Wild Horse Island

On Thursday, we took a boat ride out to Wild Horse Island. We chartered a boat with a captain and left bigfork at 8 am. Bigfork is at the northern tip of Flathead Lake and it was a 20 mile trip over the water to get to the island. Wild Horse Island is a state park that is about 2,000 acres and is inhabited by quite a few large mammals, including horses. The captain was knowledgeable about the lake and was a competent boat pilot, but he was carrying a variety of personality disorders so he kept us on our toes for the 7 hour trip.

We got to see the lake from a new perspective, learned about the origins of the landscape, the history of the mountains, the native American population, some details about flathead lake, the flathead river system and the local fauna. We saw bald eagles, ospreys, wild horses, massive bucks and a herd of big-horned sheep.

We saw an osprey snag a fish about a ¼ of its size out of the water. Then we saw another osprey tearing the guts out of a fish and feeding it to its fledelings.

Captain Bill was a kook. He was mustachioed like a seventeenth centrury vicomte and talked a mile a minute. He took a shine to mike. And mike couldn’t get far enough away from him on the boat. He spoke to all the animals we saw in a creepy Cesar Milan voice and told them that it was ok, it was just their friend bill. I will try to upload a video that captures an example of this one-way conversation. He talked to the animals ~50 times while we were on the boat.

When we landed on the island we had a couple hours to kill. We started off on a hike. Christine and I decided to climb to a plateau in the center of the island to get a better view. Mike and Dot stayed in the lowlands with Captain Bill. Apparently Captain Bill was watching us ascend through his binoculars and he knew that we are newlyweds. He asked Dotti if she was ready to become a grandmother, because he was quite certain that we were going to get to the top of the hill and would find a spot to generate a grandchild. At that point Mike asked bill where he would be spending the remainder of the day on the island and explained that unfortunately the cadwells were going the other way. He was a looney toon.

We got back into bigfork and went to have a couple beers at the saloon without captain bill. Then we went over to the cadwell’s condo for a swim in the lake and a nice dinner of seabass.