Outdoor Winter Activities

I saw that there was an OUTDOOR hockey tournament over the weekend held outdoors on the ice of Seeley lake. They had to push back the start time due to the temperature being 23 degrees BELOW zero earlier in the day.

The team from Helena won the tournament and the Seeley Cup. They outlasted 43 other teams. All the proceeds got to the Seeley Lake Elementary School and Missoula Youth Hockey.

All of this got me to thinking about how much more my age group played outside in Montana, even in the winter time.

One of my favorite things to look forward to each winter was our trips to a place called "Sun Mountain", which was located between Monarch and Neihart. It's was a just a big gently sloped hill that you could pay a couple bucks and slide down. When I first started going there, you could catch a ride back to the top on one of those big "Snow Cats" with the tracks on them. In later years, I recall that they installed a rope tow to get us back up top for another run.

At the bottom, they had a big cabin you could rent and use to warm up and even sleep over.

I heard that the insurance they had to carry just became too expensive, so that's why they shut it down. Great memories though.