Montana (1/2) - The Places That Impacted Me Most
I looked at the yellow rolling hills with pure excitement, a warm feeling was going through my body, it felt like I was meant to be there.
Seeing Montana for the first time in my life.
It was the spring of 2009 and I was on a cross-country road trip with a college buddy named Marco. We left home in Quebec City, Canada, and pointed our old Subaru Wagon toward Los Angeles, planning to take our time in the Rocky Mountains. After driving all day through the Dakota flats, we finally entered the highly anticipated state of Montana. We only had two days to get a feel for it before we have to cross back into Canada on our way west.
Growing up I heard countless stories from my dad who—for what now feels like fortuitous reasoning—studied forestry in Missoula in the 1960s. Those two years my French-born father spent in the American West had been so impactful for him that he showered my brother and I with epic tales ranging from backcountry skiing bear encounters, to the life of a ranch hand, to getting lost in blizzards, and simply baking a lot of soufflés for bewildered Montanans. There was no shortage of inspiring material for a twelve year old.
Frederic Strohl’s Montana adventures:
And so it was that 42 years later, Marco and I spent two days romping about the northwest part of the state (the most beautiful part, in my view) and crossed into British Columbia on our frenetic coast-to coast jaunt. Truthfully, I don't remember much about that time in Montana except for the sign of the Big Sky Motel somewhere back on Interstate 90, and Flathead Lake. Driving the western shore on a sunny afternoon was pretty impressive for a guy who was used to quaint European landscapes. The lake is enormous—so big, in fact, that "you can see it from space," as the locals say.
In fact, I don't remember much about that entire trip, except that neither of us used a cellphone nor a GPS on the entire trip. And yet, it’s on that trip that I decided to dedicate my life to making photographs of the natural world.
It's important to note that my dream at this point was to move to Los Angeles to become a commercial photographer. I thought I needed to be close to the "industry" to "make it." (Blame these preconceived notions on shows like Entourage.) Therefore, in 2014, my girlfriend (now wife) Andrea Dabene and I packed our tiny studio in Vancouver, BC, loaded our lives in the back of a rented Ford Flex and drove to California, dreams in tow.
The drive from Vancouver to California, 2014.
We posted up at my Aunt Junie's place outside of L.A with three thousand dollars to our name. As the months went by Andrea and I met a lot of great people, and even experienced a fair share of commercial success as photographers; but something was off. I was tense and irritable and Andrea was sick of it. We fought a lot. One night after an argument about traffic (or something stupid), I sat down for some introspective thinking: I was a guy who thought he was living his dream, but all I'd found was that this childhood fantasy wasn't what I wanted at all.
Two days later, I pitched Andrea this idea to move out—just for the winter—to a remote cabin in Montana I'd found on Craigslist. I didn't expect it to go over that well since I'd put her through a lot of changes over the past several years and promised Los Angeles would be the last one. To my surprise, she was into it (always such a trooper), keen to live in a log cabin 25 miles from the nearest "town" in Southwest Montana... in the winter. So once again we packed a carful of bags and boxes and headed off into the unknown.
Postcard from Zion National Park on our drive to Montana, 2014.
Postcard from The Tetons, 2014.
It was October when we arrived, and in hindsight I couldn't have chosen a better time to show Montana to Andrea. As we crossed the Wyoming / Montana border, we were greeted by an endless sunset over the Madison Range, the aspens wearing their brightest yellows and the peaks capped with a dusting of snow. On a piece of paper, we have a rough description of the cabin and an address that no GPS seemed able to locate: 91 North Palisades Drive.
Just as we were making another u-turn on another forgotten dirt road Andrea yelled
"I see it! There, the house with the blue roof," "And there's a river in front of it!" I exclaimed.
We pulled into the long driveway and made our way to the wood cladded front door. Hesitantly we knocked—nothing. So, with a shrug, we inserted the key mailed to us and stood in the doorway of our new home for the next several months. It was a nice place: out the living room, the Madison River; to the North, one house about a mile away; to the South, nothing.
"Is there Wi-Fi?" Andrea asked, breaking the silence.
I told her I had no idea. "The guy I spoke to seemed unsure."
"I don't see a network..."
"Well, shit."
And that's how one of our favorite winters began. Pure wilderness around us, no Internet and a cast-iron stove to keep us warm through the long Montanan winter.
The cabin, 2014.
About two weeks later our friend Morgan Phillips joined us. There were three bedrooms in the cabin so we offered a room to a handful of friends we thought might appreciate the isolated setting and be tolerable to live with. Morgan fit the bill. He was a treat to share a house with, and we've stayed close friends ever since.
On the last week of October, Andrea and I made plans to head North for the weekend to see Glacier National Park before it closed for the winter. We pulled into Whitefish on the night of Halloween for a late dinner. There was a bustling energy in the air, a drastic change from our previous month of cabin-bound isolation down south. We didn't expect the small town to be quite so alive. Andrea loves a festive atmosphere. I had no plans at that point to make the town our home, but I was happy with her first impression of Whitefish.
We stayed a week at Gerald Askevold's place, one of Dad's university friends from the sixties. He lived on the far end of Blanchard Lake. Every morning I'd finish breakfast, throw a jacket on, walk to the dock camera-in-hand, hop in the old aluminum canoe and set off into the fog. I'd float in total silence except for the ripple of the canoe. Slowly the fog would dissipate under the heat of the sun, and inch by inch the landscape would reveal itself.
Our time was well spent between lazy picnics along alpine lake shores in Glacier National Park, a few hikes on the trails that were still open, and a ton of photo stops in between. It felt like my first time seeing this place. Bowman Lake was the place we enjoyed the most—the larch trees were at peak color and it was a foggy day. We spent the afternoon reading there, alone but for each other's company.
A week around Glacier National Park, 2014
On the return drive south to the cabin we had a long conversation about what we had seen and experienced in Flathead County. We both wanted to return. Our present living situation had some issues: while Andrea loved the winter cabin, she wasn't fond of the isolation, nor the prevailing winds of the Madison Valley. On top of that, our rental agreement only lasted through March. The only thing we knew for sure was that we would not be going back to Los Angeles.
We had plans to go back to France for the summer to shoot my first book, Alternative Living, so we only needed to find a place to stay for the spring. For reasons I can't quite remember we spent that season near Seattle, in a little cabin called Tye Haus. In mid-June, we boarded our flights to Paris and went on to travel across eight European countries, from France all the way to the northernmost part of Norway.
In early October, after four months on the road, Andrea and I were resting in a small fishing hut turned B&B in Norway's Lofoten Islands. We were having an all-too-familiar discussion of where we'd go next. Our weeklong trip in Northwest Montana had left quite an impression on us, and it kept coming up in the conversation. For me, it made perfect sense: Dad had made his way in those parts, I'm attracted to large mountains and glacial lakes, and Andrea loved the quaint town feeling. We looked up some rentals online and found a company called Montana's Best Vacation Rentals, and they happened to have an Instagram account. (Back in those days it wasn't common for small businesses to use the app.) I got in touch with them, explained that we wanted to spend the next winter in the Flathead Valley and we would trade our stay for photos. It was a simple enough pitch, but I seriously doubted a small business in Montana would go for it. Thankfully, I was wrong. (First lesson in dealing with Montanans: They're a proud bunch; never underestimate their ambition. Turned out the company's GM, Isaac Johnston, was into our idea and even knew our work from Tumblr! It's a small world...)
Six days of driving, a long flight across the Atlantic and a longer one across the States, and we arrived back in Seattle. On a dreary November morning we packed our vehicle full of our belongings and headed East toward the Rockies. Would that be the last time we do this?
Part II of this piece comes out Sunday April 26, make sure to subscribe below so you don’t miss it.
The Madison Range from the air, 2015.
