just ain’t true. And goodbye parking inspectors. The ticket machine is part of a computer network. You have to tell it your number plate and pay by credit card. $2 for 2 hours, as it happens. No ticket. We wait and worry about no ticket until a local comes along and tells us that tickets are yesterday.

Today, the parking authorities know exactly how long you have been there. It’s on the computer record. For ever. “Smart parking,” I love it, swoons Bruce.

The Missoula food front? Hmm. One night we dine at a Mexican which is my idea of hell and another at a Japanese steak house which is the full knife-juggling cliche with average food made interesting by the young sports jocks who shared our table. One was an NFL player and another a former basketball player who now participated in the TV American Gladiator show. Fit? You betcha.

Out of Missoula the road curves through mountains growing less lush. On one side, they are simply coated with dense pine trees and on the other, the trees are thin. They just dapple the slopes.

There is so much wilderness. It is daunting. Endless impenetrable virgin landscape full of bears and elk and moose and wolves.

A park ranger was killed here this very week. He was riding his bike through a forest trail and surprised a grizzly bear which knocked him off the bike and mauled him to death. A ranger, no less!

And between the ranges of mighty mountains are one after another broad, open valleys. This is where the ranchers are with their cattle and horses. Lovely salubrious farms - and some a bit on the scruffy side. Farmers have a habit across the world of not throwing things out just in case… And America has this transportable home and trailer thing. I wonder if anyone has ever counted how many there are.They certainly can be a blight on an beautiful landscape.

We pause at Coeur d’Alene where a resort town has grown around a great freshwater lake. We drive past an odd plethora of thrift shops and then suddenly are at a big, showy hotel beside which is a vast acreage of moored power boats, all under cover. There are seaplanes on the lake, too. Oh, this is big money. We walk a stunning floating pier erected all the way around the marina - one spot elevated to allow the boat access. But the thing we like best about Coeur d’Alene is its name.

Back on the 90, heading east.

As we bypass a flyspeck town called Clinton, the Rockies start showcasing themselves as real rockies - massive rocks and boulders. The pine trees still grow, sometimes right on top where some crevice has allowed topsoil to settle. They perch on veritable rock faces. In every possible chink, there grows a tree.

And then another valley, rimmed by those beautiful blue mountains, big horizons.

I could go on and on. The landscape does, ever changing, never boring, always just sheer lovely wonder.

I am so glad we are here.

We have run out of the Clark Fork. It turned into a trickle. Next we see the Jefferson River - and now the Gallatin.

Oh, and we just passed a sign pointing to a town called Three Forks - “Montana’s favourite small town”.

And a goods train a mile long - the Burlington Northern Santa Fe line.

We also passed the Continental Divide. From now on, the rivers are running east to the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic.

And we are heading to Big Sky, Montana.