Essentially the Only One

A member of the crow family - not sure which one. San suggests a turkey vulture - she might be right.A beaver on the verdant banks of the Missouri River.This and the next two are from Ulm Pishkun State Park (also known as First Peoples Buffalo Jump State Park). Here's a marmot.Some prairie dogs.A deer. (Well, actually two deer.)

Another hot St. Louis Saturday, but it's my birthday and I always feel good on my birthday. Another year gone but, just as many times before, a year of great pleasures and few disappointments.

Considering that these are hard times for many, I can feel doubly thankful. I use this date to record our household worth from year to year. This year, yes, we've lost some - about 8% - but are still very far from the waterline. Luck and good management; we've always been frugal and this is where it pays off. One thing I can say; I've been reading articles on finance and money management for a long time now and it is clearer than ever that most - maybe all - self-appointed experts know nothing except how to market themselves. These days, I just follow the news.

Ruth is preparing a celebratory meal of home-made (and by that, I mean completely from scratch) steak and kidney pie and trifle. My workmate Robyn gave me a lovely bottle of wine yesterday to share with the meal. It's going to be delightful.

Meanwhile, here's another photograph. Taken at First Peoples Buffalo Jump State Park, Montana and processed using Canon's 'Nostalgia' Picture Style template in their Digital Photo Professional software, it produces an effect of extraordinary calm in me when I look at it. It's the prairie dog hole that does it - a snug home on a barren landscape.

(Part 1 here)

Here I found the Stockman's Bar, with its venerable sign weathered but intact.

Earlier, I had been looking in a volume of Great Depression era Farm Security Admininstration-sponsored and other photographs at our friends Geoff and Martha's house in Helena. I am not quite sure, but I believe of them is of this very bar taken in late 1930s.

This type of visceral link with history is something that is easy to experience in Europe, with many private and government sponsored organizations dedicated to preserving ancient buildings and artifacts, but is far rarer here. Rarer, and consequently more exciting on a very elemental level. The rough edges of history have not been varnished way in places such as this. No brochures or tourist buses to the Stockman's Bar. They may yet come, and with them some prosperity, but it is still on the cusp here.

It became clear to me that it was precisely towards this sort of industry that Harlowton is now gearing. The refinished facades on all the buildings, a new museum and the part-restaurant/part-souvenir store we ate our very delicious sandwiches and milk shakes all pointed in this direction.

A good thing too. At the end of main street, a beautiful old hotel, The Graves Hotel, was in the process of renovation. I wished it was further along in repair, because I would have loved to stay there.

A long porch flanked two sides of this building, one looking out onto main street, the other beautifully placed to sit and gaze at the rolling hills in the far distance.







I pictured myself on a long porch swing, a long cool cocktail in hand, enjoying a gentle evening under this veranda.
Alas, though, we did not have time to linger and besides there were the altogether stranger ghost towns to discover before the day ended.

That's the downside of travel - you find a fascinating place and before you can really dig into it, you have to leave. Better, though, to have seen even a brief glimpse than none at all.

Welcome to
The Jersey Lilly
and Ingomar, Montana
The Jersey Lilly is open from
7:00 a.m. - Midnight

Although dining reservations are not necessary, we would appreciate a call ahead of time if your group has more than four people. We want to ensure you have the best possible experience at The Jersey Lilly.

I found myself returning in thought to Ingomar, Montana this evening. I've already illustrated this extraordinary ghost town in an earlier post, but - perhaps because I was listening to a reading of I Am Legend on BBC Radio 7 tonight - I decided to Google the town to see what I could find.

I found this website. It dates from 2007 and that might explain the surreal disconnect between what is written and pictured there and what we found in July of this year. It's as much a ghost website as the town is a ghost town.

The sign on the Bunk n Biscuit looks fresh enough, but the building, the old schoolhouse, still looks semi-derelict. The Jersey Lilly itself was closed.

Not long closed, judging from the inside. There were liquor bottles behind the bar, coffee pots and knives hanging from the kitchen wall. Salt pots on the tables and little dust. But there was that sign - Bar is Closed until Further Notice - on the door. I felt someone should have posted website is closed until further notice but abandoned web pages tend to be as neglected as abandoned towns.


I noted, too, the artful way that the photographs on the web page downplayed the overwhelming sense of decay that infects a visitor to Ingomar. The slide-show there pictures the wistfully named Central Park, but fails to convey the background of rusting oil tanks and decomposing buildings present in all but the most carefully framed shots.
No paved roads in this town, just gravel streets - farm tracks really - and nothing beyond the perimeter of tumbledown buildings except the brown Montana plain.

In truth, I was amazed that The Jersey Lilly had managed to stay alive as long as it had. The dogged perseverance of the local ranchers, no doubt, was behind this. But evidently this is not quite enough in this depressed times to sustain the bar.

A shame. Perhaps when times improve, The Jersey Lilly will flower afresh and maybe I will be able to stop by and down a well-appreciated beer. (A few more photographs here.)

Not Creston, British Columbia, alas, and this is an entirely typical mid-Iowa farm town with rolling hills and corn fields. Not particularly inspiring for photography, so here's four more from Tuesday's expedition to the Montana landscape north of Helena.Wild sunflowersA storm approaches.A storm departs with rainbow.Evening shadows.

Yesterday, I spent a good part of the day heading north from Helena into the Missouri River valley. The river here is only about 70 miles from its origin in Three Forks, flowing north before it turns east just before Great Falls.

I started out at 10:30 a.m. and returned at 10.30 p.m. with so many photographs that it is going to take days to go through them. However, this shot was spectacular. Taken from Ulm Pishkun State Park where I had ended up after a very slow journey through the mountains, it shows a giant storm cloud directly north of me.

Against the flat plain, the sight was breathtaking.