By Deirdre McNamer
Published November 25, 2007

SOMETIMES I’ll sit on the front steps of our yellow bungalow and think about swimming up through 2,000 feet of water to catch a breath. It’s what I would have had to do 12,000 years ago when the Missoula Valley was the bottom of a stupendously big lake. The mountains that rise from the edges of town still show the striations that were the lake’s shorelines during subsequent glacial dramas that drained and refilled the valley, time after time after time.

Until quite recently, the mountains had houses only up to the lower shorelines. An exception was an extravagant white Victorian, the showplace home of an early city father, that had, in 1966, been sawed into sections and moved from downtown to a mountainside area known as the South Hills, where it was turned into a restaurant. It burned down in 1992 and was rebuilt as a mini-castle-restaurant called Shadow’s Keep. For quite a while, it stood up there pretty much alone, looking like something that had fallen from a time machine. As you drove up to it, the houses on the lower hillsides thinned out, and then there was a stretch of open ranchland, and then you were there.

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