Skywatch Friday: Continental Divide, East & West

At 6,000 feet along the Continental Divide in southwest Montana, spring can come slowly. But then one day the air feels different, and though we will have frosty nights and another blizzard or two, it's really spring. To keep one's life in a sort of Zen balance, it's time to take in both sides of the Great Divide. Like these specimens of the Boulder Batholith on a ridge overlooking my home, we seek a dynamic tension. Here, a conversation between earth & sky (and gravity):

Like a Zen kōan the two sides have a contrasting nature that must be reconciled. Butte, Montana, lies on the dark side of the mountain with its water polluted by copper mining waste flowing to the Pacific Ocean. In this panoramic photo, you can see the old, abandoned Berkeley Pit on the right and billionaire Dennis Washington's ("Montana Resources") still-operating East Pit (aka "Continental Pit") on the left (zoom in and check it out):

The awesome beauty of these environmentally horrific mining operations are sort of a kōan within a kōan, as this close-up photo of the Berkeley Pit (filled with highly toxic water) shows:

Not shown in the photos above is the Yankee Doodle Tailings "pond," an artificial lake of several square miles where Washington dumps his waste from the Montana Resources/East Pit operation (note that the surface is still frozen over):

The earthen dam that holds this mess back is several hundred feet high. If it failed, as earthen dams sometimes do, it would make a huge splash in the Berkeley Pit into which it drains. To give you some idea of the sheer size of the Yankee Doodle Tailings, here's a closeup--showing a huge mining truck dumping mine waste to heighten the breast of the dam; the huge mining truck is that tiny dot on the raised portion of the dam, center right:

Yet somehow, nature endures. There was sign from a herd of mule deer, including this recently shed antler:

And MollyTheDog flushed several Blue Grouse. I wasn't quick enough with the camera to catch their flight, but the tracks were pretty slow and I could sneak up on them:

Speaking of MTD, turns out she's a mountain dog, scrambling over the boulder-strewn ridges like a champ:

The next day, Mrs Rover and I took a hike up a favorite wash along the Big Hole River, whose relatively pristine waters drain to the Atlantic Ocean. Hmmm... what's this? A dead Mule Deer Buck. Wonder what killed it?

Oh, here's another dead Mulie, a yearling. From the way it's been skinned out, it looks (and smells!) like the work of M. Tn. Lion. Well, Cougars have to eat too, the dead noursish the living, and nature endures:

How happy we were to see the first flowers of spring, including this incredibly lush bouquet of Hooker's Townsendia (Townsendia hookeri):

And the lovely, if tiny, blooms of Hood's Phlox (Phlox hoodi):

The ant people too are welcoming spring as they frantically work to clear their tunnels and bring in food for a new generation:

Happy Spring!