Hiking in Montana

With two friends in town, it seemed most appropriate to share the things I love most about Billings: hiking and food. (Not that the food is especially good here, but it isn't bad. And I love food.) So, S and I went hiking on his first day here. Actually, we went rockhounding. This is "Montana Agate" season, so it seemed like the thing to do. MT agates have a unique, desirable landscape pattern to them, when painstakingly cut and polished. Since I have recently decided to embrace my obsessive rock collecting (sorry mom, can't be stopped), it has become an interesting challenge to find something unique, and perhaps slow the collecting by entertaining the thought of more careful polishing.

We came back with several large rocks that may or may not be (but they look like they are!) and a hilarious story of a man who asked for a ride back to town for he and his dog. The dog was a sweet, fluffy thing that kept jumping into our laps while we were sifting stones, so we felt like we already knew him. Little did we know in the car, the dog would reveal all the other friends he met next to the river.

I've never had to pick ticks off of anything in my life. And when you have the experience of both knowing what they are, but never having dealt with them, you pretty much think the second one touches you, it will suck all your blood, give you lime disease, and turn you into a vampire. So I would point at a tick, and S would pull it off. The owner, in the backseat (why were we holding his dog??) was frantic, apparently having the same experience with ticks that I had. He insisted we stop so he could buy beer before dropping him off.

We didn't find any on us, so we assumed the dog got them from the brush.

Next day, J is in town so we take him to Pictograph State Park to see where S proposed. We decided the cement path crawling with middle school field-trippers was too busy, so we took a dirt path along an extinct creek bed that ran between the cliffs (to the left in the picture below). We got all the way to the end, "mountain goating" from rock to rock at some points. At the top, we found a huge stash of owl pellets and began pulling them apart to look at the bones. Somehow, I never got to do that in grade school, and they never let you do cool stuff like that for an undergrad biology degree, so we pulled them apart, arranging the bones by size and type. some were tiny, mouse-sized. Others were broken pieces of larger things, like rabbits. Neat!

I don't know why I was surprised when we got back to the cement path, and I reached up to rub my hair and found a tick in it. Over the rest of the evening, until we left J at the bus station to go on his residency, we found a dozen more between the three of us. I have purchased large quantities of bug spray since then.