What? Friends visiting us here, already!?!

We're nowhere near to establishing a full- or part-time residency here. And yet, St. Louis friends already are coming to visit!?!  What? In the photo, from left to right: the man who introduced me to Alex, Paul Wagman; his very significant other, Elsy Cardona; me; Al, the mountaineering legend). These guests stay in a unit next to ours for two days as part of their road trip West. On the first day here, we all hike farther along Blodgett Creek than we have before. The results of an old forest fire remain...

...and Paul gets into taking some fancy snapshots of his own. First, it's Elsy. Later on, he focuses on  some of the gorgeous Montana wildflowers still in bloom along the trail. These include:

Showy Milkweed

Ninebark

 

Eliptic-leaved Penstemon

Thimbleberry, in flower

Fluffy plumes of Clematis

Paul and Elsy give us this wonderful book on wildflowers that they'd picked up in Glacier.

And we take long looks at the granite scenery on our way out of this 3+ hour hike.

We go home, take a rest and decide to go out again (third time for us, first for out guests, at Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge). It's hot but just as beautiful as ever.

Clouds above, and reflected in the water, are part of the attraction.

Ducks cool off on a floating log...

...then jump off and start swimming into the sunlight when I get too close.

Meanwhile, Paul takes a long business call on his cell phone while the rest of us walk around the reserve (and Elsy borrows our second Missouri Botanical Garden umbrella to keep cool; she cuts quite a stylish figure out in the wild!)

 

Postcards from the edge...

A late afternoon drive on the east side of the Bitterroot Valley, up high on Ambrose Creek Road.

 ... the edge of our vacation, that is. Yes we're on the brink, the verge, the threshold of our last week in Hamilton; house hunts are on hold (to my relief, being risk averse as I am) and we're back on vacation!! Above and below, with captions, are some of my favorite images from the last few days.

We find dozens of butterflies on the roadside at what looks like a tiny watering hole (I read later that this is a process of collecting salts and other nutrients from damp surfaces -- called puddling).

Soft shoulders of the foothills greet us as we drive down from Ambrose to the valley floor.

  

Also after Ambrose, we see another in a series of little white crosses along state and federal highways, secondary and forest service roads. They are part of the Montana American Legion White Cross Highway Fatality Marker Program. It began in 1953 "after six lives were lost in the Missoula area over the 1952 Labor Day Holiday" (see http://visitmt.com/experiences/montana_extras/features/cross.htm). The crosses all are poignant, but especially this one, decorated with a child's soccer-ball stickers.

For some reason, this particular abandoned pick-up truck (my favorite Montana image) strikes me as eerie, with Ambrose Creek and Sapphire Mountains in the background. 

Talk about your juxtapositions! The next day we head south and west for a camping trip in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness area, and along the way we decide to stop in at a most un-wild location -- an exclusive, multi-tiered mountain inn complete with pool, luxurious private guest cabins, wine cellar, Wi-Fi and other seemingly out-of-place amenities!

A gift shop at the Triple Creek Ranch also sells top-of-the-line cowboy hats.

..

...and very expensive fly-fishing dude-wear.

Some of the purchased guest apparel is even hanging out to dry. Dude!

We move on to the real wilderness.

We take a long, beautiful, dirt road that eventually puts us by the high, fast and very cold Selway River, just across the Montana border into Idaho. When Alex was a kid, this is where his family would come to camp and fish with the Milner family.

We find exactly the same campground at Indian Creek that he as a child -- and later, we as a newly married couple -- had enjoyed years before.

Tall, stately Ponderosa pines sway above the campground.

We sit by a fire and sip wine.

We even enjoy the slowly dying fire from atop our old air mattress and under a plush comforter, inside the tent

.

But the joke's on us. We (I should say I) hadn't planned for the extra-cold temperatures that we got overnight. Also, the old air mattress feels more like a water bed, sloshing this way and that when either one of us move. We end up around 2 a.m. retreating to our relatively warm, very stable fold-back seats in the car. What intrepid explorers! We joke about the night on our drive out of the Selway. Next option? NOT a room at the Triple Creek Ranch (as if we could afford it http://www.triplecreekranch.com/) but probably a tricked-out VW camper van, such as one of those that we've seen advertised on Missoula's Craigslist (?).

And so, the next day back in Hamilton, we drive through a lupine-studded forest to get to a hiking trail that will prove we are not wimps!

We walk past more lupines and native sunflowers to get to the top of...

...Blodgett Overlook, a spectacular site for viewing west to the glacially carved granite cliffs of Blodgett Canyon, where we did our first hike of this month-long trip, and then east to see Hamilton in the valley below. It's a place to sit and take stock of all that we've seen and done in June! 

Gulp! Did We Almost Buy a House in the Bitterroot!?!

Not this one. But with a new paint job inside and out, new plantings and removal of that scalloped screen door -- ick! -- it could be a darling in-town Craftsman, that is, if the spidery old furnace, below, holds out...

Not this one either. Above, it's an older cabin in foreclosure on a quaint little farmstead just outside of town.

Nix also to this new, spacious log home (in a sterile subdivision), but wait 'til you see the living room and all the views (3 pix, below)...

 

Yowsa!!! Imagine waking up to this every morning.

Then there is the charming Victorian, in-town...

...Our real estate broker Vicky Bohlig leads the way.  It's a cute 1915 two-story that needs tons of work, especially the cheesy '70s bathroom add-on, below, wocka wocka!

 

Below is a mystery house; I don't remember anything about it from the blur of 10 visits on this overcast  morning...

...but back in Hamilton, we get to some more, er, interesting concepts, such as the almost-off-the-grid remodel of a 1941 "southside charmer" (real-estate term!), above. Check out its backyard's tracking solar panels, below...

They're behind a garage and not as obtrusive as I thought they would be. Raised beds in the backyard also promise a bumper crop of vegetables...

But our last visit produced the most expensive house and a big dose of southside Hamilton charm. Think Webster Groves cottage, mature trees, cedar-shingle siding, original wood floors, great (not perfect) kitchen, 3 bedrooms, 3 baths, gorgeous picture windows front and back, wood-burning fireplace plus basement wood stove and huge gardening potential, ornamentally in front and with patio, vegetables and herbs in back. Here it is!!...

Ta da!!  Humble enough looking on the outside, but tons of restored 1939 built-ins and many examples of the current homeowners' own good taste, inside. We go see it... twice. We talk about it a L-O-T. We do some math. We email our financial planner in St. Louis. We email another trusted counsel there. We to and fro and fro and to on this topic. It is two days of angst in the middle of our perfect vacation!! I want my vacation back!!!

And so, if you know us and/or have been following this blog, you might ask: Becky, weren't you against this kind of expensive search to begin with?  Yes, is my answer.  And: Alex, how did you get Becky to give in to a house hunt in Montana? Hammering her with pleas to get some sort of foot hold in your land of perfect childhood vacations?? Yes, he'd say if he were honest.  

I have to admit that the quiet, beautiful, cool-and-dry village of Hamilton, nestled between two mountain ranges full of a lifetime of hikes, is appealing, even if local politics often skew right and cultural resources are limited (although good folks are working to bring some of those resources back). Streets are busy with walking families and cycling retirees, morning and evening. A farmers' market on Saturday brings everybody out. Street dances with live country music happen in town.

We sit in Vicky Bohlig's office a final time to talk it out.

'The asking price is higher than the assessment, higher than when the market was hotter," she says.


"And I don't know how motivated they are to sell. It's a real fast mover," she adds. "I bet they're quite surprised they haven't sold it."

Says a thoughtful, somewhat chastened Alex: "Our thought about that house is that it is a little bit overpriced now. If we wanted to make an offer, what would it be? On the other hand, it's come to a point in the whole process that we're back to asking more fundamental questions: Do we want to live here?"

I explain to Vicky that I have so much back at home -- friends, nearby relatives, volunteer work, some part-time paid work, a great old house and garden.

"We were kind of falling in love with a house in Hamilton," adds Alex. "Gosh we don't want anybody else to get that house. But are we really cut out for a small town?" His music, friends and volunteer connections, house and other projects also, of course, reside in St. Louis.

And yet, he describes a lunch that he went to in a home with a fantastic mountain view. "And still the down side of this house we're looking at is that there's practically no view."

"The market could still go down a little bit," Vicky advises. "But I believe things happen when they're supposed to happen. I thank God I'm older and I'm comfortable not getting freaked out when people want to take their time."

We both sign an agreement that makes her our only agent here. She will forward new listings electronically.

And we agree to take a break. A long break. Real estate has been an interesting way to tour the area. But now, I am getting my vacation back!!!!

(By the way, I may have buried my lede about Hamilton. A letter went out this week to members of the Citizen Liason Group for activities at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories. Vicky is in that group as she is in many other environmental, "green" and advocacy associations.  The letter says that a researcher at the labs earlier in June was working on plague and stuck himself with the needle he was using. His wound was washed immediately, he was given strong antibiotics and samples from the incident were sent to an independent lab for testing. He apparently is fine. Vicky says that these events are rare, and that when they happen, extreme precautions are taken, press releases or letters go out right away. Still, she and many other Hamiltonians were unhappy a few years ago when the labs went to Level 4 status. I, for one, am too.)

On the other hand, look at the fortune I got in a Chinese restaurant earlier in this Wild West trip!!!

Birds, Birds and More Birds

We see an Osprey land in a nest some 50 feet above our heads.  Behind us are dozens of specimens we've never seen before -- Yellow-headed Blackbirds, perched on the stems of fluffy-headed cattails. They look totally tropical. And in a pond nearby is a male Bufflehead, a duck of such black-and-white magnificence that it's surprising it survives at all in a green-and-brown world.

We are at Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge, named after the U.S. Representative, then U.S. Senator from Montana (1961-1978). It's located in Stevensville, MT, about 25 miles north of where we're staying in Hamilton. And it is a quite wonderful place to view nature and birds.

Marshy wetlands surround the roads we drive on.  Blue-gray mountains loom to the west and south. Clouds of every shade of white and gray puff overhead under otherwise pristine blue skies. And the birds keep on coming...

...I realize that, unfortunately, I don't have a long enough lens to capture them well. But then, I also don't keep a "life list" of bird sightings either (I find those to be competitive and obnoxious).  We add to our short list of "Birds of the Bitterroot" the Yellow-headed, above, plus a Great Blue Heron, an American Wigeon, a Common Goldeneye, Wild Turkeys and two gorgeous Sandhill Cranes.

Just before we leave Lee Metcalf...

 ...we ditch the Subaru for a final walk down the refuge's main road. Its side trails are still flooded from the overflow of Bitterroot River and tributaries. Perhaps flooding has kept people away. This is as quiet and peaceful and beautiful a place as you're likely to come by on a late-spring afternoon.


Much closer to Hamilton and to the Bitterroot Mountains is the city's Hieronymus Park & Trail, similar to Lee Metcalf but seemingly less full of wildlife. Still, it's a nice place to walk, away from the busy main Highway 93.

We meet a fisherman along the way. He's looking for brown trout. He hasn't caught one yet on this cool, cloudy day. Then we spy another sky-high nest -- this one easily twice, maybe three times as tall as Lee Metcalf's. It's built on a cell phone tower.  And it appears to be empty. But, never mind. My lens won't capture that elevation anyway.

We don't give up.  At sunset on this, the eve of the longest day of the year, we head out at 9 p.m. for Calf Creek Wildlife Management Area -- 2,000-plus acres about 8 miles east of Hamilton that aims "primarily to provide winter range for elk and compatible recreational opportunities for the public." We see no elk. But in the warm evening light, we catch a tiny streak of turquoise flying by.

We find it in binoculars. It has stopped for just a moment. It is stunning. Again, my camera will never capture something this small, this far-away. It's a Lazuli Bunting (we identify it later), so I'm borrowing an image that's Copyrighted © Arlene Ripley...

It flits away. As we continue our walk, we see lots more beauty in sunset-tinted pastures and golden rock. Birds, we decide, don't have a lock on color and form.