by Dan Austin

Here’s a bet you’re bound to win – ask someone for Montana’s state motto. Even if they’ve visited recently, to climb mountains, raft rivers, bike or hike or to experience Yellowstone National Park, you can bet them ten to one and still win a bundle.

Some will smile knowingly and take your wager, thinking “Big Sky Country” is the answer. And boy does that moniker fit. Travel the state from its green eastern prairies to its western white-capped peaks (a distance of some 500 miles!) and you’ll marvel at the immensity of open space and the big blue sky. But no matter the popularity of the nickname, and even its presence on some highway signs, your bet’s still safe.

Another friend might come up with “The Last Best Place,” which has gained in popularity of late as everyone from recent college grads to the just-retired look to live where they can have an active outdoors lifestyle while still enjoying the culture and convenience of big towns and small cities. When everywhere else with all these attractions seems to be full or quickly filling up, it’s no surprise that Montana’s wide-open spaces have brought it the more recent nickname of last of the best places.

So what’s the real answer? You’re going to be surprised, for it isn’t in English, and unlike so many states’ mottoes it isn’t Latin either. It’s Spanish – Oro y Plata (“gold & silver”) – and refers to what brought non-Indians here in the first place. The Kootenai, Crow, Blackfeet, Flathead, Sioux and other tribes, descendants of those who had enjoyed the place for some 10,000 years, had only a hundred whiteskins to deal with before gold was discovered in 1860.

Think about that. More than half a century after Lewis and Clark had traipsed in both directions across the state (1805-06) and reported glowingly on what they’d discovered, it was still inhabited almost exclusively by Native Americans. Then gold was found and, a single decade later, 20,000 miners and merchants had arrived (a century and a half later Montana’s population is still under one million). Their nickname for the place? The Treasure State.

It was a treasure as well for the next batches of newcomers, for the men driving cattle, the gangs laying rail, the tough ranchers and loggers and the families who came to settle the land. That last bunch is still around in big numbers, for today agriculture is Montana’s biggest industry. Timber is the biggest “industrial activity.” The nation’s largest storehouse of coal is here, and oil, and natural gas.

But best of all, in most places the state still looks the way it did way back when. Thus Montana’s growing tourism industry, and thus those wonderful tourists who come for a week or two to get their Big Sky fix. If you’re leaning in that direction, or are still wondering where to go this summer to get away from it all, I invite you to accompany me for a few paragraphs as I describe a loop of geologic wonder and of flora and fauna beyond compare – my absolute personal favorite, and I’ve lived here going on two decades. Only a few hundred miles in length, it contains much of the best this state has to offer. Sensory overload I always call it.

We begin in Bozeman, a hip Western college town that sits in the Gallatin Valley at an elevation of almost 5,000’, with mountain ranges (the Madison, Bridger, Gallatin, Tobacco Roots…) in view in nearly every direction. Main Street is lined with attractive brick buildings which, to Eastern eyes, have a bit of the Dodge City look. It’s named for John Bozeman (who laid out the Bozeman Trail in the 1860s), and it is comfortably small – fewer than 35,000 people. But the county it sits in is larger than two states!

Our loop takes us south out of town on a winding rural highway along the Gallatin River, through a canyon the river has carved over eons as the snowmelt and summer rains from the mountains rushed to lower ground. You’ll see high peaks, lush forests, roaring rapids, and soon will come to Montana’s most famous ski resort (fun in any season) – named, of course, Big Sky. In summer you can reach the highest mountain (Lone Peak – over 11,000’) by foot or, in four minutes, by tram. But either way the views are surreal.

Whether you’re catching your breath from the hike or just enjoying the panorama, this lofty spot is perfect for thinking about how these mountains came to be. As with the rest of the Rockies, it’s believed this range was created by a tectonic smash-up of unbelievable proportion, one massive “plate” shifting into and onto (or under) another, causing that neighboring piece of the broken eggshell to rise or fall.

This rumpled part of Montana is the piece that rose skyward, and which avoided the scraping, leveling action of later glaciers which, during successive Ice Ages, planed the eastern, green- and gold-brown prairie part of the state flat. Or at least much flatter. Farther south, as we near Yellowstone, we’ll come to evidence of tremendous volcanic eruptions and resulting magma flows. Eons of erosion from wind and rain and snow carved this formerly molten rock, even as geologic uplifts fought back to form new plateaus. Understanding the terrain here takes effort, for you are looking at dramatic action frozen in time – at least for now.

Let me suggest that you spend the night at a Montana guest ranch along the Gallatin River. From your cabin porch you’ll see fishermen plying the fast-moving waters for fly-wary trout. Stop early enough in the day for a horseback ride, get back in time for a barbecue. Tough life. Then sleep soundly in the cool night air (even in summer!), and awaken to another day in something close to paradise.

As you continue heading south along the Gallatin, through national forests on both sides of the road, you’ll notice the canyon getting wider as we close in on the town of West Yellowstone. A shock to the senses after all the quiet natural beauty, it’s also (I have to admit it) – fun. Everything a tourist’s heart desires, from cotton candy to an Imax Theater, from museums and a park visitors center to backwoods survival gear, is here. Knock yourself out. For it’s another – an other – world once you turn east and enter our nation’s very first national park. OK; technically the majority of the Park is in Wyoming, Montana’s close cousin to the south, but a little creative license needed here. As you’re about to discover, it was first for a reason, and after the scores of parks I’ve visited it’s still my favorite by far.

But then, why wouldn’t it be? There are ten thousand geo-thermal wonders here, half of all that exist in the entire world, a greater single collection than anywhere. Yellowstone is “the largest sanctuary for western large mammals in the lower forty-eight states,” with two thousand buffalo, twenty thousand elk, griz and black bear and moose and bighorn sheep and…, well, you’ll have to come and see the rest yourself. It’s a zoo that’s more than twice the size of Delaware – without any cages.

Wait – there’s more. A waterfall twice as high as Niagara Falls, the largest log structure in the world (the enormous Old Faithful Inn), the largest mountain lake in all North America (Lake Yellowstone), a live Tyrannosaurus Rex…. Okay, I’m kidding about the dinosaur. But all the rest is true. As is the magma you’ll be seeing soon after you enter the park from the west, evidence of “catastrophic volcanic eruptions” which spewed out so much molten rock that it collapsed what is now the center of the park, “forming a 28- by 47-mile caldera, or basin.” It is this still-boiling cauldron just below the surface that powers the mud pots, fumaroles, hot springs and shooting geysers which we all come to see.

I don’t want to, and you won’t want to, but it’s time we continued our loop north out of the park. (Hey, you can always come back.) Once you’ve torn yourself away from the appropriately named Mammoth Hot Springs (where the elk walk calmly outside the hotel and past the stone buildings of Historic Fort Yellowstone), you’ll exit through (Theodore) Roosevelt Arch, dedicated in 1903. The wonderful words chiseled elegantly into the massive stones say it all: “For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People.”

But the beauty doesn’t end, for we exit into the wide, glacier-carved and again correctly named Paradise Valley, running north between the high Gallatin Mountains on your left and the lofty Absaroka range on your right. You’ll have marveled at the falls of the Yellowstone River inside the park; now you have the opportunity to raft its whitewater rapids. What a thrill!

Once back on the road you’ll see why the Hollywood hit movie “The Horse Whisperer” was filmed here. Those stunning skies, the mountain vistas, and the windblown waving fields of wheat which filled so many scenes were not computer-generated or created in a studio. That was Mother Nature at her best.

Lodging at its best, Montana-style, is here as well – at Chico Hot Springs Lodge (added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1999). For more than a century visitors have been soaking in the hot-spring-fed pool, gathering in the Victorian-era lobby before and after an excellent dinner, and sitting in the porch swings wishing time would stand still, at least for a while.

But it won’t. And maybe it shouldn’t. For we still have to complete our loop back to Bozeman and begin thinking about returning next year to see another beautiful piece of this big state. Glacier National Park? Flathead Lake? Oh, the choices!

Maybe it’s time to vote on a brand new motto for Montana. Put me down for The Toughest Part is Going Home!

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