Episode 53 | Northern Idaho to Bozeman, MT
My middle name should be Sidetrack.
I was on my way back toward Bozeman, mentally already plotting the most ambitious possible version of the drive home — West Yellowstone, Under Canvas, the Lamar Valley, the Beartooth Highway, maybe all of it — when I saw a brown sign on the side of the road. Brown signs mean state park, and this one had a camera icon on it. I pulled over and asked the woman at the entrance if it was worth stopping.
She talked for fifteen minutes.
The oldest house in Idaho. A church built without nails, its roof painted with huckleberry juice. A field of aspen. A view of the river valley below. I was completely derailed from whatever plan I had, which in hindsight was not a functioning plan anyway.
The Museum
I watched as much of the introductory film as my attention span would allow, which was enough to get the general shape of things. The Coeur d’Alene and surrounding tribes, the mission’s arrival in the 1840s, the collision of two very different ideas about land and ownership. History out here tends to come in at high volume and I absorb what I can.
The buildings were what held me. The church especially. There’s something about a structure built without nails, held together by wooden pegs and joinery and an apparent belief that it would stay upright, that commands a kind of attention that a film in a visitor center doesn’t. I walked through it slowly and thought about what I would have set up and photographed here ten years ago, when I was deep into HDR work and every interesting interior was an exercise in multiple exposures and Photomatix processing. I didn’t do that. I just walked around with a camera and let the place be itself.
Photography evolves. At some point you stop trying to prove you were there and start trying to understand what you were looking at.
And about that journey with HDR photography … here are some images below from a few previous outings. Much more over on the MDSimages website as well!
The Drive Back Along Coeur d’Alene
From there I wound back around the lake one more time, which I’m fully aware was not the most direct route to anything. The views from the road along the water reminded me of Lake Lure in North Carolina — the scale of the thing, the mountains behind it, the houses tucked into the hillsides above the shoreline. I said out loud to nobody in particular that I could see myself living here, which I’ve said some version of roughly fifteen times on this trip, and I continue to mean it every time.
I had intended to take the scenic route along the St. Joe River down toward a small town called Avery, but stopped for gas and asked the woman at the station about it. She hesitated. Lots of accidents on that road, she said. I looked at the GPS prompt that said may contain dirt roads and made the sensible decision for once. Got back on Interstate 90.
Of course I was filming while driving. That’s a separate matter.
Lookout Pass
The border between Idaho and Montana runs through a ski area called Lookout Pass, which in August is a windy, off-season, slightly melancholy place where people apparently come from both states to ski in winter and bike in summer. The staff had the energy of people who were being asked to stay open for the biking crowd when what they really wanted was to close up until snow season. I stopped long enough to stretch my legs and get the car dusty.
Somewhere along that stretch I found myself thinking about a documentary I’d worked on about a man named Kim Kahana, a stuntman and filmmaker who had recently passed away. I hadn’t reached out to his family yet. The drive through these mountains had a way of surfacing things that needed to be addressed.
Nine Hours and a Hotel Near the Airport
Here is the honest accounting of what happened next: I drove nine hours.
After dropping Denise and Becca at the airport I’d gone from second gear to fifth and covered an unreasonable amount of ground trying to cram three days of travel into one. By the time I reached the outer edge of Bozeman it was dark and I still had over an hour to go. I caffeinated myself, put the high beams on, and got there. I did not go to West Yellowstone. I did not do the Beartooth Highway. I checked into the Even Hotel, which had just opened two weeks prior and was very close to the airport and had a breakfast that was adequate and a lobby with a floor plan I genuinely liked.
That’s my review of the Even Hotel. Adequate breakfast. Good floor plan. Survived.
The Flight Home
Bozeman Airport is small and pleasant and the photography on the walls by an artist named Denver Brian is worth slowing down for on the way to the gate. Some of those images reminded me of the shots I didn’t take on this trip, which is a specific kind of feeling.
I am now, officially, a window seat person. This happened somewhere over the Rocky Mountain states, staring down at cloud formations and the light moving across ridgelines and thinking about aperture. The aisle seat served me well for years. The window is better.
Dallas layover. Centurion Lounge. Discovered I had significantly more Idaho footage than I thought. Got home. The cat registered her displeasure at the duration of my absence and then decided she didn’t smell any bears on me, which was accurate and slightly disappointing.
Season 4 done. Season 5 ahead.
