Hiking to Yeager Flats

Yesterday I took a hike with about 20 people from various parts of Montana to Yeager Flats, a high alpine meadow below Ear Mountain on the Rocky Mt. Front. The Montana Wilderness Association, working to protect Montana's wildlands, and leading hikes into those parts for 49 years, regularly organizes hikes that stop in Choteau to pick up hikers like me. Harry and I have done one or more of their hikes each summer, and although I got a late start due to high water and cold weather, yesterday was a great beginning for me. This five mile hike took us up the Bureau of Land Management trail below Ear Mountain, to Yeager Flats, and on to the Metis cemetery, at The Nature Conservancy's Pine Butte Guest Ranch.

The weather was perfect and the views were spectacular, but my little iPod camera can only do so much to capture the essence of what I saw. (it tried, bless its heart)  I have to admit I discovered something not so good about my common sense (or lack of it). I was behind the leader and in front of 18 other hikers when we spotted a baby bear in front and above us. Worried of course that there was a mother bear close by, we all stopped and made defensive moves in case she suddenly appeared. At the time I didn't know it, but I was the only hiker carrying bear spray. That would have been the appropriate time to get it out of the holster (yes, it's a Wyatt Earp thing, Clay) and have it ready to go as needed. I did think about it for what seemed to be an eternity (probably 1 second) and went for my camera, instead. Stupid, stupid, stupid. It wasn't even a good picture! I must admit we all knew it was a black bear and the immediate consensus of those in the know was that it didn't appear to be with any mother at all, sadly enough. no excuse. I did take the picture and then get the bear spray out, after one of the hikers noted some movement in the shrubby growth nearby. That turned out to just be wind, but it was sobering enough for me to evaluate my decision-making and decide I was no better than those (idiots) who stop the traffic in Yellowstone and get out of their car to take close-up pictures of dangerous wildlife. I promise next time I will use better judgement. By the way, our friend, Ellen from Roanoke, lives very near this trail and encountered a grizzly in her yard last week. She estimates it was 4 feet tall standing on all four feet. And I was the only one with bear spray???

The rest of the trip was through a sea of wildflowers. Because the spring was late and wet, many flowers that would have bloomed in progression are blooming simultaneously. We saw blue fields of lupine, pink fields of wild geraniums, and yellow fields of stonecrop, beardtongue, and actinella. I think I could have determined our elevation by the type of flowers in profusion. Our 5 mile hike took all day because we moved so slowly through these flowers, discussing what they were and taking pictures to remember. By the end of the trip I discovered that many of the hikers were school teachers. No shock there. My friend, Laurie, wisely says that we should try to commit the memory of what we see to our brains, rather than the pixels of our camera. That will be my excuse for poor pictures, and she's right.

We ended our hike at the Metis cemetery, and everyone was sad that our friend, Al Wiseman, couldn't be with us to tell us more. These graves represent a very important part of the culture of this part of the world, and the names on them were very familiar. I thought a lot about our late neighbor, June, whose relatives populate this ground.