The fat season.

At 5 a.m. downtown Missoula has a surprising amount of traffic: trucks pulling drift boats, minivans hauling campers, and Subarus loaded with skis, bikes, or kayaks (and sometimes all three). This is the fat season in Montana, when everything seems possible.

(Central Missions from Red Butte on June 1: an interesting exploration that netted little skiing.)

(Pushing off from just below the summit of St. Mary, rushing to duck morning storms moving in from the south.)

This year’s fat season began a few weeks ahead of last year’s, and a month or more ahead of the year before that. Warm spell early in April; little new snow through May.

(Hoodoo Pass on June 8; last year the snow line was nearly 1,000 feet lower.)

(Stateline Mountains.)

After looking at Illinois Peak all day Saturday I decided to have a go at it on Sunday – never mind the fact that I’ve only heard of one person skiing it before. A bust. I missed my alarm and slept until 5, was stopped by a fallen tree a mile from the summer trailhead, and somehow even though I spent hours gazing at the peak I failed to notice that the approach was entirely melted out and the mainline run would deposit a skier a mile or more from the approach trail.

(Sleeping in meant I missed this guy.)

Driving down the canyon in the afternoon I was surprised to see a man pushing a lawn mower out of the forest. Turns out the guy’s family has an old mining claim there, long unproductive, but he likes to keep the ghost town around the claim tidied up. He led me into what he said was the jail, a stack of rocks sunk into the hillside (or the hillside has since grown around it).

“The jail had room for two people,” he said. “So when a third came in, one of the first two had to be hung.”