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These were taken Memorial Day weekend, about 12 miles outside the town of Lincoln. Turns out, Montana is really damned gorgeous. The weekend wasn’t nearly long enough to soak it all in.

The cabin where we stayed was on the bank of this rivery type thing. It might be called Copper Creek, but I can’t guarantee that’s accurate.

Upstream it got a little crazy, what with rapids and waterfalls and such.

But even further upstream, it mellowed out quite a bit.

About 50 or 60 miles northeast of Seattle is a trail that leads a couple of miles up a mountain. It’s not too tough a hike. We did it in regular sneakers and used no special gear. There are a couple of streams to cross, but they’re not tricky.

At the top of the trail is Heather Lake, faced on a couple of sides by steep granite slopes. Snow run-off creates dozens and dozens of waterfalls shooting off the mountains to feed the lake.

There are roughly a zillion boulders piled up around the lake, probably left there when the glaciers receded as the Ice Age waned. Thanks, glaciers, those were fun to climb on!

In retrospect, I wish we’d started earlier so we could have spent more time further off-trail. In some more retrospect, I also wish I’d taken a lot more pictures.