Hidden Country

The sun had just risen when I stepped from my doorway, coffee in hand and sunglasses perched intentionally on top of my head. Before climbing into my old 4Runner, I took a long look at the mountains, as I routinely do, and feeling slightly comforted, I embarked on my journey east.

As I traveled farther and farther from my home in Saint Ignatius, I watched as the mountains rippled away. The rocky peaks sunk into wooded summits, the wooded summits faded into grassy hilltops and ultimately settled into a vast sea of swaying grasses that stretched clear to the horizon.

Without mountains, I have no bearings, no sense of direction or place. My first impression of the prairie was that it looked like the ocean and I was a ship lost in its midst.

From what I could gather growing up, eastern Montana was a place that very few had any inclination to visit. The images that occupied my mind were of a land swept by bitter winds and flat as a tabletop.

I am, if anything, a mountain boy. I was born in Missoula and raised in Saint Ignatius, a small town nestled against the base of the Mission Mountains. As is the case for most of who grew up in the western part of the state, I learned early on that, to discover beauty, all I needed to do was look up towards the mountains. It would seem that our state is synonymous with mountains. Look up “Montana” on Google Images. What do you see? You guessed it: mountains. What do you not see? The other two-thirds of our state.

I did my best to remain optimistic the day of our hike in Frenchman Breaks. I met up with a group in Malta that included former nurses, non-profit workers, and archaeologists. We then headed north. I continually looked to the land and sky for some indication of where we might be headed, but I found nothing.
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What might appear to be an unbroken expanse of prairie grass in fact contains miles of canyons and breaks, each hundreds of feet deep, what McKean calls “hidden country.”

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Lesson number one about traveling in eastern Montana: it requires a new perspective on the land. It's “a whole different way of looking at travel,” Outdoor Life Editor Andrew McKean told me.

At one point, the lead car turned off the road and killed the engine. I looked around. This is it? I thought.

On no apparent trail, we were off. Lesson number two about traveling in eastern Montana: there are very few trails.

In the Frenchman Breaks (photo by Mark Good)

We walked about twenty meters, and suddenly the land dropped to reveal the Frenchman Breaks.

Lesson number three about traveling in eastern Montana: the prairie reveals its startling beauty to those who go in search of it. What might appear to be an unbroken expanse of prairie grass in fact contains miles of canyons and breaks, each hundreds of feet deep, what McKean calls “hidden country.”

As we continued down into the breaks I found myself reaching for my camera again and again. And I discovered that this land was really not so secretive at all. Treasures were strewn everywhere, such as the lichen-covered rocks of a 3,000-year-old tipi ring or the tooth of a shark that dated to a time when dinosaurs roamed the land and a shallow sea covered much of eastern Montana. With each foot we descended we stepped back in time hundreds, then thousands, then millions of years.

To discover Frenchman Breaks on your own, visit our online hiking guide, hikewildmontana.org.

– Tyler Courville, Stanford University student and former MWA intern