Frank Hurley was an Australian photographer, explorer, and filmmaker. Among his adventures were Antarctic expeditions including the legendary Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition under Ernest Shackleton (the aborted attempt to cross the continent) and the earlier, lesser-known, Australasian Antarctic Expedition, a successful scientific effort led by Douglas Mawson.
Here we see a portrait from Mawson expedition. The subject is of of meteorologist Cecil Madigan, who has returned to camp in the middle of a blizzard, resulting in dramatic ice buildup over his face and goggles.
I dutifully drove back to the lodge and fetched our morning coffee. We had previously determined that our main vague waypoint, Yellowstone National Park, was not readily reachable from the spur into Idaho we had taken. So we returned to Montana and resumed our course south along Interstate 93.
We stopped for a walk in Darby, Montana, a town that has maintained an Old
The Darby Marshal’s Office
West theme on its main street to such extent that even their police station is decorated with an western facade, complete with cow skull mounted over the main entry, and is called the Marshal’s Office. I wandered into a sporting goods store, but found it mediocre. We lunched at another diner. Before leaving, I wandered into a store offering handmade Stetson-style headgear with no real intent to buy and couldn’t coax the owner into conversation. Oh well, that’s perfectly fair for a tire kicker.
We reentered Idaho from a more favorable position and somewhere along the highway the landscape changed again. The plains became flatter and more arid, the mountains drew closer and more violent in shape. The color palette emphasized yellow and orange reds. We stopped for a short walk up a pass serving as the start to a long distance trail. Maybe if my companion had younger bones…
During the routine of breaking camp, I was assigned to find our morning coffee. I went back to the Missoula strip and found a Starbucks in a Target. Such a departure this trip has been from our wilderness ventures into Canada!
At a gas station in Lolo, we decided to step into the neighboring state of Idaho and vaguely set a town called Elk City as our destination. We liked the name. While setting our course beside the pumps, a stranger told my father he was the spitting image of a Forest Service doctor who died ten years ago. I began calling him “Doc.” As we broke west and entered the Bitterroot National Forest, the hilly plains became sparse pine forest upon the hills and mountains again. We saw ranches and small farms on either side of the road, but also evidence of wildfire in the previous season. Each of these little farms is marked by a ranch gate: two vertical pieces support a third horizontal beam that protrudes from each end, like serifs in text. Sadly, there was not actually a home behind each gate, likely taken in the fires.
Scholarly interpretation of this piece usually notes the context of the Napoleon’s French Empire encompassing all of Germany when considering this scene of a lone French cavalryman. He is dismounted, carrying just a saber, which seems so feeble in the dark German forest. A crow looks on from atop a cut tree stump to give certainty to the coming conclusion of the story.
But here, we’ve included it for its more superficial themes.
