By Lesley Sauls
Delicate wildflowers in glass jars hung suspended on ropes from low shepherds' hooks lining a short aisle. A banjo player plucked Pachelbel's Canon in D as the radiant bride walked with her father toward her future husband and a backdrop of mountain valleys and peaks. This is what my family and I had come to the Montana wilderness to witness, but it was only the beginning of what we saw.
When we checked into our rustic log cabin, our group learned about mountain air conditioning. That is what locals call the technique of opening windows to let in crisp morning air and closing them in the afternoon to keep out the hot afternoon breeze. We followed suit and found it to be a comfortable and green way to live.
On our covered porch we lounged on Adirondack chairs and looked across a small pond to the outer holes of the property's championship golf course and a small horse barn and corral. Behind our cabin was a lush, grassy lawn on which afternoon games were encouraged. The lodge provided us with equipment for horseshoes, beanbag tosses, croquet and bocce ball to play in the shade during the hot afternoon hours.
The property's main lodge is a gathering place and historic outpost that dates back to the early 1900s, when this stock ranch became Seeley Lake's first commercial dude ranch. During the Depression it was home to nearly 100 unemployed lumberjacks, and subsequent decades were ones of decline. It was in the 1970s that the Double Arrow Ranch assumed its place as a guest lodge complete with tennis courts, swimming pool, hot tub and 18-hole golf course.
"It's a family run business; I guess you could tell that," explained the desk clerk at the lodge. "They've been doing it for generations."
An old upright piano that voiced its age through its sound was a draw for my daughters, who played and sang every time they came to the lodge. Fortunately, guests and staff enjoyed the prelude to evening meals as they lounged in sofas with aperitifs and icy mugs of local brew. When the dining room opened, we savored a broad array of gourmet meals, although the menu did focus on the local bounty of wild game and seafood. In an effort to taste the indigenous flavor, we closed our eyes and dutifully bit into the house specialty — rattlesnake and rabbit sausage. It was delicious.
The lodge's golf course boasts a pro shop and cafe that serves sandwiches and wraps for lunch. Several guests in the wedding party were headed out for a game and said they had heard they would see a white-tail deer and her baby that lived on the course. They had hoped to spot some of the local elk, too, but later told us that they found only the elusive ground squirrels that were once called picket-pins by early settlers because of their resemblance to stakes used to picket horses.
While others golfed we headed out to explore the local area. After getting the scoop from the staff and picking up a day-hike guide, we chose two hikes on subsequent days that took our breath away in very different ways. Both had waterfalls as their end points and trees along their routes, but the personalities and surprises offered by each were distinctive to the specific trails.
A 4.6-mile hike to Morrell Falls took us on a wide path through a forest of lodgepole pines that stood poker straight despite their Latin name, pinus contortis, which means twisted pine. The trees were initially studied by scientists on the Pacific Coast, where strong ocean winds caused them to grow in gnarled shapes, but in the Montana wilderness they grow perfectly vertical. We left the forest floor to climb through thicker woods past glassy ponds edged by towering stone cliffs. After crossing a rocky stream on a wooden footbridge, we ultimately arrived at the base of a 90-foot crashing waterfall where we cooled our hot feet in the icy water and watched rainbows rise in the mist over the falls before retracing our steps back through the fragrant and lush forest.
The next day's hike was shorter, narrower and less carefully maintained, although the guidebook says it is the most popular hike in the Seeley-Swan Valley. With its trailhead at one corner of pristine Holland Lake, the tight path winds around its shores and provides views into the deep, crystalline water. We could smell the vanilla bark of Montana's state tree, the ponderosa pine, when the sun baked down on it between dappled patches of shade. After a gentle walk around the lake, the narrow path led up 200 feet over mini falls and past small mountain creeks to a rushing, gushing falls that tumbled 50 feet over boulders and between crags down to Holland Lake. We crawled up to feel the spray on our outstretched arms and turned around to take in the breathtaking view.
"It's the picture from the water bottle!" my daughter observed.
Indeed, we looked back toward snowcapped McDonald Peak in the Mission Mountains range across wide, clear Holland Lake and a forest of dense pines. It looked exactly like the idyllic picture that graces several brands of mountain spring water, and we were witnessing it personally.
We tripped back down the mountain path like goats, dodging bushes and stopping at the water's edge to skip rocks and watch a water-skier and a wake-boarder take on the glassy water. The two-hour hike was just enough for a morning adventure.
Huckleberries are a huge part of life in this part of the United States, and we were fortunate enough to be in Seeley Lake when they were in season and being sold fresh at roadside stands. We enjoyed chocolate-covered huckleberries, huckleberry lemonade, margaritas, ice cream, vinaigrette, and I even came home with huckleberry mints and candles.
The wedding itself was unforgettable, with a sunset toast and dancing under twinkly lights into the night. The next morning, after a breakfast of crab eggs Benedict, corn-beef hash, waffles and fruit fit for royalty, we headed off on another Montana adventure. In some ways we had saved the best for last.
Our tired legs and feet were ready to share the burden of our exploration, so we headed to the Rich Ranch to meet up with Tommy and Clint, the guides from Georgia who led us up and down mountain paths on gentle horses chosen to fit our sizes and abilities. The Double Arrow Outfitters are run by the Rich family out of Rich Ranch by the same family who has been outfitting the Double Arrow since the 1970s. With gentle demeanors and slow Southern drawls, our guides educated us as they led us through the shady groves. At one point Tommy dismounted and picked wild thimbleberries and, yep, juicy ripe huckleberries for us to savor from atop our steeds. Clint found currants for us to try, too, and the easygoing guides helped us pose for a family photo on horseback with a mountain valley spread out behind and below us.
On our way back to the ranch we took a meandering route that included a stop in a small town called Ovando, where a legendary shootout left a bullet lodged in the wall of what was then a store and is now aptly named the Stray Bullet Cafe. We took advantage of the restaurant's shaded front deck to have lunch before we wandered around the frontier-style town's replicated hoosegow and history museum. There we learned about the Bob Marshall Wilderness that surrounded us and covers more than a million acres of land along the Continental Divide. This giant wilderness bears the name of one of the first activists for land conservation who worked with Aldo Leopold and the Wilderness Society in the 1930s to promote what would become the National Wilderness act of 1964 that preserves natural resources around the country.
With our interest piqued in learning more about the area, we stopped into the Double Arrow's old barn that was moved from the ranch down to the highway years ago to become the Seeley Lake Historical Museum. There we learned more about the Bob Marshall Wilderness, ranching and local history. Interestingly, this was where World War II conscientious objectors came and became the first fire-jumpers into mountain wildfires. One of their uniforms is still on display in the museum.
My family found more than we came to Montana to see. We played cards every evening on the porch of a rustic lodge, we hiked wild terrain around unspoiled lakes and we pretended to be cowboys for one morning on horseback. We witnessed a beautiful wedding and tasted exciting wild game. The beauty and adventure we found on this destination nuptial weekend was the icing on the multi-tiered huckleberry wedding cake we had savored under a velvet Montana sunset.
WHEN YOU GO
Double Arrow Resort: www.doublearrowresort.com
Rich Ranch: http://www.richranch.com
Day-hike guide: www.amazon.com/Seeley-Swan-Day-Hikes-Alan-Leftridge/dp/1591520142
Seeley Lake Historical Society: www.seeleyhistory.org
Stray Bullet Cafe: www.ovandomontana.net/businesses/straybullet.php
Lesley Sauls is a freelance writer. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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