To the southeast (4/7)

This is about the closest that the images come to showing the view in the ‘other direction’. This is the view to the southeast of the other images. However, it is also deceptive because this is taken before we reached the summit, so where the picture is being taken and everything else in the picture except for the distant mountains on the horizon would have been underwater 11,000 years ago. The picture also doesn’t show the vast valley between the hills in the middle ground and the mountains on the horizon. Our distance from this image to those far-away mountains is about 60 miles.

Also keep in mind that all of the images in this series are from high up in the NBR, near the highest point in the refuge. I still have difficulty in wrapping my brain around how huge Lake Missoula was. Incidentally, the river valley I live in, located roughly 40-50 miles from the NBR, was created primarily by the repeated draining of the lake. This is a river valley, so the Clark Fork River has done some sculpting of the landscape, however, most of the formation was done from the staggering amount of water that flowed during the many times the ice dam broke up and subsequently reformed.