At a friend’s ranch.

My August 2005 road trip (which still hasn’t made it to this blog), took me all over the northwest. On the way back, I decided to stop in and visit our friend Lynn. Her husband, Ray, had been partners with Mike (my husband) on a Grumman Tiger airplane. At the time, Ray and Lynn lived in town. They decided to move — or maybe Lynn did — and they bought a house on some acreage in Sheridan, MT.

I arrived at Lynn’s doorstep after a very long day in the car. I’d started at McCall, ID and had driven along one scenic road after another. In Idaho, most roads don’t run east to west. They run north to south between mountain ranges. (Or at least that’s how it seemed to me.) So I did a lot of zig-zagging up and down the state of Idaho before crossing the Continental Divide at Chief Joseph Pass.

I’d been told that Ray and Lynn’s house was in Dillon, MT, so that’s where I headed. When I got there and called for directions, I learned that I was still about 30 miles away. I finally found the place in the foothills of the Tobacco Root Mountains, near the Beaverhead National Forest.

Lynn got me settled in and we had some wine by one of the two creeks that flowed past her house. Then we went for a walk in her alfalfa field. This is the view from the end of the field, looking back toward her house.

I can’t remember how many acres they have there, but I can remember the color: green. There was a lot of water in the area and with the right irrigation equipment, they were able to grow two crops of alfalfa a year. That was more than enough than they needed for their horses (which graze in a separate field). So they hired a guy to cut the alfalfa twice a year. He gets half the crop for payment and they sell the other half to pay their annual property tax bill. Nice.

I spent a wonderful night there, listening to the water flow by outside my window.