Every summer Blue Eyes and I pack up and spend a week with his parents and family in a cabin deep in the Elkhorn Mountains in southwest Montana. I have very little cell service there, no internet, and miles and miles of open spaces. I usually have hours to spend searching out micro and macro vistas, fiddling with my camera settings trying to capture in pixels something that has no business being captured in pixels. Even in July the mountains have patches of snow on their peaks and the morning and evening temperatures leave you reaching for a jacket. The small towns and sprawling ranches that surround the mountains gave me and my camera plenty of raw material.

The view from my in-laws house. It really is just stunning!

Minty green lichen.

Purple mountain lupine.

There were fields and fields of this in bloom in early July! Entire hillsides were covered in clumps of purple blooms.

No idea…

An old abandoned Ford tractor.

St. John’s Catholic church, out in the middle of practically nowhere, no town close by, very few ranches, just this tiny white church and graveyard.

I love the old green paint on this bus! I stood gawking and snapping pics until the neighbors started asking questions. (In my bright red mini and giant camera I certainly don’t look like a local in this small rural town.)

Fields of rapeseed/canola. Rapeseed is the official name of this bright yellow flower, but the Canadians have renamed it “canola” for it’s uses in vegetable oil and plastic production. Canada + ola (meaning “oil”) = canola. Brilliant.

This might be one of my favorites from my whole trip.

Such a beautiful stripe of bright color in the middle of miles of greenish-brown fields, mostly alfalfa and hay about ready to be cut and baled for winter.

Next summer I want to take myself and my camera on a few short day-trips to explore more of the surrounding area. On our last trip Blue Eyes and I crawled all over the abandoned Comet Mine and I would love to find something else like that to explore!