Monday, June 15 - Boulder, MT

Here we are in Boulder, on the hill behind the Mine. We're having a great time inspecting the local flora and fauna. We have been seeing bluebirds and lots of cows. We took a side trip yesterday for lunch, about 40 miles to Whitehall. The valley to the south is irrigated, both by gravity feed ditches and huge sprinkers. Some sort of yellow flowered crop may be canola seed. It looks like very spindley broccolli.

We had some rain yesterday, the first since we left Alaska. People around here say it gets much drier later in the summer. With the spring moisture, new wild flowers are appearing every day. For those of you who haven't checked out Susannah's House Blog lately, she now has internet hooked up at the house and has posted pictures of the inside of the house. http://www.westhillhouse.blogspot.com/.

We drove to the very top of the hill behind the mine the other day, which caused me to hyperventilate, so we drove down again to a more level site where I could get pushed around in my wheelchair and look at the wildflowers on my own. Because of the dryness, the lupine is very small but is just blooming today. We got some rain last night and this morning on the way up to the mine I saw yellow daisy-looking flowers all along the roadside that weren't there yesterday. In another month this will all be sere and brown--all dried out. So the flowers act much in the same way as they do in Alaska--they grow for all they're worth in a very short amount of time, hoping to produce seeds before the weather kills them off. It is really beautiful here, truly, and so different from Homer. It reminds us that we probably would be happy and interested wherever we end up. Talked with my sis Elizabeth yesterday and we will probably try to connect with them in July when they come out for a Gallagher family reunion in Estes Park northwest of Denver.