Back to Blogging: Visiting Big Sky Country

A bison at National Bison Range overlooking Flathead River valley
with Mission Mountains in background

Blogging was light last week because I decided to visit some distant relatives out west.  Here is a view (I did not take the photograph) from the National Bison Range Wildlife Refuge in Montana.  That flat valley was the lake bottom of Glacial Lake Missoula.  To give you an idea how deep that lake was, the surface of the lake was almost as high as where this photograph was taken. This lake had a volume of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario combined.  The lake rapidly drained when an ice dam broke approximately 18,000 years ago (although it probably happened to some lesser extent both before and after that date on a periodic basis as glaciers ebbed and flowed).