The 100 Year Storm

You feel the wind first; a few fresh gusts that relieve some of the day’s heat and force the mosquitoes into hiding. Within the hour you’re scrambling to stop your tent from blowing to the next county.

During this particular storm, the first drops began to fall around midnight, a slow but constant tapping on my tent. I woke about four hours later, when, my tent lying half-destroyed around me, I had to look for alternative sleeping arrangements.

Waking up at 5am to a light show over Buffalo Camp (Sun Prairie), North Eastern Montana

Over the next 36 hours, the rain continued to fall. Bone-dry creek beds turned into raging torrents, effectively isolating the Landmark crew on what was now our Sun Prairie island.

We had just received eight inches of rain in a 48-hour period. The average rainfall for the town of Malta, 40 miles to the north of the Sun Prairie, is 12 inches.

“That was the third 100-year storm in three years,” said American Prairie Reserve Operations Manager Damien Austin a few days later.

I’d read about the brief but intense Northern Montana summer, with its 90-degree temperatures, big blue skies and the occasional super-cell storm crossing the prairie. My first two weeks on the Landmark crew provided just that. This, however, was something different.

Following the peak of the storm and the subsiding of water levels, ASC Program Manager Mike Kautz traverses the swollen Telegraph Creek.

The days of waiting out the flooding rains, of gale force winds that could blow my tent to the Little Rocky Mountains — they all add to the experience.

On the American Prairie Reserve, bison will wander in and out of your campsite. Dominant males like these remain within the herd until displaced by younger, stronger bulls in a continual changing of the guard

While the storm brought destruction, it also brought life. Fields transformed into what I can only assume resembles spring, and the bison have become playful again after the stifling heat of early August. Describing the plague of mosquitoes that wreaked havoc on my sanity as “horrendous” fails to describe their effect in even a remote sense.

Life in northeastern Montana is not easy, but it is unique.

Originally published on National Geographic News watch

Gregg Treinish and his team at Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation bring us stories from around the world about adventuring with purpose. Here, ASC volunteer Morgan Cardiff shows us the wonders and challenges of life on the American Prairie Reserve, where he collected wildlife and environmental data on the Landmark adventure science crews this August and September. Morgan hiked throughout this wild landscape, managing remote cameras, mapping prairie dog towns and recording every animal sighting.

October 6, 2014

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