This mailbox is many, many miles from…well, anywhere. But I’m sure it makes rural deliveries possible for plenty of folks ranching or farming in the area! It sits just south of our border with South Dakota, and naturally it caught my eye as unusual.

I don’t know if it’s been repurposed by the nearest resident or if it serves as a distribution point, but it sure looks cool, standing in isolation out along a vast stretch of the CanAm Highway!

As crazy as it sounds, I did get a few days in the middle of 2020 to bolt to Montana and roam my old stompin’ grounds. I had *one* tiny window of opportunity amid a year of non-stop work, and it happened to coincide with the date during which I had my buddy’s lake condo at Big Sky. After clearing it with my boss, I took it. And I didn’t come back empty-handed.

While roaming the top of Lone Peak (solo – my family wanted to do more kayaking, and I wanted to do both) I found two quarters in separate locations. Since there really isn’t much of – well, anything in the places where I was, I surmised that these may have been lying there for quite some time. They may have been dropped in the snow, then settled into the meadow with a spring thaw. Or they may have been dropped by hikers like me. Either way, the odds of my stumbling (figuratively) upon both of them probably weren’t very high.

I took a ton of photos and video, but that time in June was the last time I took off until Christmas. I haven’t had much time for photo editing, either, and what time I have had lately has been consumed with frost (okay, Rime Ice) photos. But sometime I hope to get to those pictures, too.

I was blazing up Highway 281 in “Other Dakota” when I saw a brilliant red cross off to the right. I was on a mission, so I didn’t really have any photography in mind on this particular date and hadn’t done any research to see if there were any prairie churches along the designated route. But I couldn’t pass this up.

No, it ain’t lit, and no, I didn’t play with the brightness or saturation of the red in the cross. It really was that bold. I believe it had a lot to do with the blue light of the overcast sky. We’d encountered fog and wet roads all along this leg of our route, and that can actually do some pretty cool things to items like this red cross. It seemed absolutely brilliant, and I’m glad I got to stop in for a quick shot.