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winter
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spr ing
81
i t r
s r i
that last taste of the Wild West.
Jeff Bridges met his wife at Chico Hot Springs when he was in the
area filming Rancho Deluxe in 1974. Dennis Quaid, who lives about six
miles from Chico, occasionally joins the band and fills the dance floor of
the 100-year old inn. Those who aren’t tearing it up inside are soaking
in the open-air geo-thermally-fed hot spring pools just outside the bar’s
doors. On Sunday mornings, residents and tourists gather for the best
breakfast buffet in southwest Montana. Michael Keaton, Rich Hall, Peter
Fonda, Margot Kidder and other celebrities have made the Paradise Valley
and surrounding towns home.
Jim Harrison, Thomas McGuane, Peter Bowen, Richard Brautigan,
Doug and Andrea Peacock, Walter Kirn and others have penned their
stories, novels, essays and poems near here. Last year, Anthony Bourdain
filmed an episode of
No Reservations
with Harrison and local painter
Russell Chatham.
Celebrities aren’t the only famous folks who live in the valley. The
Church Universal and Triumphant – a New Age religious movement
founded by Mark L. Prophet and his wife Elizabeth Clare Prophet –
built a compound, complete with bomb shelters, bordering Yellowstone
National Park. At one time headquartered in Santa Barbara, the group
moved to Montana in 1981. Many of its members left the group when the
world did not end, as predicted by Elizabeth Clare Prophet, on April 23,
1990, and have built houses throughout the valley.
Fortunately, we can’t see any of those people from the river. We pull
the canoe over to an island for lunch and spot deer tracks in the sand.
Other than the hum of the two-lane highway about a mile away, all is
quiet. Motorized boats aren’t allowed on the Yellowstone; many places
would be too shallow for them anyway.
We look across at the wide-open spaces that provided a backdrop for
“The Horse Whisperer” and “A River Runs Through It” while we eat. Not
far from here, DePuy Spring Creek enters the river. The three-mile trout
fishery, and other spring creeks, provides good fishing year-round, due to a
consistent temperature.
Wanting to soak in the last bit of summer, we lie on a log and gaze at
the cloudless sky. Winter is harsh here. At the south end of the valley, in
Yellowstone National Park, cold air gathers and sinks in the Yellowstone
caldera. That cold air eventually fills all the space and then pours over the
sides like water, following the Yellowstone River into the Paradise Valley
where it explodes and roils sweeping the valley clean. Semis blow over
on the highway and kindergartners are kept inside at recess, lest they be
blown over and scraped up. We don’t mind the winter wind because it
helps define who we are—tough, persevering and a little crazy—but we
appreciate the almost imperceptible breeze today.
Back in the canoe, we float past soft mud and cobble cliffs filled with
holes where swallows nest. A small buck dances across the river, alarmed
by our presence. I can’t help reminding my husband how incredibly lucky
we are to live here.