Montana Motels

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With its gurgling streams, distant peaks and clouds like floating refineries that churn toward the horizon, Montana stretches out in all directions. When we were driving through Big Sky country, speed limits were set by "reason and prudence" which meant that you could peg the needle as far to the right as desired - only when we felt a strange vibration throughout the entire car frame did we decide to define "prudence" as "less than 100 mph." At the edge of eyesight, lightning arcs play between the vast clouds, but the rain won't hit us for an hour. Stopping in Bozeman in the Gallatin Valley, we visit the Royal "7" Motel, another one of those Holiday Inn look-alikes from back when the chain featured its "great sign."

Jim Bridger Motor Court

In Gardiner, at the northern edge of Yellowstone National Park, we stop by the 65 year old Jim Bridger Motor Court - a site celebrating the greatest scout of the Rocky Mountains according to the "Ripley's Believe it or Not" clipping framed in every log cabin: "He exchanged a yoke of oxen worth $25 for a volume of Shakespeare and then hired a wagon boy at $40 per month to read it to him." Jim also is credited with "discovering" Great Salt Lake in 1824, but I like the Shakespeare story better. Rounding the corner of Scott Street West, we find the Hillcrest Motel (top image) with its office set atop a hill of stones. Before long, we slide the long pathway into Yellowstone, America's first national park established in 1872 by Ulysses S. Grant. The roadbed - bumper to bumper with cars, vans, and RVs - is a nesting spot for nature lovers on photographic shooting sprees. The mule deer, bull moose, bison, and other beasts are all fair game for inquisitive shutterbugs. It's not uncommon around here to see well intended though somewhat misguided activists screaming "give 'em space!" from a gas guzzling, ozone depleting metal dinosaur.

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