Sun drenched cattails on the edge of a very frozen Freezeout Lake near Fairfield, Montana.

I rolled out of bed at 4:00 a.m. Yes, it was early, but part of me is still on Wisconsin time, so it wasn’t as bad as it seems.

I five hours of sleep in total; two too few. Under the night’s black sky and  and Havre’s relative quiet I made my out of the door and headed on down the highway to Freezeout Lake…much to the displeasure of Steve (the cat). I told him I would spend much of the following day with him, though it didn’t seem to matter.

The highway between Havre and Great Falls was eerily quiet–even more than I would have expected on an early Saturday morning in north central Montana. I only passed 3 or 4 cars on the way, I swear. It was a lonely drive, but I’m used to it by now. The good news is that I was able to pick up an 80s radio station out of Great Falls, which made the time pass more quickly.

I arrived at Freezeout Lake rjust as the sun was lifting its head over the horizon. I didn’t really know where I was going, but spotted a photographer on the opposite end of the lake. He had a very big lens, so I assumed he knew what he was doing. But that’s not always the case. I hiked to his location nonetheless and began to unpack my gear. I still hadn’t seen any of the thousands of snow geese every was talking about, but thought they would likely make their presence known was the sun had risen.

A avian enthusiast happened upon our location with a good set of binoculars and pointed toward the horizon and said, “Look.”

What appeared to be a this haze of fog was thousands and thousands of snow geese…yet well below the numbers expected to arrive in the next couple of weeks. I spoke to him for a little bit and learned much. He said the snow geese had yet to arrive in large numbers because there was still too much ice on the lake. He also told me that the opportunity to photograph would be much better then because what geese already arrived were nesting and feeding in the fields…not the place I want to photograph them. My goal was to capture a swarm as it rose above the lake with the beautiful Rocky Mountains in the background.

It was very cold, but I dressed for the occasion. All of me was warm, except my fingertips. I did my best to keep the warm, but I think I got a mild case of frost bite.

Opportunities to photograph snow geese this morning were not good, so I decided to pack-up and leave after three hours of watching and waiting. I will return in two weeks.

I drove north on U.S. Highway 89 for about 100 miles. The scenery was breathtaking. I must have jumped out of my car a dozen or more times. I was truly experiencing sensory overload. And as such I wasn’t totally pleased with my work. My mind races when there are too many things to photograph and I end up not photographing any of them particularly well.

They say here in Montana that the state’s three main cash crops are wheat, cattle, and missiles. I saw a lot of each on my drive.

I saw my first missile silo north of Fairfield. I had seen one before a dozen or more years ago and forgot that the Montana countryside was littered with them. This time, however, their presence was laced with irony. On my last trip through Montana I was in a rush to get back home so I didn’t really think about them. This time, however, I was searching for beautiful and interesting subjects along the way. On the left of me was evidence of God’s grace–tall, majestic mountains rising from the earth that would make the most cynical human being feel small and insignificant. And then on the right of me every 10 miles or so were man-made nuclear missile silos hugging the ground.

Each silo contained a single Minuteman III missile, which is capable of delivering three  warheads onto its target with a yield of 1.2 megatons each. That means each missile I passed (6 or 7 in total) was 240 times more destructive than the bomb we dropped on Hiroshima. The thought of it kind of creeped me out.

I drove a hundred or more miles back to Havre, thinking about the beautiful Rocky Mountains that flanked me on the west and the nuclear missiles that flanked me on the east. All in all, it was a confusing end to the day.