This morning, I had perhaps the best breakfast of my life— fresh scrambled farm eggs, homemade apple cinnamon dumplings, a strawberry salad, homemade granola with yogurt, and blueberry pancakes made from wheat grown by our host’s brother—all prepared by Amy, one of the proprietors of the Circle View Ranch.

Over breakfast, Phil, the other proprietor, described Scenic, the all-but-abandoned town just up the road. In the 60’s, Scenic was renowned for the brawls that broke out at the saloon, but slowly, everyone had died or moved away until no one was left. The whole town then went on the market and was sold to a church in the Philippines for $900,000. Now one couple lives there and sells odds and ends (but no gas) out of the old gas station.

On our way toward Yellowstone, Ally and I stopped there and had a lot of fun creeping around the squat-roofed, stone jailhouse and snapping pictures of the saloon, which had strung across its roof many strands of sun-bleached animal skulls, coils of barbed wire, and a sign that, for years, had read “No Indians Allowed,” until someone finally got enough sense to climb up there and paint over the “No.” Next to the saloon was an open-air cell with a couple of rusty bed frames. I bet that place saw its share of soul-splitting headaches:

By evening, the landscape had changed dramatically as the clouds’ shadows slid like butter over the mountains and valleys of Montana. On our way to Cody, where we stopped for the night, we drove through the Bighorn National Forest, and the shadowier hilltop roads were still lined with snow.