When you mosey around Montana, you get the distinct feeling you’re being enveloped by incredible landscapes. You’re inside the scenery, not simply gazing at it from a ways off. The wide open spaces, treed mountains and trout-filled rivers increasingly charmed us the more time we spent here. The state’s sparse population is distributed in a nice way, with a log house or ranch every so often, but not so meagerly that the towns seemed like islands in the middle of no-man’s land. The Bitterroot Valley is especially spectacular, nestled between parallel ridges of 8,000 foot peaks. In pursuit of some Montana vittles, we found ourselves at a startlingly nice, rustic lodge smack in the middle of the woods there where the conversation with locals was as agreeable as the food. Our search for a new homestead may very well have ended right here. Unfortunately, unless you’re a grocery sacker or horse trainer, job prospects look pretty dismal. I’m still hashing out the details for an eBay career path…

As we travel around the country we see a lot of reverence paid to the anniversary of Lewis and Clark’s expedition. Although the trip indeed had many merits, we have mixed feelings about it. It was with their callous attitudes that the destruction of unspoiled land and abundant wildlife began. When Native Americans hunted, they first gave respect to the animal, apologizing for killing it and then thanking it for sustaining their lives. When Lewis and Clark hunted, they tramped out, shot the buffalo and took only the tongue, brain and hump. They left the rest to rot where it lay. If that weren’t bad enough, they shot bald eagles and prairie dogs simply for sport. I don’t really have a point to this, only that when you fast-forward to today and see that the prairie dog population is 1% of what it was and that the only remaining, genetically pure, wild buffalo herd is in Yellowstone National Park, it doesn’t exactly make me want to celebrate. But spending time on the wild frontier of Montana, where it still looks a little bit like it did 200 years ago, does.