Spring tends to come late in Montana. When I left for the Southwest with Rodrigo, it was definitely still winter. When we returned a week or so from the end of March, it felt like spring with several days in the 60s. That was actually not what we were hoping for. Rodrigo has never skied before and wanted to go to the indoor ski slope when we were in Dubai in November. I wasn’t keen on the idea, despite the novelty of it, and suggested an alternative full day of activities there. I told him we’d go skiing when he visited in Montana in March. Well, with weather in the 60s in the valley, probably not much lower on the slopes, and little recent snow, conditions looked to be appalling even if the nearby ski areas were still officially open. Late March can be great for skiing here, and resorts typically stay open until early to mid-April. Buit not this year.

Instead, we went for a hike. Higher elevations would still, of course, still have significant snow despite the thaw, or worse yet lots of mud. But there is a great place nearby for a scenic rather easy low-elevation hike.   That would be Beartrap Canyon, a trail along the Madison River about 35 miles southwest of Belgrade, a seven-mile roundtrip walk I’ve now done five times. Is it my absolute favorite hike in the area? No.  I do it because it’s a good hike early and late in the season when the alternative are still snow covered or likely to be muddy. It was beautiful as always, with the fishermen and kayakers out in force, and even some Trumpeter Swans on the river.

My spring was a short one, one that is some years can still feel mostly like winter, just under a month long before leaving on my next overseas trip to Europe. Perhaps the highlight of it was completing my library, an excruciatingly long project that took about two and a half years from the time my first swindler contractor, Paddy the Drunken Irishman, first began demolition work on in August of 2022. My nice contractor/carpenter, Joe, finished up the last work on it while I was away over the winter. I spent most of a month just admiring how beautiful the woodwork on it looked while I was empty, knowing full well it would not be quite as aesthetically appealing once it was put to intended use of storing most of my vast collection of books in a way I could access anything I’d want to reference at any time. Those pictures are in the first entry of this year’s Montana Life blog.

So how to arrange the contents of a home library? With much reflection and estimation of how much linear yardage I’d need for each genre, I began stacking the shelves with piles from what for three years I had been calling my book room, the adjacent bedroom that was full of books in boxes and in piles.   Once I got that more or less set, I started arranging them by subject matter – art, architecture, archaeology, anthropology, natural world, cookbooks, history (by country and era), travel guides, family photo albums, etc.  Will I be able to find a book when I want it?  Even without any kind of a formal Warren Decimal System, I suspect I have a pretty good idea of just about where any one of the 3,500 or so books I have is located. After all, my Myers-Briggs personality type is INTJ, sometimes characterized as builder of systems. Miraculously, to my pleasant surprise, it all just about fits.  Not quite, though. I decided to donate about 400 books I’d characterize as the dregs of my collection, including many very outdated travel guides from the 1990s, that I am pretty sure I would never look at again. And there’s not quite enough space to shelve all of my National Geographic magazines dating to the 1970s. I may never look through them again either, but they are sort of a collector’s item. It’s not that I wouldn’t have minded some more empty spaces in the corners to display some of the treasures I’ve acquired around the would over decades of travel, but they’ll just have to go elsewhere around the house.

With the completion of my library rooms, I feel an enormous level of satisfaction after having waited so long. That wait was not only over the last 30 months for its construction, but also over the many years when the books were all in storage in Colorado or more recently still in boxes in my house. Now I can move on to furnishing and decorating the rest of Chateau Warren.