Oh my heaven! I'm Fifty Seven!

I just had a very happy birthday.  We decided to go somewhere different and have an adventure for my birthday this year.  We couldn't afford Patagonia or Paris, so we did something much more exotic and close to home: spent two days at a cabin in the mountains of Montana!  No, silly, not OUR cabin, a Forest Service cabin in the Crazy Mountains that we rented for a couple of nights.   I can just hear you saying, "but that is just like where you live.Why would you go there for a vacation?"  But hey, if I lived in a condo in some big city and I went to stay at a condo in some other big city, you wouldn't think it was so weird.  This was just like that.  A new cabin to learn the ins and outs of.  A new view to gaze at.  A new bunch of forest and mountains to ski and hike in.  All the things that make me love living here in my mountain cabin, but in some OTHER mountain cabin.  Of course, it was not as luxurious as my home cabin, but that was part of the fun of it.

I took a big tub of the best lamb stew I have ever made and a bottle of Chilean wine and we brought along one of our five gallon water jugs and the Forest Service provided lots and lots of firewood for the woodstove, and it was just grand. 

The cabin we visited is called the Porcupine Cabin.  There is a snow survey site there which we have always used to gauge how our snow/precipitation year is going (which is abysmal this year because the year for the graphs starts at the beginning of October, and it has been dry, dry, dry since then). So it was fun to actually get to see where the data comes from. 

The cabin is on a hillside on the western slope of the foothills of the Crazy Mountains.  It overlooks the Shields Valley and has a spectacular view of the Bridger Mountains:

The sunset behind the Bridgers was spectacular.  Too bad I didn't get a picture of it.  But here is a mid-day picture of the view over the Shields valley to the Northwest, which gives you an idea why Montana is called Big Sky country.

The snow there is just as minimal as the snow here at home, so we had to ski around the remains of last summer's flowers and grasses and where the forest was thick we had to take off the skis and hike for lack of snow cover.

But that was okay, it was just fun to be in a new place and outdoors doing what we like best - reading the animal tracks and traveling around on skis.

I forgot to bring my camera, so I took these few pictures with my phone so I could do this blog post.  The phone has no zoom lens or light metering so not many pictures turned out, but you get the idea.  It was a great couple of days and we were quite pleased with ourselves and life in general.