Journeys›Photograph

A Summer Day by the Clark Fork in Missoula

·Missoula, Montana·#travel#hiking#summer#dogs#river
A wide river flows between tree-lined banks, with a metal bridge and distant mountains under a cloudy sky.

Missoula runs its best feature straight through the middle of town — the Clark Fork, which turns out to be the largest river in Montana by volume, about 360 miles from Silver Bow Creek out to Pend Oreille Lake. We spent most of the day working our way along it, starting where an old black steel trestle crosses to the far bank, then upstream under the Madison Street bridge with traffic humming overhead and the moon still hanging pale above the cottonwoods.

Past the university end of town the valley pinches in, timbered slopes on one side and a bald brown hill on the other with a big lodge-style house partway up. The dogs got the last stretch. There's a sandy beach where the bank flattens out, and both of them went straight for the rocky waterline — the little brown one nosing along the stones, the black-and-white one keeping to the dry sand and looking pleased about it. Someone else had claimed the shade at the far end of the beach.

Farther up, the river spreads shallow and fast over cobbles, glittering the whole width of the channel. We turned around there, dogs damp, shoes full of sand.

A river flows under a dark bridge, flanked by trees, with mountains in the background under a cloudy sky.A wide river flows under a bridge with mountains and a daytime moon in a blue sky, surrounded by green trees.A wide river flows through a valley with forested and grassy mountains under a blue, cloudy sky.A wide river flows through a valley with a large forested mountain on the right and houses on the left.A person and a dog walk along a rocky riverbank with hills, trees, and buildings under a blue sky.Two people and two dogs are by a river, with a house on a hill and mountains under a blue sky.A woman and two dogs are on a rocky riverbank, with another person under a tree, mountains, and buildings in the background.A wide, sun-dappled river flows between green forested mountains and rocky banks under a bright blue sky.

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