Our Side of the Mountain in Missoula, Montana
| January 31, 2008 |  View for printing |
SOMETIMES I’ll sit on the front steps of our yellow bungalow and think about swimming up through 2,000 feet of water to catch a breath. It’s what I would have had to do 12,000 years ago when the Missoula Valley was the bottom of a stupendously big lake. The mountains that rise from the edges of town still show the striations that were the lake’s shorelines during subsequent glacial dramas that drained and refilled the valley, time after time after time.
Until quite recently, the mountains had houses only up to the lower shorelines. An exception was an extravagant white Victorian, the showplace home of an early city father, that had, in 1966, been sawed into sections and moved from downtown to a mountainside area known as the South Hills, where it was turned into a restaurant. It burned down in 1992 and was rebuilt as a mini-castle-restaurant called Shadow’s Keep. For quite a while, it stood up there pretty much alone, looking like something that had fallen from a time machine. As you drove up to it, the houses on the lower hillsides thinned out, and then there was a stretch of open ranchland, and then you were there.
Since houses have begun sprouting all over the South Hills, the ranchland we pass on the way to Shadow’s Keep has come to seem more quaint with each passing year. It’s also looked, of course, like a cash cow, and you expect cash cows to go to market sooner or later.
By DEIRDRE McNAMER
Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/op ... oref=slogin
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This story ran late last year but with the story that ran recently in the Flathead Beacon "Helping Trophy Ranchers" http://www.flatheadbeacon.com/articl ... chers/2140/ , I thought it was worthwhile to repost. I'm going to work on an effort to make more aware of the very positive value of conservation easements to the future of Montana.
If you'd like to contribute your comments, please send them to me. russ@matr.net
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