Page:Condor14(6).djvu/13

Nov., 1912 A HORSEBACK TRIP ACROSS MONTANA 219 flying against the wires and had not been dead more than a day or two. I presume from this that the Wilson Phalarope breeds in the marshes of the Prickly Pear Valley, though there were no marshes in the near vicinity of the place where I found the bird. The next day I decided to take only a short ride, as the weather was hot and trips of the last two days had been rather hard ones, particularly for my horse. So I started rather late and stopped early, going north along the route of the Great Northern Railway as far as a ranch near the station of Mitchell. On the way out of Helena, I remember seeing a Solitaire, seated on a wire in the northern part of the town. It seemed to me a rather low elevation for this bird and de- cidedly not in its usual habitat. It is possible though, that this species breects among the rocky cliffs of Mouht Helena a few miles west of the town, though even there it would be at an unusually low elevation. The people were early risers at the ranch where I stopped that night, so -I was on my way early on the following morning. A short distance north of the ranch the road entered the Prickly Pear Canyon, and in the next ten miDs, between here and Wolf Creek, I enjoyed the best scenery of my entire trip. High walls of reddish colored rock, seamed and broken into rectangular masses, rose on either side, while along the canyon bottom flowed a fair sized stream, its banks fringed with willows, alders, and occasionally tall cottonwoods. On the steep slopes above the canyon walls were clumps of Douglas firs and yellow pines. The road followed along the stream l?ottom, or occasionally climbed a little way up the hillside on one sicte or the other, where a better view up and down the canyon could l?e obtained. Wild rose l?ushes, covered with pink blos- soms, grew in profusion along the road, while syringa bushes, growing in clefts of the rocks, formed dense white masses, often extending high up into the walls of the canyon, the fragrant blossoms filling the air with their sweet perfume. At Wolf Creek I left the canyon road and turned westward, on the road to Stearns, which was my destination for the night. The road left the canycn anct climbed up hill, till it reached a wide stretch of rolling grassy hills. This country, neither valley nor mountain, continued all the way to Stearns. Tall waving, green grass clothed the hillsides, and with it were many flowers of various colors, l?ut the most abundant of the?e, one whose spire shaped clusters of blue flowers covered the hillsides everywhere, was the lupine. The two most abundant birds, in fact almost the only birds in this country, were the Meadowlark and the Vesper Sparrow. These two birds were everywhere and their songs rang from the grass hills on all sides. The next morning I left Stearns, which is merely a ranch and post office on the South Fork of the Dearborn. River, and rode on northward across the divide between the Dearborn and Sun rivers to Augusta. The same grassy hills con- tinued through the Dearborn country, but where I crossed the main branch of the Dearborn, the road took me down into a steep-sided canyon, whose walls were grown with Douglas fir and limber pine. Here in the firs I heard the. voices of two mountain birds, the Audubon Warbler and the Western Tanager. On the other side of the river I found that the road carried me in decideoily the wrong direction, so, since there were no fences across the grassy hills as far as I could see, I left it and rode across the open country. As I crossed the divide between the drainages of the Dearborn and Sun Rivers, a decided change in the character of the country was noticeable. The rolling, round-topped hills changed to fantastically shaped, fiat-topped, prairie buttes, the tall grass and