So my wife left last week to take care of some family business back East where she grew up and that left me with two big dogs and the Boy, so I did what comes natural and decided to take them all on a hike, rather than sit around the house on a gorgeous sunny morning.

We went up into the hills of the Divide to go flower hunting with the expressed goal of finding some bitterroots, which I have seen up there before (with help from a botanist).

It seems like there’s more knapweed than ever and while it is a long ways from blooming, the old stalks and seedheads from last year still abound.

We ended up having the whole area to ourselves, which was very nice. We kept the sheep dog on a leash as she has a tendency to run off into the next county and then not be able to find her way home. The other dog, a Golden Retriever-Great Pyrenees, stays close. 

Up we went until we got to the highest hill which didn’t take all that long, maybe an hour.

We just missed the peak of the arrow-leaved balsam root. They bloomed a little earlier than usual down low and other hadn’t quite opened up up high.

They’re the sunflower of Montana and a favorite flower to be sure.

It’s definitely griz country up there so we made plenty of noise and took note of a host of other blooms, like big patches of prairie smoke and camas and a host of others whose common names escape me. We found no bitterroots.

I just finished reading “Undaunted Courage” by Stephen Ambrose. The book was a national bestseller some 30 years ago and chronicles the adventures of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark across the West.

The book is nearly 500 pages long and took me six months to read as I’d grab a few pages here and there each day. A few things I learned about Lewis that struck me as remarkable: He couldn’t spell at all. I’m no grammarian by a long stretch but he spelled like a second grader.

He almost made it to where I was standing on this day. He and his party split with Clark on the return journey from the Pacific and ran into some Blackfeet teenagers who tried to steal some of their horses near Cut Bank Creek. Lewis shot one of the teens and another was killed by a member of Lewis’s party.

They got out of the area fast after that, lest they run into Blackfeet warriors where they most certainly would have been outnumbered, covering something like 100 miles in a day.

Another remarkable facet was the sheer amount of game in the region. Everyone probably knows about the giant herds of buffalo back then, but on some hunts it was nothing to kill 20 or so elk or deer. (Wolves also abounded, for what it’s worth).

Now we have big highways and weeds and a smattering of buffalo and call it progress.

The expedition also ate a lot of dogs. Lewis also had a pet dog named Seaman.

I wonder if it was an Old English sheep dog.

The book doesn’t say...