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!