Lone Mountain Ascent

Overlooking the Big Sky ski resort is the 11,166 foot Lone Mountain. I like mountains; they inspire to head up. Living at 45’ elevation in the flat Central Valley doesn’t give me much opportunity for hill-climbing, so I made the most of it during my trip, going on hikes after the sessions were over in the afternoons. (If I had realized the conference was in the mountains, I would have remembered my hiking boots.)

Reaching the peak itself was beyond my available time and ability, but I longed to hike up to the bowl of the cirque some 1500’ above the resort. After things wound up on Thursday I started hiking, bringing my sketchbook, not sure how far I’d get.

I had gone a quarter-mile from my room, climbing maybe 100’, when an obstacle presented itself. There was a bear grazing just off the trail a hundred meters up. So much for heading up that trail, so I sat, sketched, and even managed a photo through my binoculars.

Hungry by this point, I made a foray to the resort grocery store, then started hiking up the slope below the gondola, stopping at one of the pylons to sketch the view at left of the mountains to the northeast, constantly bedeviled by mosquitoes (forgot the insect repellent as well).

At 8700’, in the rocky slope below the cirque, there was a field of these beautiful lilies (illustrated at right) standing about 15 cm tall. I don’t have any Rocky Mountain flower books and don’t know what they are. I wasn’t sure how much farther I wanted to go up, but I was hearing odd bird calls from above (ptarmigan???), so I kept going, and reached the bowl.

The barren walls of the cirque were impressive, and there was quite a rush of meltwater draining from the remaining snowpacks above. The bird call turned out to be a raven, and though there was interesting birding to be done (were there rosy finches around?), I had to turn around before it got dark, a sign on one of the ski structures reading 9067’ elevation.