Brigitte Bowers: Fire season in Roundup, Mont., a tense time of year

Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series.

“I hope you don’t mind the gun,” Isabelle said. “It’s just in case of snakes.”

My sister and I were walking the gravel road in front of her house, which is on Bull Mountain in southeast central Montana, and her husband, Andy, was following close behind, a snake shooter strapped to his leg.

My teenage son, Everett, brought up the rear. Everett and I were at the final destination of our four-day trip through Nevada, Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. We had spent the day driving through the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone, and then Montana.

Bull Mountain is not really a mountain in the sense most people think of one. Its highest point of elevation is about 3,800 feet, but central Montana is mostly plains so I could see how, in designating it a mountain, perspective might have been important.

The particular section of Bull Mountain where we were located is in Musselshell County. My sister’s property is on a bluff overlooking the county seat, Roundup, a town of about 1,900.

It is coal and cattle country, and until 1997, it was also an important stop on the Missouri Railroad. The train no longer passes through Roundup and the coal, which is now mined on an area of about 750 square miles of Bull Mountain, is considered too thin to be of high quality.

Still, coal mining is the main industry in the area. The only crop in the county – in much of central Montana, for that matter – is alfalfa, which is irrigated by ranchers directly from the Musselshell River. They pay no irrigation fees.

“I know you probably don’t think there are snakes around here, but there are,” my sister said, by way of apologizing for the gun.

In fact, Bull Mountain is exactly the kind of place where one would expect to encounter a viper. Though I would not usually wish for a gun during my evening walk, I was glad to have one available, should the need to kill a rattlesnake arise.

A recent article in Time Magazine named central Montana one of the safest places to live, in terms of natural threats, in the United States. This would be news to my sister, who has in the three years she’s been in Roundup experienced a hundred-year flood and a devastating fire.

The 2011 flood put the entire town of Roundup under about 4 feet of water and seeped into the storage unit where Isabelle and Andy had kept all of their material possessions while waiting for their home to be built. They lost everything.

The 2012 Dahl fire ravaged over 10,000 acres. Isabelle and Andy stood on their bluff and watched it advance toward them, veering off in a different direction about 15 miles south of their property.

Though I didn’t know it on the evening I took a walk with Isabelle, my sister and I would spend much of the next day watching a fire burn about 3 miles to the northeast. That fire burned for only one day, and ultimately did not threaten my sister’s home.

It is not uncommon for winds to gust at 40 to 50 miles per hour on Bull Mountain. Combine that with summer thunderstorms and a landscape characterized by sage and Ponderosa pines, and you can see how fire season in Roundup is a tense time of year.

But it is also easy to see what attracts people here. The streets are clean, the clapboard houses well-kept. Residents know each other and like to talk. Instead of being hostile to outsiders, they are curious. Everyone I met had time to talk.

At a party my sister’s neighbor threw while we were visiting, I met two people from the Central Valley – one raised in Madera, the other from Fresno – who reminisced about their younger days in California. They agreed that the Valley had grown too much, become too overpopulated, in the years since they had left.

It was on our last night in Roundup when I finally heard the snake gun go off. We were watching TV, and I heard a distinctive popping – three shots – coming from the front lawn. “I think Andy might have just gotten a snake,” I said. He’d been out for a walk with their German shepherd.

We went outside and found a rattler still writhing in the grass, about 20 feet from the front door. We watched Andy chop off and bury the snake’s head – the fangs can still deliver venom after death.

Then he threw the carcass for the coyotes to find. As we went back into the house, we could hear them yipping and howling, about a half-mile away.

This story was originally published September 6, 2014 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Brigitte Bowers: Fire season in Roundup, Mont., a tense time of year."