Brookelyn Bridge

Here are some pictures of where I live:

This is the front of my house - just part of it. From the street it doesn't look very big, but inside it's a good size. It's a tri-level Frank Lloyd Wright style house. I love it.

We live in an older neighborhood, so there are a lot of mature trees. A lot of woodpeckers and hawks, rabbits are everywhere, and across the street, a deer gave birth to a fawn in this yard. (Stockard Channing's mom, Mary Alice Fortin, built this house. Mary Alice donated MILLIONS to our local medical community). Behind this house, there is a nine hole golf course and private country club.

This is the Big Ditch. It runs right through the middle of the entire city - bores through the rimrocks and out the other side. It is the main source of irrigation for our area. The city has expanded at a tremendous rate over the last few decades. Crops are sacrificed to make way for urban sprawl and when the crops go, the irrigation canals are bulldozed as well. When the canals disappear, the water table drops. Some of the wells have been drying up, so the city/county have been better about the more recent planning. They now leave irrigation in some of the neighborhoods as water features - ponds and stuff. Every 7 years or so, a dead body is found somewhere along this thing. And once in a great while, you hear about someone who jumps in to save their swimming dog and they get sucked under the rims. There was some lady that survived this a decade or so ago. All these canals give us a shit ton of misquitos. And ducks. There are ducks everywhere!

This is the park we hang out at the most. It's within walking distance of our house. Just west (left) of here is one of the two colleges in town. Mixed in behind the trees, you can see the rims.

These are the "rimrocks" which is just a fancy name for "butte" I suppose. They are a prehistoric beach. A lot of sandstone - and fossils are regularly found. There are also a lot of rattlesnakes and lizards. It's fun to hike around these. A lot of people rock climb them as well. There is a highway that runs up there and when you're downtown looking up at the rims, there is an illusion that the cars are driving right on the edge of the rim. It's a given that every year, a car will drive off the rims and at least one person will fall off the rims. Sometimes, these end in deaths, sometimes, the people are exceptionally lucky. I suppose it depends on how far they have fallen. The fence at the bottom of this picture is a standard 6-foot fence. People live right below these and every now and then, erosion takes its toll and a boulder breaks off and rolls down the cliff. I think you have to have pretty good insurance if you're going to live under these cliffs.

We used to live west of town and would drive in from the country. We actually bought some land right where I took this picture. We were going to build a house, but once we priced it out and realized how much it was going to cost us in this market, we decided to buy the house we are in right now.

We get some wicked fog now and again and these were taken on an October morning a few years ago.

The next several pictures I did not take, but I love them.

This is probably a wheat crop. I think it's either west of town or above the rims. We have a bit of a rainy season in the spring/early summer. We're somewhat in the midst of it still right now, so this is a pretty good picture of what my world looks like these days.

Sun on a wheat crop at the end of summer

Sugar beets are another major crop around here, but they just aren't as pretty. Other crops are alfalfa and corn. Growing up, we had a 200 acre corn field behind our house. Like Children of the Corn or something. We used to spend hours running around those fields.

I don't know what kind of trick they used to get this picture, but this tree is on top the rims, covered in frost. That is the city behind the tree. Some kind of flare from the city lights. They took this photo in the morning.

This is a picture I remember from my childhood and still makes me laugh. Every now and then, I see it in those random emails flying around and I love that it was taken here. Some kids took Ronald McDonald from the RM House here and put him up in a tree. The police came and took him down and returned him. The newspaper photographer was there to capture the moment. The cop on the left is retired now. The one on the right is still on the force I believe.

I feel like when you live in Montana, you don't always feel like you're from just one city. I feel like I'm from a region. I grew up in a city as much as I grew up in the nearby mountains. We spent a lot of time hiking and camping. The Beartooth mountains are closest to me. This is Froze to Death Plateau and Mystic Lake. I've camped on that plateau.

This is Granite Peak, which is the high point in the state (and on the very right side of that last picture). We climbed it a few years ago and I stopped about 50 feet from the top. Long story. It was fun. And not nearly as cold as it is in this picture.