High on Big Sky

Big Sky, they call it.

It is America’s answer to Switzerland - mighty snow-capped mountain ranges and valleys of rushing rivers. Resorts for skiing and snowboarding in the winter and for action sports like mountain biking, hiking, and zip-lining in the summer.

It is the most sensational landscape up there with those wild, primitive, towering, snow-streaked peaks. It is very high country.

I’m not good with altitude. I’m the one who did not get beyond the luggage collection in LaPaz, Bolivia and had to be carried to a hotel bed unable literally to lift a finger until some lovely doctor came and injected me with magic and told me henceforth to drink lots of mate de coca for the altitude.

Big Sky is not as high as La Paz. It is only 7,600ft while LaPaz is 13,000. Nonetheless, the air is noticeably thin up there and even Bruce noticed how easily he puffed out on fairly ordinary exertion. I find it enervating. Blech. My vim vanishes.

I am piqued to find that I’m not at my peak in this peak of mountain beauty.

And, I have so much to puzzle about.

How many cow hides are in the hotel decor?

Wow, this wild mountain man hunter decor is the last word in macho kitsch.

It is heavily toned in browns overwhelmingly leather and wood dominant with lots of iron and bronze . In one foyer is the biggest (and best) bronze bear sculpture you ever saw. If there are not enough antlers

on the poor stuffed creatures on the wall, there are hundreds more incorporated in chandeliers and light fittings throughout the property.

Then there are the cow hides. It’s cow hide city.

Of course we have our own cow hide affixed to the wall in our room. And massive leather armchair and deep leather sofa. The walls all dark brown. Wood, wood, wood. Including the bed. It just looks like wooden panels until you pulled it down for sleep. Yes, a drop-down bed! With a stone fireplace at one end, he room is long and thin and dark and brown and…just

like a bear’s cave!

Saving grace is the view from the little window. Ye gods, That huge mountain peak is so close! It is almost in the room. It is intensely huge.

After complaining vigorously about the insanity of a drop-down queen bed, I drag the giant armchair to the window and slump into it, gasping not only for oxygen in the thin air but for the sheer glorious wonderment of the mountain.

I am to make that chair and that view the centre of the universe for the next two days.

Bruce takes the ski lifts up to the top of two mountains and is utterly exhilarated by the scale of the landscape and its mighty beauty. He would like me to join him.

But I have always said that I like to look up at mountains and not down from them. I just make a cup of green tea and take it to my chair by the window to gaze upon that grand rocky face.

As the day wanes, the colours melt around it into softest pinks and caramels and then, as light fades, it becomes a dramatic silhouette against the night sky.

Then comes the morning. Oh, what a sight to meet the eye as the first rays of sun beam on the top of it. Bright orange. It turns bright orange.

And one is seeing this from bed! Albeit a dropdown bed with no side tables. That mighty mountain makes one forgive all else.

Lone Peak is its name.

There are several restaurants and a wee skiers' shopping mall with lots of eclectic legging apparatus and puffy jackets. Not a shopping paradise for me, much to Bruce’s delight. We do a lot of people watching on our evening perambulations.

We can’t resist snooping on a wedding. Blow me down if the groom and his seven grey-suited groomsmen don’t whoosh down from the mountain on mountain bikes. Then the bridal party descend the slope via ski lift to the sound of bagpipes.

Leaving Big Sky is even lovelier than arriving. I think it is because we are going in the same direction as the Gallatin River which rushes through the valley on its rocky bed. We take time to watch the white water rafters this time, and also the fly fishermen. We look at some of the Montana mountain riverside real estate. A cool couple of million and you, too, can have a log cabin.

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.