if you really want to see yellowstone national park you must get out of your car.

Let Yellowstone Trails: A Hiking Guide by Mark C. Marshall (park ranger) get you started. This was published by the Yellowstone Association and covers both short and long hikes. I'd recommend the Bliss pass in the Northwest via Slough and Pebble creek as one of the tip top all day hikes.

Yellowstone: Image taken by dmdzine, discovered on www.flickr.com.

Here we have had snow and temps below freezing for a few days, but my favorite time in Montana is fall, hopefully it will come back for a few days for another hike or two.

Missing summer already,

Catherine @ Reading In Montana

Red Lodge & the Beartooth Highway

This last weekend we decided to do a little weekend getaway before the Fall semester starts for me at Montana State University-Bozeman. I have been in Montana more than five years now, and I still hadn't driven the scenic Beartooth Highway, bringing drivers to almost 11,000 feet from Montana to Wyoming. So we decided to head to Red Lodge, MT, spend the night, and then drive the highway before heading home through the northern part of Yellowstone National Park.

Red Lodge, a mountain town known for its coal mines in the late nineteenth century, is rather small - its population just a little over 2,000. When we arrived in Red Lodge, we checked out the also-small library (Carnegie-style), nicely placed at the northern end of Broadway, and picked up some books for Reading in Montana.

We were also in Red Lodge during its annual Festival of Nations, celebrating the town's mining immigrant diversity. We attended the dances in the civic center. This is a picture of some of the Scottish dancing:

You can see more pictures from our trip via these links: Red Lodge and Beartooth Highway.

Michael @ Reading in Montana

Currently reading: Raising Freethinkers: A Practical Guide for Parenting Beyond Belief by Dale McGowan and others.

The Night the Mountain Fell

The Night the Mountain Fell: The Story of the Montana-Yellowstone Earthquake by Edmund Christopherson

Collectors Edition! 1960

11:37 P.M. on August 17, 1959 - It's almost been 50 years since the creation of Quake Lake.

Photo from http://www.mtpioneer.com/Sept-mountain-fell.htm

(Image caption: Motorists can hardly believe their eyes-the earthquake takes its toll, creating a dead end and a new lake near West Yellowstone, August 1959.)

Catherine @ Reading In Montana