A Voyage of Discovery: Betsy and Bubba on the Road

Well, Big Sky is the generic name for the Montana landscape, and appropriately so. It is so open and so large. By day, what seems to be a million miles of blue stretch out before my eyes. By night, I see stars I could never have imagined, and have never seen so vividly even in the middle of the Atlantic with no lights for a thousand miles in any direction. The dry dry air certainly plays a part in the wonderful clarity of the air. So does the fact that we’re not downwind of a couple thousand miles of factories emitting pollutants. That yellow haze that so often mars the New England skyscape is certainly nowhere to be seen in my immediate area.

But I’m also working in Big Sky. I started work about a month ago as a reservations person at Lone Mountain Ranch, a guest ranch in Big Sky. Homesteaded in the nineteenth century, the ranch began to be developed as a guest destination in the 20s. Not much happened in Big Sky until a partnership involving Chet Huntley began a ski resort development in the 60s, and acquired massive amounts of land, including the ranch. They began the development of the Big Sky ski resort, one of the largest on the continent. With it, of course came Mondo Condo. And now, Big Sky is becoming the home of the private enclaves: super inflated real estate values, a private club called the Yellowstone Club, with astronomic initiation fees and even bigger prices to own a home in the “club”.

In the 1970s, the Huntley group sould off the ranch to the Schaap family, who had previously run a motel and ski touring business in West Yellowstone. They developed the ranch into a first class low key resort. Some of their guests, returning year after year, have done so for 10, 15 18, 20 years or more. In the winter, more than 80 kilometers of cross country ski trails are groomed. They run a marvelous sleighride dinner, taking guests by horse drawn sleigh to a kerosene lantern-lit cabin, where a prime rib dinner is served up, along with entertainment by one of three different Montana cowboy singers.

Guests are housed in charming simple cabins with a western motif. There are a couple of newer lodge type buildings, but the majority of folks want to be in the cozy little cabins. There’s an inviting saloon and dining room, and a great outdoor shop.

In the summer, they offer, in addition to the usual fare of riding, an Orvis fishing program, and a terrific naturalist program, with guided hikes of the ranch, the Gallatin National Forst and Yellowstone.

We are between seasons now, and the winter skiing guests begin to arrive in two weeks. So we’re engaged in the bustle of getting things going.

I leave the house in the morning before the sun is up.I confess that I’m already counting the days til the solstice, in anticipation of the days getting longer. I drive about ten miles down a back road from the house to get out to Montana Highway 191, often known as the highway of death. Of course, this is not the road we usually think of as a highway. It’s two lanes, and winds its sinuous way through a deep canyon, alongside the Gallatin River, which crosses under the road three times in the 20 or so miles. There is a fair amount of traffic, largely due to the pace of development in Big Sky; contractors, supplies, etc. Like so many communities, its cost of living does not permit most workers to live there, unless their employers provide housing. Everyone’s in a hurry to get to work or get home, and there have been about 9 fatalities on this thirty mile stretch in 2006.

As I am getting to the canyon, the day is lightening, but it will be some time before the sun actually makes it over the hills and lights the canyon. The last three days, the morning temperatures have been below zero (yes, fahrenheit, not centigrade), and there has been what I still call sea smoke rising off the river. The rocks in the river are covered with snow, and ice is starting to extend out from them.

The canyon opens up as we get about six miles north of Big Sky. I turn west off the Highway, and often encounter mountain sheep close to the intersection. They come down a pretty sheer hill to lick at the road salt. The road weaves through the first of several series of condos and retail centers, but I very shortly get the stunning view of Lone Peak.

We had a bit of an Indian summer last week. The ski areas were originally going to open Thanksgiving Day. But that snow you saw from Thanksgiving Day in Bozeman-well, it missed the mountains entirely. I drove home Monday in a blinding storm, and, as you can see, we’ve started to get some snow in the hills. By the way, people ski down that peak. I will not be one of those people.

I look out my office windown and have a pretty lovely view as well. Notwithstanding the Mondo Condo style of Big Sky, the ranch is tucked into a little valley, and the development is invisible unless you climb up into the hills. I did enough walking right after I got there to see the less appealing views; now I’m trying to confine myself to the appealing ones. They have snowmaking equipment, and, while we wait for Nature’s Own, they are making snow so that the horse drawn sleigh can actually be on the snow for the first sleighride dinner on the 2nd. I’ll start bringing the snowshoes to work next week and snowshoeing during my lunch break. They offer free ski instruction to employees. My cross country skiing is all self-taught or improvised. I’m told, by folks who’d taken lessons after years of backyard skiing, that it will open up a new world for me, so I’ll take advantage of this opportunity ASAP.

Maybelline has her winter coat on, since Sunday when they promised a dip in the temperature below zero. The high for today was about 12 and it s not expected to be quite that tropical tomorrow. Even Bubba is finding it too cold to stay out for too long, and high winds are forecast for the morrow. But a warming trend is in the offing, with temperatures as high as 25 by Sunday.