Oldman Watershed Council (OWC)

I live in a fold on thrust-faulted landscape. Behind me, to the west, the Livingstone Range is a towering tsunami. To the east, a parade of sandstone ridges, like ocean waves, extends outward toward the Porcupine Hills. Out there, beyond breakers cast in stone, the Castle, Crowsnest and Oldman rivers converge in united flow.  

This is a landscape of innate power and enchantment. It's raw, beckoning, enticing. It's a mosaic of fractured rock and twisted trees, a land of tortured topography and confluence. There are secrets within its creases.

Adrift on this sea of contorted rock there are grasslands and forests, and within this floral collage there are deer and elk, coyotes and cougars. There are also prehistoric chert quarries, medicine wheels and vision quest sites. And beneath all this, lying in a vast subterranean museum, there are bizarre lifeforms (hadrosaurs, ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs). Sometimes they emerge, offering a glimpse into a lost world.   

The most well known member of this Age-of-Dinosaurs community is Black Beauty, a Tyrannosaurus rex who, after living underground for millions of years, rose one day from her rockbound resting spot and moved north to her new home at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology.

Out on the lithographic sea, life changes. The winds of time are unrelenting, and the weather can transform in an instant. This is the land of the chinook, the snow-eater. It can arrive as a gentle and benevolent pulse of warm air, or descend as a killing, malevolent force. 

Those who live on this land of rising and falling fortunes know adversity. Life at the birthplace of the chinook often unfolds in dramatic and unexpected ways. Hurricane-force winds, raging wildfires and ravaging floodwaters have a way of coming to the fore, commanding attention. 

When wind rips the doors off your truck, you tend to take notice. On the other hand, many days are made in heaven, but you never know what's lurking around the corner.

It was late in an idyllic June day when I looked out over the fractured Late Cretaceous seabed. The land was a rich green. Life seemed peaceful. Black Beauty and many other dinosaurs had gone "over the rainbow," but as I looked into the void created by their absence, I spotted a large grizzly. I saw the bear as he emerged from an aspen forest. My wife (Monica) joined me at the window, and there we stayed for the better part of an hour.

I'm pretty sure I bagged hair from the previously reported black grizzly. Hopefully your DNA analysis won't show this hair to belong to a Black Angus. How embarrassing that would be! If, by chance, your findings reveal this shameful, cloven-hoofed flaw, you may send me the following message:

Dear Mr. McIntyre: We regret to inform you that your reported "black grizzly" was, in fact, not a bear, but a registered ruminant, a Black Angus. We've enclosed some sketches (of bears and bovines) to help you in your future attempts to provide us with meaningful data.

While tracking the black grizzly, I was more than surprised to discover a muskrat in a place I would never have expected one to exist. I literally stumbled upon the semiaquatic fur ball as I traced the grizzly's trail up a spring-fed stream. There, where I'd last seen the bear, I walked in boot-sucking muck through thick brush. Steep banks were on both sides of me. I was acutely aware that I was tracking a bear, and I was thinking "bear" when the muskrat, right at my feet, exploded into action. The result: A wave of mud and cold water washed over me.

I recovered in time to catch a glimpse of a brown torpedo with a rope-like tail as it shot downstream. Not since an airborne beaver crashed onto the deck of my kayak have I been more startled by a frenetic, panic-stricken rodent. 

Several days after the black grizzly made his presence known, my wife and I decided to spend the better part of two days walking home from two, close to home, locations. The plan: We'd drive, park and walk home via a footloose course across the undulating bedrock sea. 

The first day we walked home from Lundbreck Falls. The next day we walked from Chapel Rock. Each of these walks, based on our routes of travel, was on the order of 20 km.

During these treks the sounds and smells of spring were in the air. As we moved across the landscape, we breathed in the heavy, sweet perfume of blooming wolf-willow and, moments later, lost it to the divine and sweetly intoxicating fragrance of chokecherry. We crossed upland hillsides and climbed ridges where the sweet, spicy scent of locoweed floated through the air and followed us home.

Wildflowers were everywhere, and the rough fescue grasslands over which we walked were rich, luxuriant and, in places, nearly waist high. Meadowlarks sang, raptors soared and Columbian ground squirrels, like exclamation points, punctuated the land.

The thrust-faulted landscape was bathed in shades of green, and the foreground ridges were covered with picturesque, wind-shaped limber pines. The views, always striking, became sensational when set against the backdrop of the knife-edged Livingstone Range, the rugged peaks of the Flathead Range, or the distinct and distant profile of Chief Mountain in northern Montana.

Surprisingly—or maybe not—an estimated one-third of the aspens, balsam poplars and willows within the traversed landscape were still (mid-June) without leaves, and many deciduous trees appeared to be dead, or dying. Why? The problem would appear to involve a complex set of factors including drought and year-round temperature differentials. Within aspen forests this phenomenon is known as sudden aspen decline (SAD). It's claiming aspens throughout the North American West.

Monica and I saw dozens of elk and quite a few elk calves during our travels. Also seen: a mule deer fawn, a moose calf and dozens of young Clark's nutcrackers. A red fox put in a brief cameo appearance while, somewhat surprisingly, we didn't see a single coyote. But two days later, near home, I found a coyote den with no less than five pups at its entrance.