Jenna Caplette migrated from California to Montana in the early 1970s, first living on the Crow Indian reservation, then moving to Bozeman where she owned a downtown retail anchor for eighteen years. These days she owns Bozeman BodyTalk & Energetic Healthcare, hosts a monthly movie night, teaches and writes about many topics.

Though summer and daylight wane in late August, because I am just now out camping, I now notice the early sunrise, the late sunset.

In June I am too busy with the garden. The same in July. And I like to be in the mountains when so many have redirected their lives to the routine of fall — back to school, back to work. There are fewer people in the mountains now and less noise. 

And oh! the berries. Huckleberries. Raspberries. Thimble Berry. Elderberry.  Straggling Juneberries. This morning while out wandering the mountain where we are staying in a friend’s cabin, I came across a little thicket of gooseberries and went back to the cabin to get a container for picking, never remembering why it has been years since I last picked gooseberries. The bushes are lethally protected. I pick a few, carefully, one at a time, wondering what technique women of the past developed to achieve this without shredding their hands. If the goal of a berry is to be eaten and then pooped out and so it’s seeds spread, the evolution of the gooseberry seems counter-productive. I imagine a recipe for gooseberry pie: rinse berries to remove blood. 

I think I did make a gooseberry pie, decades ago, and now I remember why I have treated them as a non-berry since. The few I gather I will mix with currants from our garden for jelly, to deepen the flavor. 

As I wander, my mind jumps to other topics. I realize that all the dream jobs of my youth involved Mountain, forest animals and as few people as possible.  I muse about how important that “not-people” component of my dreams was. I married a man who thought he would work as a fire look out, preferably in the Big Horn Mountains, not knowing how endangered that lifestyle already was or how changed our lives would be by his inability to complete the coursework in forestry and by our daughter whose disability made living in town the best option. 

Ironic in any case since my ex is compulsively social and would never have survived the isolation of a fire look out. Raised by his grandmother, she also provided informal foster care to many, many youth, lining he and the rest of them along the wall at night to sleep on blankets, their feet pointed in to the center of the room.  

And I have spent much of my career in jobs requiring me to be social. 

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The afternoons on this mountain are long. At home I never notice how long a summer afternoon is because at home my time is measured, rationed, crammed with responsibilities and tasks. Here there is time and more time, enough to watch rain clouds cluster over the Spanish Peaks to the South, then creep out to fill the sky, until everything is greyed out and expectant. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. 

My daughter is finishing the puzzle we brought, a puzzle that would take a week or two at home.   Here it has taken less than 24 hours. 

There’s lightning to the south now, the rumble of thunder, the sound of puzzle pieces being snapped in to place, and then rain fills the long reach of afternoon.

Lacey Middlestead is a Montana native and freelance writer currently living in Helena, Mont. She loves meeting new people and helping share their stories. When she’s not busy writing articles for newspapers like the Independent Record and Helena Vigilante, she can usually be found indulging in her second greatest passion–playing in the Montana wilderness. She loves skiing and snowmobiling in the winter and four wheeling, hiking, boating, and riding dirt bikes in the summer.

S’mores may be the unofficial summertime treat, but I for one am a much bigger fan of ice cream during the hotter days of the year. Whether in a cone or dish, covered in syrup or blended in a milkshake, it ice cream is delicious any way it comes. Now I know you can get ice cream all year long, but not necessarily from everywhere. I wait all year for summer to roll around again so I can partake in the smooth soft serve of the iconic Ice Cream Place in Seeley Lake, Mont. Anyone who has drove through Seeley in the summer knows what I’m talking about. And even if you haven’t stopped there before you’ve definitely noticed it because the line to order is always distressingly long.

This past weekend my fiancé and I along with a few of our friends headed to Placid Lake to camp. With Seeley being only a few miles down the road, the ice cream was simply too tempting. No one said it out loud, but there was silent agreement between us that at the end of the weekend we would make a trip into town for some frozen goodness. I guess we figured it would be our reward for “surviving” in the wilderness….a.k.a. the well-established campground equipped with showers and bathroom facilities.

But to tide us over until Sunday afternoon, I prepared a “camping” version of homemade ice cream for us. It was a surprise I’d made especially for our friends Brad and Tara’s three-year-old daughter, Camille. It was her very first camping trip and I wanted to make it special for her. And what kid doesn’t like ice cream!

On Saturday night, after gorging ourselves on a delicious meal of spaghetti and toasted bread with parmesan cheese, I announced that we would be making homemade ice cream for dessert. Everyone got excited until they realized that it was a bit labor intensive. But I explained that burning off a few extra calories beforehand would help them from feeling guilty later. I’d made this particular ice cream recipe once before at a summer program I helped with a couple of years ago at my job. The kids loved it and I knew that it would work brilliantly for camping.

To start with all you do is make a basic ice cream mixture of half and half, sugar and vanilla. I did this before we left town and then divided the mixture into several quart sized Ziploc bags. I handed each person a bag as well as a larger, gallon sized bag. We put the smaller bag into the big bag and then filled the big bag with ice and rock salt. Then we sealed the bags and started shaking them. This is where things got messy. It takes some time, at least 10 minutes or so of hard shaking, for the mixture to start solidifying into ice cream. And as the ice melts and the bags get shaken up, water ends up splattering out. We quickly realized how cold your hands get too holding the bags so some of us put on gloves or pulled down our sweatshirt sleeves. It took a while, but eventually we all had an individual baggie of ice cream to enjoy while sitting around the campfire. It doesn’t get much better than that!

While everyone seemed to enjoy the homemade ice cream we were all still anxious for Sunday to arrive along with our trip into Seeley. Sunday finally came and after taking down our tents, stuffing our sleeping bags back into their sacks and heaving all of the coolers into the truck beds, we were off!

To no one’s surprise, we pulled up to the Ice Cream Place to discover a line of a dozen people or so. We quickly jumped on the end and squinted towards the order window where the large menu hung on the outside of the building. They serve everything from chicken strip baskets, burgers and burritos to every ice cream concoction you can imagine. The worst part is trying to decide what you want. My personal favorites are the strawberry-vanilla swirl in a waffle cone, huckleberry sundae complete with whip cream, nuts and a cherry and the Seeley Swirls which are equivalent to a Dairy Queen Blizzard. For this go around I settled on a huckleberry sundae. Once we all got our treats, we sat down at one of the picnic tables in the seating area and dug in.  It was sheer bliss!

Ice cream, no matter what kind or where you have it, always tastes good. But on this last camping weekend, it tasted especially delectable. Something about being out in the woods always makes food taste better to me. I’m not sure whether I’ll make it back to the Ice Cream Place again before it closes for the season, but it is always worth the wait for that first bite of summer.

12:15 p.m. Two people in Columbia Falls are involved in a heated battle over custody of their dog.

12:55 p.m. A 24-ounce can of beer was stolen from an Evergreen gas station.

1:53 p.m. Three down-and-out puppies with porcupine quills stuck in their hide were found on the side of Steel Bridge Road. They were taken to the vet and then the shelter.

5:52 p.m. Someone called in because they saw a bunch of cars pull into a residence on Shady Lane and assumed it was drug related. The Drug Task Force is looking into it.

7:10 p.m. A Kalispell man broke stuff during a quarrel with his lover. The two were separated for the night.

MORE>>>Flathead Beacon

While much of the U.S. will swelter in heat and humidity this weekend, it will feel more like fall, or even winter, for much of Montana and Wyoming. 

An unseasonably cold low pressure system is expected to bring below-average temperatures to the northern Rockies through early next week. Temperatures will be up to 35 degrees below average in some locations this weekend. Glacier National Park may not even reach 50 degrees for a high on Saturday.

In fact, low temperatures will drop below freezing in the higher elevations, leading to the chance for the first snow of the season to fall. In West Glacier, Montana, the average date for the first temperature below 32 degrees is Sept. 13, so the cold conditions are about three weeks ahead of schedule.

MORE>>>Weather.com