Run 1 time: 64:06 + 2-minute kick
Kim Williams Nature Area
Run 2 time: 64:07 + 2-minute kick
Mount Sentinel M-Trail
A rare 2-night stay in one hotel room. A minor bonus: one more with no packing. My hotel was right on the river, which was a bigger bonus. Wasn’t sure where to go at first, so I headed up-river on the north side, but that turned out to be a quick dead end. I could see runners and bikers across the river, so I back-tracked and found a footbridge that took me over to the University of Montana campus.
Unfortunately, there was a football game the day I checked out, and it inflated the room rates considerably. $180ish the first night, $330ish the second night. When I booked it, our travel app gave me the average, and believe it or not, $255 a night is the median in Missoula. If I would have known the difference, I would have stayed just the one night and then picked the next city for the second night stay.
As I left town that Saturday morning, headed to Washington for a family wedding, I saw a man tending to an elk that had been struck by a vehicle, maybe his vehicle. I am not sure what he was doing. He was kneeling by the animal, his hand on its neck. Was he rendering care? Was he helping the spirit to release? Was he displaying remorse? It seemed a dangerous place to be ceremonial.
I had seen numerous animal crossing signs in my travel through Wyoming and Montana, including Elk Crossing, Deer Crossing, Bear Crossing, and even Bighorn Sheep Crossing. The ones that I found interesting had a mileage limit: an outline of an elk with Next 10 Miles under it. How do the elk know how to measure mileage?
The one animal I did not find represented on state signage is the one animal you see everywhere: the pronghorn antelope. Every time I drive through Wyoming and Montana, not to mention North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and Eastern Washington and Oregon, I see LOTS of antelope. Sometimes 200-300 in a day. They gather in small herds and graze or just bed down by the interstate.
If any game deserves some road signs, it is the antelope. There is more roadkill antelope in these regions than any other animal, though not as many as the roadkill deer you see in Wisconsin and Iowa. Why do the antelopes not get signs? Is this some kind of discrimination? Is there a game caste system at play?
A few days later I made the drive from Spokane down through Lewiston and onto Boise, and I saw some “Watch for Rock” signs, which was appropriate. I watched, and I saw some beautiful formations. I was happy to be prompted. In other places you will get “Falling Rock” or pictographs of boulders crushing stick figures in square cars, but that just tells you to be alert to danger. Being reminded to watch for rock, as an entity unto itself, provides a richer travel experience.
The second run was not so much the normal 10-minute run/5-minute walk, but the run-until-lung-failure/walk-until-just-breathing-hard. I took the trail up UM Mountain. That is not UM, as in what everyone in Montana starts a sentence with, but UM as is University of Montana. Typical. Of course they have their own mountain. It just formed for them through millions of years of plate tectonics, right next to the football stadium.
The trail cut back-and-forth up the slope to the giant white M on the hillside a 700 feet up from the valley floor. If you’ve ever wondered what a big letter on a mountainside looks like close up, what looks Majestic from below, looks godawful up close. Downwind from the top left corner, large sections of peeled-off white paint hung in the prairie grass. The view of the valley and distant mountains was to die for — literally, if you tried to run all the way up. I was prudent and took several walking breaks.
The wind was a-gustin’ up near the top of Mount Sentinel, which is its real human name. Not UM Mountain. It is a popular trail. Not sure how far it was to the top, maybe a mile or a little more. At least 50 other people on the trail at the same time as me. Good lord. What are these people trying to prove? We were already at 3200 feet elevation at the bottom.
I wish that I could get off I-90 and I-15 more when I am in Montana. Sometimes I cut across on a state highway, if I can, from one city to another. The drive from Great Falls to Columbia Falls is fantastic — you go right past the south edge of Glacier National Park. But the drive down from Columbia Falls toward Missoula, along Flathead Lake, is depressing. A lot of rundown houses and shacks, junk-filled properties, and tourist traps.
So long, Montana. See you next year.
Don't Make It a Habit. Make It a Ritual. 