Montana is a very large and very diverse state. Growing up in Montana, I sort of took it for granted. Growing up with pilot parents, I had a bit of a sense of the state as a series of airports separated by forests and farm land. We lived where the plains meet the mountains, with beautiful and high peaks visible from town, but in the bottom where the wind blows and the plains stretch out to the east. Our valley was ranch country. There were a few wheat farms to the north of us, but most of the folks in our area raised alfalfa as their primary farm crop and earned their living raising sheep and cattle. The agriculture of our area was always marginal, with a few ranches able to produce a living for their families and many struggling with the problems of low prices for their animals and high prices for the supplies they needed. Once the farm crisis of the 1980’s hit, the area around my home town began a not-so-gradual transition from working ranches to hobby farms and vacation homes. The price of land went up so high that the concept of a family ranch was pretty much a thing of the past. A few historic families have hung on while neighbors sold out to wealthy outsiders.

That way of life wasn’t the only living to be earned in Montana. Much of the western part of the state was based on timber and mining. Logging, paper mills, mining and smelting were the big businesses. Those industries too have faded as the easily accessible minerals played out and the old growth forests were thinned and the market shifted.

Almost everything east of the mountains in the northern two thirds of the state was once a huge grassland covered with buffalo, but has been during my lifetime a production area for cereal grains, primarily winter wheat - the hard red wheat from which bread is made - and barley - grown both as animal feed and as malt barley for distilling. There are a few ranchers who have grown sunflowers and oilseed and a few other crops, but grains are the big crop. When I was a child, the usual practice was to rotate the land between a year of fallow ground and a year of grain. The land was divided into great strips and whatever land could be broken up was put into crops. While the grain was growing the farmers used tractors and tillers to mix the top of the fallow ground to prevent the growth of weeds and retain the moisture for the next year when it would be planted. Practices such as low till or no till, where the stubble was left in the field didn’t come into common use until the last decade of the twentieth century. Outside of the River Ranch, near the center of the state, we didn’t spend much time in the northeastern part of the state, and it was, to me, a series of giant wheat fields over which we flew when carrying someone or something to Glasgow or Wolf Point.

I have since made a few trips across that part of the state with memories of hot summers, windy days and fiercely cold winters with blizzards and limited visibility. There is a lot of open country in northeastern Montana.

Much of that country is now dominated by very large farming operations that are highly dependent upon petroleum-based fertilizers and broadleaf herbicides. Some of the herbicides are delivered with airplanes that are much bigger than the small spray planes that my parents used to operated. Some of them are applied with land-based sprayers. The biggest of the sprayers are computer controlled and remember where they have been. After the farmer drives the sprayer for the first round of the field, it decides where to go to deliver the herbicide in the necessary pattern. Combines remember fields and yields and provide instructions for drills to deliver fertilizer the next spring. Entire operations are based on very large and very expensive machinery and lots of computers to analyze, remember and control the machines.

The business is very different than was the case when homesteaders started with 160 acres and a couple of horses. It is very different from the days when I was growing up and a farmer’s ability to make field repairs was as critical as his ability to put in long days of near boredom driving the tractor round and round the field.

Today we will head out across the center of the state, heading East to the southern shore of the reservoir behind the great Fort Peck Dam. Fort Peck Dam itself is a major story in the shaping of this state. The massive earthen dam was built before the days of massive excavators and giant haul trucks. It required an incredibly large labor force in a place that had few amenities. People lived through -40 degree winters in tents and tar paper shacks in order to have the jobs offered by the construction. They worked in back-breaking conditions to move the rocks and dirt that formed the giant reservoir. Lives were lost. families were shaped. The process became an event in the life of the state that not only transformed the land by filling the breaks and gullies of the Missouri with a giant reservoir, but transformed the story of the state by providing off ranch jobs and sources of income for construction workers.

These days the reservoir is a place of recreation, though it remains off of the main routes. There are no Interstate highways that come close to this part of the state and we’ll travel about 25 miles off of the pavement to reach our campsite on an arm off of the southern shore of the lake.

We are big fans of remote camping, but we won’t be alone in our campground - in fact reservations are recommended for campers who want to stay and the cost for us out-of-staters is as high as the camping resorts in other locations. It is a way to connect with the land and driving across this part of the country is a way to remember the wide open spaces and the pioneers who crossed them.

I anticipate the adventure with joy.

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