On the road…again!
Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams
Chronicles of a Footloose Forester
By Dick Pellek
Where Was Warland, Montana?
Only with the evolution of geospatial markers and the gradual adoption of digital geographic coordinates was it possible for the Footloose Forester to finally stamp “mission completed” on the precise location of (historical) Warland, Montana. The tiny dot on old maps of Montana was one of three far-flung field locations where Footloose Forester had worked during his career, and had become part of the trio of field locations that had subsequently been inundated during lake formation behind reservoirs. The creation of Lake Koocanusa behind Libby Dam drowned Warland. La Vueltosa Dam in Venezuela swallowed up tiny Santa Maria de Caparo; and Lac Selingue in Mali eventually drowned the village of Kéniekénieko, previously on the banks of the Bafing River.
The digital coordinates of the drowned villages in Venezuela and Mali are reported in previous chronicles of the Footloose Forester and are marked in accompanying Google Earth maps with a yellow stick pin. The underwater location marked with a stick pin should be an aid of anthropologists interested in future exploration. But it was the historians and the Montana Gazetter that shared the digital coordinates of the former Warland Ranger Station upstream of Yarnell Island on the Kootenai River.
The Footloose Forester was elated to know that the truss bridge at Warland was removed and thus his presumption that the present and prominent Kootenai River Bridge upstream was its replacement—was a wrong presumption. Live and learn. Now, only the notation of 48.5007903, -115.2873868 on a Google Earth map is needed to pinpoint that previous river crossing at Warland, a place where the Footloose Forester found a Kootenai stone hammer during the summer of 1958. He will never forget the moment he plucked it from the muddy soil at water's edge. He will also never forget fishing for cutthroat trout from the opposite bank of the river where that old truss bridge once spanned the Kootenai River.