in the Helena Valley....

On a graphic relief map, you see this high, arid country in terms of its "wrinkles." You see similar country from your airplane when you fly through Salt Lake or Denver or Calgary. The mountains here divide the hemisphere's freshwater, and the rivers that start at the top of the Rockies (about 18 miles from Helena) end in either the Atlantic or the Pacific oceans, hundreds of miles away at the edges of the continent.

Like everywhere else, water runs downhill around here, north from the valley through the Gates of the Mountains, then east and eventually south, joining the Atlantic finally in the Gulf of Mexico, thru the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, passing at last through New Orleans where we lived for a a while a long time ago.

A short distance north of here near the border between US and Canada, the continental plate tips north and the water runs to the Atlantic through more arctic passages such as Hudson Bay. Our nearest geographic neighbors are Canadians, as the Dakotas are hundreds of miles east, and Idaho and Wyoming both are a long way away.

I think this was big-time dinosaur country back in the cretaceous era. We occasionally run across the fossilized remains of large vertebrates in our trips afield and the coal-fields of Montana show evidence of a swampy tropical climate around here that may have lasted for a hundred million years or more.

I think this valley was a big lake when the glaciers melted. Sometimes we find clam shells in our garden and on the hillsides and there are stories about garnets and rubies turning up in the gutters and gravel streets and alleys of the old town.

I have heard that volcanic magma rose very close to the surface around here about 50 million years or so ago creating a batholith rich in metal. Gold was discovered here in 1864 and has been sought and stripped from the local hillsides ever since, although all the good pickings have probably been gone for a century or so.