Glaston Lake

If you stand on a frozen lake after a few days of warm weather when the sun has melted some water atop the ice, then you unzip your jacket and hold the sides out in the wind, you can sail across the lake.

Glaston Lake is about two and a quarter miles west of our property, over rutted prairie dotted with cows and sagebrush.  The prairie is flat enough that you can see where you’re going, and treeless enough that fifty percent of the visually observable world is sky, but it has enough topographical variation that you can find a hilltop to aim for if you’re in an ambling mood.  You amble across the prairie, reach the hilltop, gaze across the newly revealed landscape – look! more grass and sagebrush, and is that a cow in the distance? – and then you see another hilltop or a ridge that can serve as your next aiming point.  If you still want to amble, the stroll continues.  You weave your way among the sagebrush.  Happily, if you like prairie, this is a process that can be repeated indefinitely.

The prairie north of Big Timber, MT provides excellent ambling.  Since you’re not far from the Rockies, you can see the snowy Crazy Mountains in the west and the white-topped Beartooths in the south.  And if you amble east from my family’s property, and you have permission to cross the Lavarells’ land, you can go all the way to Glaston Lake.  Which is how Rebekah and I ended up there.

“Jeb, are you sure the ice is thick enough to walk on?”

Of course I wasn’t sure.  I’m from Georgia – what do I know about lake ice?  Nothing.  But I figured if I fell in I could probably get back out, and I wasn’t far from the warm cabin.  So, I calculated, the risk of frostbite or hypothermia was low.

“Yeah, it’s been really cold,” I said.

“There’s standing water on the ice,” she pointed out.

“Right.  Well, there have been a couple warm days recently, but it was cold before that.”

I slid out on the ice.  You could push off and slide a short distance, sort of like ice skating in boots.  I listened for cracking and heard nothing.  Luckily the ice was thick enough.  Duke trotted out after me and even when he added his seventy pounds to my hundred and seventy, there was no cracking.  I threw a tennis ball for Duke, and Rebekah came out on the ice.  She spotted what looked like a fishing rod lying on the ice, and we walked toward it.  Duke brought his ball and I threw it again.  There was an auger hole in the ice and a short rod lying beside it – someone had been ice fishing.  Rebekah bent to examine the rod when her sunglasses fell onto the lake.  The lenses caught the wind and the glasses slid across the ice.  They moved rapidly – about the speed that I could sprint on solid ground.  Neither of us could catch them.

“Damn!” she said.  The glasses skittered away.  They were almost out of sight when they came to rest on a rough patch of ice, a black dot against the white lake.  “I guess they’re gone.”

 For no good reason I took that as a challenge.  I started across the lake after them, and experimented with several styles of walking on the way.  With long steps, you got too unstable on the slippery ice and I felt like I was about to fall.  Short sliding steps felt stable, but the going was slow.  You could stutter step then push off and slide for a foot or two, I found, but I figured that if I tried to ice skate for several hundred yards in my hiking boots busting my butt was the most likely result.  Which is how I came to be standing upright, unzipping my jacket, and holding out the sides to catch the wind.  I slid across the watery ice.  It was, I thought proudly, a mode of locomotion of which mountain men probably hadn’t conceived.

There’s some reward in novelty, even if divorced from practicality.  It would be harder coming back.  But who thinks of the future when the present is so much fun?

Google Earth image of Glaston Lake.  Crazy Mountains in the distance to the west; Big Timber and I-90 to the south.

 

Montana in winter is THIS awesome.