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The
image above is the hill where our house is, on Mt. Dean Stone, which
is mainly called "the hill" by Missoulians. (I suppose that's changing as
developers encroach on other hills.) We spent a lot of time exploring
the hill as kids. It's too bad to see more big houses going up where
we used to play. My house is barely visible in the image above: it is
a small white dot just over one inch from the left margin, at the
crest of the populated part of the hill (i.e. where the fall-foliage
colors stop and the grass and forested part begins).
The first picture at right is the view from our house looking down Westview Drive towards the old downtown of Missoula, which you can barely make out up against the grassy hill at the north side of town. That's where the Clark Fork river runs and where the two railroads put their lines. The city spread mainly south and west from there. The mountains beyond are the Snowbowl ski area (mountain to the left side) and the Rattlesnake Recreation/Wilderness area (forested area and mountains to the right side). The next image down is our house, looking at it across the bushes at the neighboring house. My room is the window on the upper left corner. The yellow slope behind the house is the top of Mt. Sentinel, which is the symbol of Missoula. The concrete M on Mt. Sentinel isn't visible from our house. The last image is the Northern Pacific Railway depot where my dad used to work. In the last fifteen years it's gone through a lot of different uses: restaurant, brewery, store, restaurant, and then passenger depot again. A lot of western cities were slow to save these old railroad buildings. Now the railroad through town is called the Montana Rail Link, owned by Montana tycoon Dennis Washington. The MRL runs a sightseeing train through town called the Montana Daylight. You can just see the colorful black and white symbol of the old Northern Pacific Railway on the corner of the depot facade. The railroad borrowed the yin-and-yang symbol (called the "monad" by railroaders) from the Korean exhibit at a world's fair in the 1880's: it was appropriate since the N.P. billed itself as the route to Asia. [ Next ] |
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