Charlie's Visit to Montana

Charlie got to Montana just before Christmas, so he and his new friend Gleim had to entertain themselves for a while because his hostess, Aiden's Crazy Auntie Patia, got all distracted and busy with the holidays. They played on the ranch for a while with Blue, an Australian Shepherd who has one blue eye, until that got boring.

Then Charlie and Gleim decided to go for a drive in an old pickup truck. Here they are, with Gleim driving (since Charlie doesn't have his permit yet) and Charlie riding shotgun. This Chevrolet truck is probably about 70 or 80 years old!



They went to the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation (http://www.rmef.org), where Gleim took pictures of Charlie hanging out with some of the local native wildlife -- an elk, a bear, an antelope and a mountain lion! Charlie looks pretty nervous in that picture with the mountain lion, doesn't he? Mountain lions are also called cougars.







When Patia finally had time, she took Charlie for a walk along the Clark Fork River, which runs through the middle of Missoula. Missoula is a town in a valley in the middle of the Rocky Mountains. Missoula has about 60,000 people, which is REALLY BIG by Montana standards. The whole state of Montana has fewer than 1 million people -- that's less than the number of people who live in just the city of San Francisco! But Montana has three cows for every person. (http://www.travelmt.com)

Charlie sure was glad he had the scarf Caty made for him in Alaska, because that walk by the river was cold! The Clark Fork River is named for William Clark, who camped in Missoula about 200 years ago when he and his buddy, Meriwether Lewis, were some of the first white people to explore what is now known as the western United States. (http://www.his.state.mt.us/lewisandclark) The native people who already lived in the area were very helpful to Lewis and Clark and their traveling companions by giving them food and horses.



Patia made Charlie pose for lots of pictures, like the one with a plaque about Glacial Lake Missoula. Where Charlie is sitting in this picture was once under almost a thousand feet of water! That was about 15,000 years ago, during the last great Ice Age. The Clark Fork River was blocked by a huge ice dam and became a lake that filled the entire Missoula Valley and a lot of other valleys in western Montana. When the ice dam broke, the whole lake emptied out all at once and drained across Idaho, Washington and Oregon. (http://www.iafi.org) The floodwaters from Glacial Lake Missoula even went all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Pretty amazing, huh?



Patia and Charlie finished their walk by going to the nearby University of Montana campus, where Patia went to school and worked until recently. (http://www.umt.edu) Patia took a picture of Charlie with a big sculpture of a grizzly bear in the middle of campus. UM's mascot is the grizzly bear and its sports teams are called the Montana Grizzlies. In the background of this picture you can see Main Hall and behind that, Mount Sentinel. If you look closely, you can see a big white M on the side of the mountain and the switchback trail that goes up to it. If you look even more closely, you might be able to see some of the horizontal shorelines that were once the beaches of Glacial Lake Missoula.




Montana is a big state and there is a lot more Charlie could have seen, but maybe he can come back another day. (And maybe you can come for a visit, too!) Now Charlie's on his way to Colorado! Talk to you soon.