Tuesday, September 13, 2016 (continued)
Dad spotted a sign for the National Bison Range and immediately turned off the highway. This is something that would have been a pin on the map had we bothered with any planning ahead of time. Theodore Roosevelt, distinguished for his contributions to the modern conservation movement (and counter intuitively shooting a lot of animals in the process), among his legacies, left the National Bison Range. It is a reserve encompassing a section of these plains and some small mountains within it, for the protection of the bison.
We paid $5 to drive the roads winding about the preserve and within minutes were rewarded with the sight of buffalo silhouettes on the hillside. We rounded a bend and encountered a herd of them, with some of them actually crossing the road just a few tens of feet away from us. I frantically worked my camera, leaning far outside the window, snapping away. As I filled a memory card, I ripped it from my camera, cut open the package to a fresh one I had just purchased (but hadn’t anticipated needing so quickly!) and resumed my photography.
For the second time on Tuesday, I was happily in awe. My sense of poetry is inadequate to describe how I was moved, but I’ll say that watching the buffalo is a privilege that touches upon much of what I imagine is the feeling of seeing families of elephants grazing.
We drove up the mountain and met a couple on a short foot trail we walked down. The woman was originally from Maine, but traveled to Montana with friends and eventually just remained. Atop the mountain, we learned the valley we were driving through was once wide, deep lake, bound by the Rocky Mountains on one side and the Bitterroot Range on the other. The mountain we stood atop was an island, which saw the passing of thirty cubic miles of water per hour as the glaciers melted.
With little light left in the day, we ate in Arlee, Montana. We failed to find a particular nearby campground, which I believe may have gone out of business, and elected to head south to the next big town, Missoula. Missoula is a small city, perhaps the largest in western Montana, but it does offer camping! We found a commercial KOA campground literally off the main commercial strip in a residential area. We set up our tents within rock throwing distance of an apartment building.
