Woods Journal

Montana is well known for its vast flat prairies, great towering mountains and gurgling creeks and rivers. As beautiful as these are, part of experiencing nature is experiencing the seclusion from technology, the rush of life and other persons. These places people go to get away are often places others have told them about. Most of the time, however, the best places are the ones found alone.

The experience of discovery, especially of a place unseen before, is for many, several times the experience that visiting a place recommended can be. Unfortunately, this is a difficult experience for many non-locals to have because it is a rare gift -- that drive for exploration. True exploration can take a lot of time, trial and error to turn into discovery. It takes a truly committed soul to spend every waking minute out on the promise of finding something lost, forgotten or that may not even exist.

To many, the easy road is the one laid out by others. There is a guarantee involved. Those who live, hunt and fish in the west, and who have done so for years, often think to travel up an old dirt road just because, or to walk a new trail that they remember seeing one afternoon on a drive. Many times, those roads and trails lead to nowhere, and even though nowhere is the kind of place many of these people wish to go, the kind of nowhere these may lead is nowhere interesting.

That one time, however, that the nowhere is in fact a very interesting somewhere, is the time one will cherish forever. These random discoveries of good hunting grounds, beautiful waterfalls, hidden lakes and rich morel foraging are the places a person will keep to themselves. These are often far better and more rewarding than those people will reveal to others.

These places could be vistas of the mountains, forgotten cabins or remote and lonely watchtowers. There can be a solemn feeling one can experience when finding these spaces, as many of them may be one of the last of their kind. There can be a feeling of recognition for being one of the last to see something like that on earth for the first time, before that thing is ruined by social media and the knowledge of all.

There is something to be said for these nowheres, and the somewheres they become to those who dare to take those roads and trails forgotten and lonely. The true explorer knows no forgotten lonely trail, because he or she will not forget those roads, and can never leave well enough alone a place the world doesn’t yet know.

Reach John Dowd at [email protected].