Jenna Caplette migrated from California to Montana in the early 1970s, first living on the Crow Indian reservation, then moving to Bozeman where she owned a downtown retail anchor for eighteen years. These days she owns Bozeman BodyTalk & Energetic Healthcare, hosts a monthly movie night, teaches and writes about many topics.

Though summer and daylight wane in late August, because I am just now out camping, I now notice the early sunrise, the late sunset.

In June I am too busy with the garden. The same in July. And I like to be in the mountains when so many have redirected their lives to the routine of fall — back to school, back to work. There are fewer people in the mountains now and less noise. 

And oh! the berries. Huckleberries. Raspberries. Thimble Berry. Elderberry.  Straggling Juneberries. This morning while out wandering the mountain where we are staying in a friend’s cabin, I came across a little thicket of gooseberries and went back to the cabin to get a container for picking, never remembering why it has been years since I last picked gooseberries. The bushes are lethally protected. I pick a few, carefully, one at a time, wondering what technique women of the past developed to achieve this without shredding their hands. If the goal of a berry is to be eaten and then pooped out and so it’s seeds spread, the evolution of the gooseberry seems counter-productive. I imagine a recipe for gooseberry pie: rinse berries to remove blood. 

I think I did make a gooseberry pie, decades ago, and now I remember why I have treated them as a non-berry since. The few I gather I will mix with currants from our garden for jelly, to deepen the flavor. 

As I wander, my mind jumps to other topics. I realize that all the dream jobs of my youth involved Mountain, forest animals and as few people as possible.  I muse about how important that “not-people” component of my dreams was. I married a man who thought he would work as a fire look out, preferably in the Big Horn Mountains, not knowing how endangered that lifestyle already was or how changed our lives would be by his inability to complete the coursework in forestry and by our daughter whose disability made living in town the best option. 

Ironic in any case since my ex is compulsively social and would never have survived the isolation of a fire look out. Raised by his grandmother, she also provided informal foster care to many, many youth, lining he and the rest of them along the wall at night to sleep on blankets, their feet pointed in to the center of the room.  

And I have spent much of my career in jobs requiring me to be social. 

****

The afternoons on this mountain are long. At home I never notice how long a summer afternoon is because at home my time is measured, rationed, crammed with responsibilities and tasks. Here there is time and more time, enough to watch rain clouds cluster over the Spanish Peaks to the South, then creep out to fill the sky, until everything is greyed out and expectant. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. 

My daughter is finishing the puzzle we brought, a puzzle that would take a week or two at home.   Here it has taken less than 24 hours. 

There’s lightning to the south now, the rumble of thunder, the sound of puzzle pieces being snapped in to place, and then rain fills the long reach of afternoon.

Lacey Middlestead is a Montana native and freelance writer currently living in Helena, Mont. She loves meeting new people and helping share their stories. When she’s not busy writing articles for newspapers like the Independent Record and Helena Vigilante, she can usually be found indulging in her second greatest passion–playing in the Montana wilderness. She loves skiing and snowmobiling in the winter and four wheeling, hiking, boating, and riding dirt bikes in the summer.

S’mores may be the unofficial summertime treat, but I for one am a much bigger fan of ice cream during the hotter days of the year. Whether in a cone or dish, covered in syrup or blended in a milkshake, it ice cream is delicious any way it comes. Now I know you can get ice cream all year long, but not necessarily from everywhere. I wait all year for summer to roll around again so I can partake in the smooth soft serve of the iconic Ice Cream Place in Seeley Lake, Mont. Anyone who has drove through Seeley in the summer knows what I’m talking about. And even if you haven’t stopped there before you’ve definitely noticed it because the line to order is always distressingly long.

This past weekend my fiancé and I along with a few of our friends headed to Placid Lake to camp. With Seeley being only a few miles down the road, the ice cream was simply too tempting. No one said it out loud, but there was silent agreement between us that at the end of the weekend we would make a trip into town for some frozen goodness. I guess we figured it would be our reward for “surviving” in the wilderness….a.k.a. the well-established campground equipped with showers and bathroom facilities.

But to tide us over until Sunday afternoon, I prepared a “camping” version of homemade ice cream for us. It was a surprise I’d made especially for our friends Brad and Tara’s three-year-old daughter, Camille. It was her very first camping trip and I wanted to make it special for her. And what kid doesn’t like ice cream!

On Saturday night, after gorging ourselves on a delicious meal of spaghetti and toasted bread with parmesan cheese, I announced that we would be making homemade ice cream for dessert. Everyone got excited until they realized that it was a bit labor intensive. But I explained that burning off a few extra calories beforehand would help them from feeling guilty later. I’d made this particular ice cream recipe once before at a summer program I helped with a couple of years ago at my job. The kids loved it and I knew that it would work brilliantly for camping.

To start with all you do is make a basic ice cream mixture of half and half, sugar and vanilla. I did this before we left town and then divided the mixture into several quart sized Ziploc bags. I handed each person a bag as well as a larger, gallon sized bag. We put the smaller bag into the big bag and then filled the big bag with ice and rock salt. Then we sealed the bags and started shaking them. This is where things got messy. It takes some time, at least 10 minutes or so of hard shaking, for the mixture to start solidifying into ice cream. And as the ice melts and the bags get shaken up, water ends up splattering out. We quickly realized how cold your hands get too holding the bags so some of us put on gloves or pulled down our sweatshirt sleeves. It took a while, but eventually we all had an individual baggie of ice cream to enjoy while sitting around the campfire. It doesn’t get much better than that!

While everyone seemed to enjoy the homemade ice cream we were all still anxious for Sunday to arrive along with our trip into Seeley. Sunday finally came and after taking down our tents, stuffing our sleeping bags back into their sacks and heaving all of the coolers into the truck beds, we were off!

To no one’s surprise, we pulled up to the Ice Cream Place to discover a line of a dozen people or so. We quickly jumped on the end and squinted towards the order window where the large menu hung on the outside of the building. They serve everything from chicken strip baskets, burgers and burritos to every ice cream concoction you can imagine. The worst part is trying to decide what you want. My personal favorites are the strawberry-vanilla swirl in a waffle cone, huckleberry sundae complete with whip cream, nuts and a cherry and the Seeley Swirls which are equivalent to a Dairy Queen Blizzard. For this go around I settled on a huckleberry sundae. Once we all got our treats, we sat down at one of the picnic tables in the seating area and dug in.  It was sheer bliss!

Ice cream, no matter what kind or where you have it, always tastes good. But on this last camping weekend, it tasted especially delectable. Something about being out in the woods always makes food taste better to me. I’m not sure whether I’ll make it back to the Ice Cream Place again before it closes for the season, but it is always worth the wait for that first bite of summer.

Bill Muhlenfeld is owner and publisher of Distinctly Montana magazine and other publications. He lives in Bozeman with his partner, Anthea, and always finds time to enjoy the great outdoors, when he is not writing about it....

What's in a name? 

Well, if the name is Montana, quite a bit.  While googling "Montana" does bring up the Treasure State first in its search, more casual searches often overturn other cyber-rocks uncovering Joe Montana, Hannah Montana (sans twerking) and French Montana (who is he, anyway?).  This is especially true if the search involves news, videos or images, where Google seems a bit mnemonically challenged.

It seems that Montana could really never be called something else, though names were floated before statehood--"Shoshone," "Lincoln"--and there was a even move in the 1930's to lop off a piece of the state along with parts of Wyoming and South Dakota, to create a new state-"Absaroka."

For me, as likely for you, this annoyance is tolerable. Let's face it, Joe, Hannah and French are temporary obfuscations. The word "Montana" mostly conjures searches that relate to the Distinctly Montana masthead--Adventure.  Inspiration. Spirit.

That's enough for me.

Joseph Shelton is a freelance writer who graduated from Montana State University with a degree in English Literature. He lives in Bozeman, where he enjoys hiking, reading, and being a misunderstood artist-type.

I have a friend who is very proud of being from Butte.  In fact, I have several, but this particular friend, who looks somewhat like one of those photographs of pugilists with names like Mug O’Shaughnessy or Guinness O’Irish or the like, is a dyed in the wool true believer in the power of Butte, America.

Now, it’s not that I’m not a fan of Butte, so put down your brick bats.  But it is a place that I had to come to appreciate.  As a kid, ignorant of the town’s remarkable history, it seemed like any other mining town, and there are a handful of them in Montana. 

But as you and I know, I was wrong.  Butte’s history is sufficient to ensure that it will be remembered forever as one of the great American cities.  You should read Mary MacLane’s journal, a section of which was reprinted recently in DM: http://www.distinctlymontana.com/Montana-people/Mary-MacLane.  When I read this I turned to my very Irish friend and said “boy, they oughta make a movie!”

He has recently pointed out that they are, a case, surely, of great minds thinking alike. 

“The Orphan Girl” is a production made by Montanans, with help from the Montana Film Office.  The production company behind the film is from Bozeman, but their love for Butte is apparent in the promotional materials they have provided. 

The film was shot this summer in Butte (where else?) and was funded by a campaign on Kickstarter which met and exceeded their funding goal.  The multi-media documentary will feature interviews with surviving miners as well as dramatized segments showing what life was like in the Orphan Girl mind at the turn of the last century. 

The footage that they have already shown is beautifully shot, and shows enormous promise.   And even the star, Brick Patrick (which also sounds like an old fashioned pugilist) is a Butte native pursuing an acting career in L.A.  As if that were not enough incentive, funds from the film will be plowed back into local Butte businesses.  This is a Montana production in every sense. 

But as excited as I am, no one is more excited than my true believing pal, who will remain anonymous except to point out that his name has at least one capital O and one apostrophe thereafter, who surely believes that all movies should take place in Butte, or at least figure it prominently into their plot.  To emphasize that point he cursed and shook a meaty fist at me.

So if you attend the September 11 premier at the Mother Lode theater in Butte, be prepared to brawl my Irish buddy for the best seats.  He’ll be waiting.

Angela Jamison is a native Montanan and she grew up in beautiful Bozeman. I'm the mother of two girls and write a blog about our life here and taking in the simple pleasures of family and food.

Sweet Pea Festival has long been a beloved Bozeman tradition.  It is one I didn’t experience until later on in my childhood.  My parents weren’t into this type of thing therefore it wasn’t until friends introduced Sweet Pea to me that I realized what it was all about.  They had me at Tater Pit.  I loved everything about it.  Running around with friends without parents because they knew we were mostly contained to Lindley Park.  Not paying much attention to the arts around us, it was more about following around boys in the way 12 year old girls do.     This continued on through high school and it wasn’t until my college years I realized what Sweet Pea was actually about.  The music, the performers and the creativity around us.  It became a place to meet up with old friends and catch up.  When I started my own family it was natural to load the stroller on the first weekend of August and head to the festivities.  Of course, as often is the case with children, this changed things.  No longer the care free running around or closing the festival down at night.  It suddenly felt harder…holding a baby in the heat, waiting in lines for food and wanting to get home before the traffic got bad.  We took a couple years off from Sweet Pea, choosing instead to leave town on this busy weekend and head to the solitude of the mountains with our babies.  Three years ago, the girls at easier ages, we decided it was time to properly introduce them to the Sweet Pea Festival.  However, things had changed again because now there was a new festival in town.

I first heard about SLAM from a friend while at the Sweet Pea parade that year.  As she explained SLAM I instantly felt protective of the long standing festival I had loved since childhood.  I didn’t understand why anyone would try to compete with such a wonderful celebration of the arts.  Because I went in defensive mode I didn’t take the time to find out what it was all about.  I didn’t like it.  Even the name felt harsh and negative…a direct insult to Sweet Pea.  I didn’t bother to find out what S.L.A.M actually stood for.  We said good bye and made our way to Lindley while they headed to Bogert.  We soaked up Sweet Pea with our kids and loved them getting to experience it.  There was chatter amongst festival goers about the other one in town.  Lots of conversations of which was better, people taking sides.  This first year I was definitely Pro-Sweet Pea. 

Year two of SLAM versus Sweet Pea shifted for me.  I learned more about this newer festival and became interested as I found out it was about supporting local artists and musicians.  I realized many of those who were brought to Sweet Pea weren’t local.  I had mixed feelings about this.  As a Montana girl I love the idea of all things local, but also think it’s great that a festival can bring artists from around the world.  I decided it was worth finding out by actual experience.  For the first time we didn’t go to Sweet Pea, but instead made our way to this small festival at Bogert Park.  I was pleasantly surprised by this low-key event.  It was on a smaller scale, but I dug the vibe.  I liked that everyone on stage or selling their goods was from around here and love this community as much as I do.  And as a family on a budget I loved that it was a free event.  Knowing many people who couldn’t afford the pricey wristband prices of Sweet Pea could still come out for this event.  Year two I was definitely Pro-SLAM.

This year was the third year of SLAM.  Having experienced both I found myself torn between the two festivals.  The happy memories from childhood pulling me towards Sweet Pea, but the older version of me knowing SLAM felt more like us.  Always feeling slightly like I was betraying Sweet Pea if we didn’t make an appearance.  Thoughts of doing both as so many do…hopping from one park to the next soaking up all the wonderful things each festival has to offer.  In the end we stuck with SLAM and saw in its third year it has grown yet again and is finding a comfortable position in our communities tradition.  I know Sweet Pea will be in our future again and I will always hold it close to my heart.  No longer does it feel as if they are completing against one another, but rather complementing each other in our ever growing town.  And this is a wonderful thing indeed. 

Lacey Middlestead is a Montana native and freelance writer currently living in Helena, Mont. She loves meeting new people and helping share their stories. When she’s not busy writing articles for newspapers like the Independent Record and Helena Vigilante, she can usually be found indulging in her second greatest passion–playing in the Montana wilderness. She loves skiing and snowmobiling in the winter and four wheeling, hiking, boating, and riding dirt bikes in the summer.

A few weeks ago my fiancé, Andy, and I attended a wedding at BruMar Estates near Big Fork. It was a gorgeous Montana wedding complete with kettle corn, huckleberry layered cake and glittery mason jars filled with baby’s breath. As much as I enjoyed myself, I found myself wanting to flee the wedding early to return to the little bed and breakfast we made reservations to stay at that night.

When Andy and first looked at places to stay for the wedding, we decided we didn’t want to make the late-night drive into either Big Fork or Kalispell after the festivities concluded. Then Andy called me one day to say he’d found a cute little bed and breakfast in the Swan Lake area. I was skeptical of the idea at first and worried that it would end up being a bunch of little shacks in the woods with no running water or electricity. I didn’t particularly feel like trying to doll myself up for an elegant affair in such conditions. But he was so adamant that it looked like a nice place to stay that I agreed to him booking the reservation.

A few weeks later we found ourselves driving through the Swan River Valley looking for the Laughing Horse Lodge. We pulled up to a two-story log building that was the main lodge. There was a whiteboard leaned up on the front steps that had all of that day’s guests listed on it for self-check in. We found our names listed next to our room number and then pulled the car around back to find our room.

We walked through a small garden area to get to our rooms. Tables and chairs were set up throughout for lounging and socializing with other guests during the day. The owner’s three golden retrievers lay sprawled out in the sunshine. They were so comfy that even the arrival of new faces to the lodge couldn’t rouse them. When we opened the door to our room, we were greeted by two log beds covered in colorful heart embroidered quilts. The wood floors and walls shone with a caramel hue and western themed photos adorned the walls. A narrow bookshelf hung on the wall between the two beds with a selection of books, including the complete works of William Shakespeare, to peruse. It was the perfect cabin abode.

The morning after the wedding, Andy and I headed over to the main lodge building for the complimentary breakfast offered.  We were both shocked and delighted to walk inside and be greeted by a cheerful “good morning” from the owner’s cockatoo perched on a limb. We sat down at the table and picked up a menu to see what our options were. There were three tempting delicacies to choose from but Andy and I settled on the peach and huckleberry pancakes that came with your choice of eggs  and either sausage links or bacon. Let’s just say I was in sheer heaven!

I can’t begin to count how many times in my life I’ve so carelessly driven past the Laughing Horse Lodge without giving it a second glance. We only spent one night there, but I was truly grateful Andy discovered this little treasure in the Swan. What it lacked in cable television it made up for in furry and feathery roommates, delicious food, and a rustic coziness that warms your soul.

Jenna Caplette migrated from California to Montana in the early 1970s, first living on the Crow Indian reservation, then moving to Bozeman where she owned a downtown retail anchor for eighteen years. These days she owns Bozeman BodyTalk & Energetic Healthcare, hosts a monthly movie night, teaches and writes about many topics.

While out hiking recently, twice I’ve been asked to use someone’s iPhone to snap a group photo (Well, okay. One time I offered). Both times I wanted to take a good, memorable photo, capture the group’s delight in being with each other, but wasn’t sure how to achieve that with an iPhone (or even an unfamiliar point and shoot if I’m handed one). 

So I asked folks at F-11 Photographic Supplies for some basic tips for helpful things to say and do when you ask someone to take your group photo while on your next outing. 

First, it’s self-evident that these types of photos are posed. That in itself creates a challenge. Ask people to hold still and smile while you fiddle with getting everything just right with a camera and their smile disappears just as you snap the shutter. Become familiar with whatever camera you are using before you start. Spontaneity makes great photos. If you talk with them, or ask them to interact with each other, you‘re likely to do much better. Watch for the right moment and the next right moment. Photograph them all. Remember. It’s just pixels. You can afford to be extravagant. 

Take a couple moments to check the background of the shot. It can be a distraction, or a feature if you’re being asked to incorporate a particular mountain/tree/landmark/monument. Be careful. A photo of a child with a tree sticking out the top of their head is memorable but probably not in the way you want. Bright lights in the background, particularly when your subjects are standing in subdued light or shade, can also be distracting.

To separate your subject(s) from the background of the image, get close to them or have them move closer to you. All the while your central focus needs to be the subject’s eyes. If the camera has one, use a telephoto lens to blur the background, leaving no question as to what the image is about. With an iPhone or iPad, use the focus box and expand or contract it by moving your fingers on the screen out, or in. To focus on a particular face, tap it and give the camera a moment to adjust. This also sets exposure to the face so that it’s not silhouetted.

If everyone will be patient with you, experiment with camera angles and perspectives – take a shot from above, or one kneeling and shooting up. Get closer, fill the frame, and then back up.

You won’t be able to control the time of day. These shots happen whenever and wherever. But if you can plan an outdoor shot, shoot during “the golden hours:” the two hours after sunrise or before sunset. Photos taken when the midday sun glares will seem hard, or harsh, with not much texture or interest, because the light comes from directly overhead. Learn  how to turn on the camera’s flash and let it help to soften deep shadows under eyes and hat brims. 

Embrace overcast days and those with rain and wind. They offer an opportunity to capture a different feeling – grasses rustle at your subject’s feet, their clothes billow out, water clings to eyelashes. These details give character specific to the time and place, perfect for remember-this-moment photos.

Now, when the roles are reversed and you ask someone to take your photo, tell them everything they need to know in order to capture the image you want, including what background to incorporate (or not) and how to get some light on people’s faces. 

And here’s the most essential tip of all: before the party breaks up and you hand the camera back (or after you are handed yours) check that there is at least one picture with eyes open and good expressions on people’s faces.