How many people don’t want to go home? Really not many, I suppose. I imagine going back to family, friends, sights, smells, and taste from my early home. So when I receive emails from a “BaseLocal” site I follow, it perks me up. The “Local” part seems like a place to relax and be grounded, and the “Base” becomes a launching pad for explorations.
I’ve had a few BaseLocals as I’ve wandered, many of which I’ve either shared or will share at some point. My places have included the Southwest, the Colorado Plateau, and the Northern Rockies, specifically the Bitterroot Valley, where I currently reside.
It is my journey in this BaseLocal that I’m sharing in images and words.
I’ve often entered the valley following near to the path trod by Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery, 200 years ago, up and over a volcanic hump covered in thickly layered conifer greenery, then dropping down into a valley, alongside a river, a 6 mile wide slice of Big Sky country in Western Montana, between the Bitterroot and the Sapphire Mountains, along the Bitterroot River, 84 miles long.
The river was named after the endemic bitterroot plant, a small low plant with an important tap root. It was used as a staple and a medicine by the indigenous Salish people the Corps met upon their descent. Peeled, boiled, and paired with sweetness, it became palatable and nutritious.
The Corps were in trouble as winter approached, temperatures were dropping. Lost, cold, hungry, on the brink of collapse, the Corps struggled down into valley. The Salish gave them safe harbor, and shared of their sustenance, as had many indigenous peoples along the way, enabling them to go on the rest of their journey.
(Acting out the basic moral obligation of The Law Of The Stranger.)
20,000 years earlier, ancestors of the Salish had immigrated from Asia, over the Bering land bridge, then travelled south. When Lewis and Clark invaded 200 years ago the indigenous Salish rescuers had been in the valley for millennia. The immigrants had settled.
The Corps were invaders who cleared the path for new immigrants to the valley, from the East and from Europe. The American immigration story has continued to unfold in stages. Born out of an exploration (Lewis and Clark), collaboration with native peoples, a flawed national mythology, suppression of dangerous “savages”, people on an entitled divine mission (Manifest Destiny), confiscation (theft of indigenous lands by homesteading), relatively mild climate (sometimes called the Banana Belt of Montana), sustenance (land, forests, water), the success of multiple generation family histories, then new invasions and new immigrants(the wealthy amenity-chasers and the Yellowstone groupies). Irony can levy a heavy burden.
The Root (the local name for themselves) is a land of recent history but long memories. families came to this place, claimed space for themselves and started a new life based on hard work, creativity, and self reliance. They built villages, hunted, fished and grew what they could. Wealth was not a goal or a hallmark. The attachment to the land and to their traditional ways is deep.
I’ve came to this land as an immigrant, someone who has traveled the West, seen paradises, and heard the stories. I see the story of this place as another chapter in the story of today’s West. Immigrants find their piece of paradise, prizing hard work and self-sufficiency. Their paradise gets noticed, becomes an amenity for others. It gets monetized for those with resources. Others enter, wanting their piece of paradise and their own amenities. The founding visions are diluted by success. A sense of compromise and loss rises as the stories about the real “Root”, the local term for their locale fade.
I also come this landscape as a follower of West Coast Photographic traditions, looking for an uncluttered view of a river under the Big Sky, the earth and its power. That’s the amenity I seek. So I walk to a bank of the deceptively placid Bitterroot River, which flows through the middle of the valley on its journey to join the Clark Fork River in Missoula, then to the Columbia and on to the Pacific Ocean. Unlike my native Rio Colorado, there’s no dissolved sandstone. I can see through the clear water to the hard bottom rocks, brought up from the earth’s core by its relentless vitality.
The Root is about the earth’s resources and humans who extract them. It’s a narrow 6 mile wide stripe filled edge to edge with human artifacts. It is rural and agricultural and its people are committed to frugality, self-reliance and the use of available resources. Fences, poles, cables, barns, equipment, lumber, and buildings are valued and enter into most viewfinder scenes shot from the valley floor.
Above me to the west, above the river cottonwoods and conifers, are the steep eastern faces of the Central Bitterroot Mountains, a part of the Bitterroot Range, the western edge of the Rocky Mountains, notched by gray canyons over a thousand feet deep with spires along the edges. Their highest point, Trapper Peak, sits 6,000 ft above the valley floor. Behind me to the east are the Sapphires, old ocean sediments scraped from peaks as the Bitterroot volcanic core rose and then sloughed off to the east. The canyons provide many image views that are small but quite intense.
The sky that rises above the crisp mountain edges is big, whether it is blue or the white, gray and black of clouds. The mountains can collect over 500 inches of snow each year from the sky and the clouds, filling streams, creeks, ponds and eventually feed the river. At least 20 named creeks flow through glacial canyons.. Water is seldom far away in this land, in distance or in depth.
Again, I come to this spot as a photographer, a chronicler of the earth. I come from the Southwest and that is a gold standard for what I want to see in my viewfinder as often as possible, seemingly endless landscapes of wild terrain. Along the way I can peek at villages I pass as well.
You want to leave a message? Share a valid email, it is safe with me.
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All Images & Stories Are ©VicSmithPhot0