These photos were taken about a week ago along Thompson River in northwest Montana and are the last of the best of this season’s fall colors. It has rained ever since, the larch have lost most of their golden needles and the cottonwoods have shed a large part of their leaves. The rain is now providing a good drink for the trees before the ground freezes and they enter the desert-like conditions (from their perspective) of winter.
Today I visited a large display of Western Larch that grows just to the north of the Weeksville Creek Divide at the headwaters of Todd Creek. The tall mountain in the background is the site of the photos in the two previous posts.
On a visit today to Corona Lake in Montana’s Cabinet Mountains we found the Western Larch to be at the peak of their fall colors.
This little tree, dwarfed by the continual wind and the altitude, the deep snow and ice of winter and the blazing sun of summer, remains determined to live where its seed somehow fell on a tiny bit of soil in a field of rocks at the top of a mountain.
Montana Outdoors 