Fleisher Pass.

In Montana there is a tiny little two lane highway, State Route 279, which starts just outside of Helena and heads North and West until it begins to climb up some innocuous looking foothills.

Soon it’s climbing inexorably, hair-pinning and curving through one of Montana’s most treacherous passes: vertigo-inducing drop-off on the left, near-vertical wall on the right. At 6,500 feet, the road suddenly summits at a mind-blowing vista, looking out from the top of the Great Divide.

This is Fleisher Pass.

Missouri River Passacaglia

Missouri River Passacaglia was commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts as part of a nation-wide celebration of the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

For me that expedition, though encompassing profoundly different landscapes, always comes back eventually to a single constant: the water: the menacing stone walls of a gorge exploding into endless vistas, pristine forests giving way to wide open plains, but all of it experienced from a single, seamless flow of water.