Gallatin Forest Day Trips

We've taken side trips the last two days into the Gallatin National Forest. Yesterday's goal was to visit the Crazy Mountains, and today we went to the Natural Bridge and Falls on the Boulder River.

All up and down the Rocky Mountains, if you look on a map, there are named "ranges," and clumps of mountains named the X-and-Such Mountains. The Crazy Mountains are just north of Big Timber, they are a small cluster of mountains on their own, on the eastern edge of the Rockies. The tallest one, Crazy Peak, is over 11,000ft tall, which is pretty tall by Rockies standards. According to Wikipedia, the original Crow Indian name for the mountains was the Crazy Woman Mountains, and referred to a woman whose family was killed in the westward settlement movement, and she went insane and lived in the mountains.

The forest service has primitive campgrounds and hiking trails throughout the national forest areas. Montana seems to scoff at pavement, a lot of the rural roads are dirt or gravel roads. On the map it looked like one of these campgrounds was right up in the Crazies, and we wanted to get a closer look at them. So we hopped in the truck and started jolting across the countryside toward the mountains.


One of the things I find interesting about the countryside is that it is like a multi-level floor plan. One area is at one level, then there's a large step up and another large flat area is some twenty feet higher than the first.

This drive went through quite a bit of private land, with rustic old wooden cabins. There were a lot of beautiful horses. In one place we had to stop the truck to let a herd of them pass on the road. (At first I thought they wanted to come see if we had any treats for them, then we realized they just wanted to get by us.)


The road to the campground led us through a canyon into the Crazies, next to Crazy Peak's next door neighbor. We took pictures of wildflowers and pine trees and horses.



Today's trip took us south of Big Timber along the Boulder River to the Natural Bridge and Falls. This is an area where the water has worn an underground path through the rock. During the high water in the spring, the water goes over and down a high falls, but during lower water it goes under the rock and comes out below. There was a natural limestone bridge over the falls, but it collapsed in 1988. The falls area and the canyon around it was lovely.

I apologize for the drunken quality of these photos--I seem to have difficulty seeing whether things are level when I'm looking at the camera. The first photo is the rapids above the falls, before the water goes "underground." The second one is looking over the top of the high falls. The third one is opposite the falls. The high falls at the top are dry, and the water is coming out of the underground channel.