Frances Hunter

blog of the author To the Ends of the Earth

 

Frances Hunter's Journal
October 2007

Winner, Violet Crown Award
for Fiction by a Texas Author

Silver Medal Winner, Independent Publisher Book Awards

Finalist, Foreword Magazine's Book of the Year Awards

 

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October 18, 2007: To the Ends of the Earth: The Last Journey of Lewis & Clark wins Violet Crown Award

We are pleased and thrilled to announce that To the Ends of the Earth: The Last Journey of Lewis & Clark, has won the highly competitive Violet Crown award for Best Novel of 2007. This award is sponsored by the Writers' League of Texas.

Along with all the other finalists, we will get to participate in this year's Texas Book Festival. On Saturday, November 3, there will be a ceremony and panel discussion at the State Capital Building in Austin, Texas. The event will be at 3PM in Room E2.030. Everyone come out to the Book Festival and see us!

October 18, 2007: Traveler's Rest, Lolo Hot Springs, and Lewis & Clark Scenic Highway

Liz at Travelers' Rest

On this day of our recent trip through Lewis & Clark country, we awoke to a Missoula socked in by smoke. When we were at the Safeway buying sandwiches and snacks for a big day of driving, we saw firefighters stocking up on groceries. God bless them.

We headed west for the town of Lolo, where our first stop of the day was Travelers' Rest. This ancient Indian campground, named by Meriwether Lewis, was used by travelers heading back and forth into the Bitterroots for millenia. Lewis and Clark stopped here on both their outbound and homeward-bound trips. It's easy to see why. The serene, wooded area is ideal for camping, with a lovely stream and lots of game nearby. We went on a nature walk through the site, where we saw turkeys and a black and yellow garter snake.

The rangers here are really nice and enthusiastic. We learned about how Travelers' Rest is one of the only places with physical evidence of the Corps of Discovery. Recent archaeology has turned up a button, a slug of Kentucky lead, and the location of the Corps latrine! The latrine's position was predicted through a study of the established practices of camp sanitation prescribed by army regulations in Lewis and Clark's day, and then confirmed through the presence of mercury in the pit. Rush's Thunderbolts, the mainstay of the Corps medicine kit, were laced with mercury -- the only reason they didn't kill you is that they went through you so fast!

We headed out into the smoke for our next stop, Lolo Hot Springs. We longed to swim here on our 2003 visit, and now we finally had our chance. Again, this site was known to the Indians and used for thousands of years as a recreational spot. Today, for a small fee you can soak where Lewis & Clark and the Indians played. A vintage pool receives very hot mineralized water from the springs streaming in over the rocks. It felt great! I could stay in only a fraction of Lewis's meticulously timed 19 1/2 minutes.

There is also a newer outdoor pool kept at a temperature of about 80 degrees. We had a very enjoyable swim here despite the smoke and a family of rowdy boys. I especially liked watching the adorable ground squirrels play all over the grounds. We finished up our visit with another soak in the hot pool. Interestingly, I noticed that my hornfly bites almost entirely ceased to itch after this experience.

After getting back into our duds, we visited the great gift shop (there is a hotel, RV park, and restaurant here too), and had our picnic. Then it was off on Highway 12, the Lewis & Clark Scenic Highway, which parallels the harrowing route through the mountains that Lewis and Clark endured during their 11-day ordeal in September 1805. This highway was constructed in the 1960s after the development of modern explosives and earth-moving equipment.

We entered the mountains at Lolo Pass. The road is beautiful, amazing, and very curvy. We climbed through mountain passes covered with cedars with a constant view of the Clearwater River shimmering over round stones. The smoke began to lift somewhat the further into Idaho we traveled.

The drive was tiring and we made a couple of interesting rest stops. I highly recommend a stop at the Lochsa Historical Ranger Station. This neat place shows how forest rangers lived and worked and fought fires from the 1920s to the 1960s. You can tour the ranger's house, tool shed, office, and other buildings. The hosts, a retired teacher and his wife, had actually started their married lives here! They had a very cute dog; along with a young buck deer on the road, this was about all the "wildlife" we saw on the drive.

We also stopped in the town of Kooskia, which has an Old West feel, and viewed a large Lewis and Clark mural. We finally got to our hotel, the Best Western in Orofino, about 6PM. I was ready to get off the road. The hotel is quite new and really nice; our room had a great view of the Clearwater River!

This was the view from our room at the Best Western Orofino

 

The fancy restaurant next door did not work out for supper for reasons too tedious to relate. We ended up getting a yummy meal at an unpretentious Chinese place across the street. Looks like it's going to be fun around here!

October 12, 2007: Birthday Fun in Missoula

Mary with the Missoula Carousel

On Mary's 40th birthday we celebrated with all-day fun in Missoula!

When we traveled the Lewis & Clark trail in 2003, we used Missoula as a base camp when exploring Traveler's Rest, the Lolo Trail, and other places, but we never had any time to explore the town itself. Today we remedied that problem and found out a little about what makes Missoula one of the most progressive and creative cities in the West!

Our first stop was the Elk Country Visitor Center, which is run by the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. This elegant facility resembles a giant Cabela's ad. Here, you can look at and play with fun and educational displays about elk behavior and habitat, and learn about what magnificent, tough, and confident animals they are. There is an amazing exhibit of trophy elk here. We enjoyed seeing how huge the elk are and hearing recordings of their "bugles."

In a way, I felt sad about the beautiful elk who are killed for trophies, but what have I ever done to save an elk? As we learned at the center, the elk population of North America plunged from multimillions in Lewis & Clark's day to just 90,000 at the turn of the 20th century. Because of vigilant conservation efforts spearheaded by hunters, the elk population has rebounded to about a million, and the animals are being reintroduced around the west and in Kentucky. It's just a fact that hunters are the ones who care about these animals enough to raise millions of dollars to buy habitat and fund research to bring this great American animal back from near-extinction.

We went back to the hotel and ditched the car, then walked downtown. It was smoky all day today due to severe forest fires, making the town smell like a big barbecue restaurant. First we went in the courthouse, which has a cool dome and is home to a beautifully done series of murals painted by western artist Edgar Paxson between 1912 and 1914. Two of the murals depict Lewis and Clark, and the others show other scenes of Montana pioneer life and history. This is a great stop for the Lewis & Clark buff!

We poked around downtown a while and found a great place to eat lunch called the Iron Horse Pub. This was an enjoyable hangout with good sandwiches and sweet potato french fries. Then we had a wonderful time exploring the downtown shops. The shopping possibilities here are almost overwhelming! We found a great used book store called The Bird's Nest where we each had some luck, and enjoyed poking through the shops looking at the art and jewelry and making a few purchases.

The pièce de résistance of the day was a visit to Caras Park and the beautiful, fun, and inspiring Missoula carousel! Adults as well as children are encouraged to ride the carousel in Missoula, and Mary and I each got a thrilling ride on a beautiful handcarved carousel horse to the music of the calliope. The University of Montana was even sponsoring free rides, I guess in honor of Mary's birthday. :)

In fact, Mary's birthday is really a big deal in Missoula, for it turned out that the city was also having a free concert in the park that evening. We stayed a while and listened to a local band, then walked across the Clark Fork river looking for a nice place to eat dinner. We found a great Italian place called Ciao Mambo, where we got yummy entrees and a dessert of "fried chocolate" -- pastry balls filled with melted chocolate and topped with whipped cream! Stupendous!

Strolled home along the river. The smoke was worse, and we found out that a huge fire had blown up northwest of town, threatening people's homes. We will be sure to be safe when heading out tomorrow.

This day was what vacations, birthdays, and sisters are all about.

October 8, 2007: To the Ends of the Earth is Violet Crown Finalist!

We are so pleased and excited to announce that To the Ends of the Earth: The Last Journey of Lewis and Clark, is a finalist for the 2007 Violet Crown Awards for Texas literature.

The Violet Crown Award competition is sponsored by The Writers' League of Texas. It is very competitive, and it's a huge honor to be named a finalist.

The awards ceremony is Saturday, November 3, at the Texas Book Festival. Needless to say we are overjoyed to be finalists, and want to thank everyone who has believed in us and encouraged us!

October 4, 2007: The Blackfoot Challenge

[This entry continues a series of blogs about our recent trip to Montana and Idaho.]

Mary at the Continental Divide

The day after our all-day excursion to the White Cliffs of the Missouri, we decided to take it easy and devote the day to leisurely travel and fellowship, rather than doing much sightseeing.

We sacked in, then poked down to the yummy breakfast buffet in the Grand Union dining room. We saw our traveling companion from yesterday, Roni, and waved her off on her further adventures. After breakfast, we had a look around the historic hotel and marveled at its beautiful restoration and the many historic photographs of past times in Fort Benton. The Grand Union was built during the height of the steamboat boom in Fort Benton and opened its door in 1883. Unfortunately, that turned out to be the same year that the railroad came to Montana and killed the steamboat forever. The hotel has had a checkered past since then -- and now, it appears, a happy ending.

We spent some time writing in our journals, and I tried to tend to my flaming hornfly bites (I stopped counting at 15). We finally got off from Fort Benton about 10:30, went back through Great Falls, and then headed west on Montana Highway 200. This route parallels the Blackfoot River and cuts through the heart of the territory once ruled by the tough and uncompromising Blackfoot Indians. For Lewis and Clark buffs, its significance is that it also parallels Meriwether Lewis's return journey through Montana in 1806.

Follow the link to a great Lewis and Clark driving brochure

It was fun to watch the landscape change from low, yellow, rolling, Charlie Russell hills into incredible timbered mountains! We climbed and climbed into the spectacular and beautiful heights with hardly another car or person in sight. It was hard not to imagine the Blackfoot still roaming this land and wish that somehow we all could have found a way to live together.

Funny sign at the Continental Divide

We stopped at the Continental Divide at Rogers Pass. This is one pass along the "Great Divide" which separates the waters that drain into the Pacific from those that drain into the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico. Haze and the smell of woodsmoke from nearby wildfires was obvious here and off and on for the rest of the day.

In the bustling small town of Lincoln, we stopped to poke around a big gift shop/trading post, then had a great BLT lunch at a pleasant place called Ponderose's.

The landscape changed again as we left Lincoln, into lumpy glacial mounds that Lewis called "The Prairie of the Knobs." At a dusty rest stop where we stopped to have some water, Mary saved me from a hideous spider that had dropped on my back from above and was heading for my neck. It might have been a hobo spider. Scream!

Shortly thereafter, we passed out of the knob country and climbed back into mountains and pine trees. We cruised into the busy university town of Missoula and easily found the Red Lion downtown. Our room turned out to be really spacious and nice. Rounded out the day a stroll through the interesting downtown area and dinner at a nice Mexican place called El Cazador. A thoroughly relaxing day. Lewis should have had it so good.

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