Cutoff score.

It is perhaps a strange correlation of the topography, climate, and access in this part of the country that skiing in the summer is often much better than it is in the winter. Suddenly, come mid-June, terrain that entailed a long day of hiking is now a two-hour traipse away. Even as the skiable terrain shrinks to a relative handful of at-elevation bowls with favorable aspect, the opportunities are as tantalizing as ever. And it's so seemingly easy. A good day's work is done by noon, meaning lazy hours of poring over the landscape to find the next day's task. And perhaps a book and a home-made candy bar and an airy bivouac.

(Day One: Waiting for clouds to break on the Walton Lake Cirque, Clearwater Mountains, June 23)

I'm having trouble finding ski partners these days. My main one is off-line for a few more years.

Others are not too keen to wake up at 4:30 and climb a mountain. The polite late-night text message replies of a few months ago are now rather abrupt. Yet, the season dwindles. This is a moment that does not return. At a party last weekend someone asked how feasible it would be to ski year-round. Totally feasible, but at what cost? There are glaciers just 30 or so air miles north of Missoula, but it’s a full day of off-trail ‘shwacking to get to them. Why not just go to Idaho and take it easy?

(Blue skies reveal a 100-mile panorama, Clearwater Mountains with the Selway beyond, June 23)

(Day Two: Clearwater Mountains, June 24)

A vacation’s been booked: biking, islands, Trader Joe’s, etc., etc. Family weekends which do not include visiting mountaintops are planned. Because you once did not know when things were to end you began to think of this “as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really.” The season that once seemed limitless now has a very real end.

(Transition platform)

So the question is: this weekend, Glacier or Missoula?

The sports page.

If your newspaper is like mine, the sports page is probably full of stories about college basketball, Nascar, and American Legion ball leagues. As a former reporter of 14 years, I know that a lot of what ends up in the newspaper is there for convenience sake – it’s easy news to get. While I don’t subscribe to the current fad of criticizing newspapers, I do think the sports page has room for improvement; what’s there generally appeals to a very narrow range of readers and has questionable news value.

(A clear day descent from Lindy Peak, June 16)

This is too bad, especially in a place like Montana where on any given Sunday there are hordes of people engaged in pursuits that would leave your average ball player begging for mercy, but they are doing it alone, or in a small team using bikes, boards, boots, or boats. Many of these are significant achievements but never make it into news unless someone dies, sets a record, or writes a book.

(East face of the Mission.)

This guy from down the valley does a lot of awesome stuff, including this one-day traverse of the Rattlesnake Mountains

(You have a baby! In a bar!)

I used to work with Jill, and have to say I was surprised when I saw she was doing things like 400-mile unsupported desert mountain bike rides and 100-mile Arctic rides on specially-made fat bikes.

This guy from Revelstoke last year climbed 2,000,000 vertical feet – then skied down it all, too. When he got to thinking about his impact on the environment, he decided to bike, not drive , to the trailheads.

The Bob Marshall in Montana is America’s second largest wilderness area. Chenault designed a race where contestants start on one side of the wilderness and finish on the other. How they navigate the 150 or so miles in between is up to them.

(Father's Day ride to Garnet ghost town.)

This guy climbed and skied Abiathar in Yellowstone National Park. Nuff said.

I found this blog this spring looking for information on a peak in the Bitterroot. This guy climbed and skied Sky Pilot in 4 hours roundtrip. Not a big deal until you know that guidebooks say it’s a two-day outing.

I guess the Alaskans will always put us to shame; this account of a recent crossing of a range on the Alaska-Canada border, from sea-level to summit, is gripping if for nothing else than its nonchalance.

Heck, and those are just the ones who blog about it.

‘A Montana summer’; a ‘Couzy-shaped hole’

Last week I skied with a guy from Colorado who said he was spending a few months here to, among other things, enjoy ‘a Montana summer’. While I’m partial to winter, of course, the Montana summer does have its charms: glistening snowfields, ambling grizzlies, wide rivers, green hills, etc., etc. With barely six hours a day of darkness, there’s also an incredible motivation to get out and enjoy it all. The other week, in Seattle, I was talking to a couple of PhDs about Montana. One in particular had not, I take it, had much opportunity to venture outside of Washington, D.C., and it was an interesting exercise to try and explain the vastness of the sweeping landscape, the unimpeded access, and the human place in it all. It’s harder still to explain to someone not familiar with the concept that the only true obstacle to overcome is your ability and motivation.

Motivation on Heart Lake, in a range some call the northern Bitterroot and others call the Stateline, June 9: low clouds and sideways snow.

Couzy, the plot hound, did not make it. We had her euthanized last week.

Couzy was an artifact of our last nine years. We got her from the pound in Haywood County a few weeks after our marriage and a few days before her prior-scheduled euthanasia. The state dog of North Carolina was bred to hunt bears, but judging by the fact that Couzy was scared of her own dim reflection on the stainless steel refrigerator, she was probably not of much use to hunters. We named her after Jean Couzy, a French mountaineer who was a member of Maurice Herzog’s famed first ascent of Annapurna. Such provenance did not wear off: she was afraid of leashes and not much of a socializer. She was also, I take it, subject at one point to a lot of abuse, judging by the way she would cower if we made any sudden moves.

We shuttled her to obedience school, which was interesting but of little practical value. Due to her propensity to both run away when off leash and attack other dogs when on leash she rarely went on hikes or to the dog park. We took her to Oregon and Canada but left her behind on other trips.

She started limping in January, and in March we found out why: bone cancer. Her death leaves the house with a sort of Couzy-shaped hole, which is to say a small, mostly unobtrusive hole, but one which is there nonetheless.

Alien technology.

On the rare nights that I cannot fall asleep I listen to AM radio. Lately it's been that old racist curmudgeon Michael Savage, who when he is not berating Mexicans, Arabs, and 'Socialists' can actually be kind of eloquent. Years ago I listened to a show whose announcer said he was located in a bunker in the Nevada desert and who discussed government conspiracies and UFO sightings, in that order. For some reason, I have always remembered something that he said about technology: that all of the great advancements of our era -- the cell phone, the fax machine, the GPS -- were courtesy of alien technology pirated from government-captured UFOs.

(June 2: returning to the scene on St. Mary)

Last week, after my stupid and epic afternoon of lost navigation on the side of St. Mary Peak, I went and dropped $170 on a Garmin eTrex 20 GPS. The eTrex 20 is one model up from the most basic GPS, and while I would have been fine with the cheapie the allure of a color screen was just too great. When I got home and opened the box Laura took one look at it and said, Well that looks like it will be a fun new toy. And she's right, sort of: thanks to triangulation from a passel of overhead satellites I am able, with two pushes of a button, to know my average moving speed and elevation profile and determine the exact size of the lot our home sits on.

OK, true. But it's also a fascinating and highly accurate way to plot routes and marks. On Saturday, descending St. Mary (again) in a storm, rather than wonder if I was too high or too low in my traverse, I simply whipped the wallet-sized unit out and saw I was about 100 feet too far east. On Sunday, skiing Lolo Peak, Eric and Greg left their hiking boots in a tree at the snowline; it seemed like an obvious spot on the way up but was simply a tree lost in the forest on the way down. Thinking we had passed them, I turned the GPS on and turned around, bushwacked 50 yards uphill, and walked straight to the shoes. Pretty cool, that alien technology.

(Looking for shoes on Lolo)

It was interesting to get into the mountains after three weeks away and see the changes spring is bringing. The snow level is creeping up, but snowpacks up high are still good and deep. The mountains picked up more than a foot last weekend and some more during the week. We've had a spate of awful weather, which means I turned attention to the backyard:

This time I paid good money for someone to break up and haul away a stupid old sidewalk in the backyard, then made four trips to bring back two tons of cobblestone pavers (matches the driveway!). Two days later: back aching, walk and patio done.