Ice Caves

Early spring or late winter on the Blackfeet Reservation meant chinook winds rolling up from the south. Warm and heavy, they could strip the snow off the prairie in a day. The meltwater rushed down our little creek, pooled across the highway, and spread into a wide, shallow lake. By the next cold snap it froze solid, leaving behind an ice field nearly a mile long and half a mile wide.
That sheet of glass was our playground. We’d drag our iron-rail sleds to the far end and wait for the wind. To make speed, we’d open our coats, grab the tails, and pull them over our heads like sails. With the gusts behind us, we shot across that ice, keeping pace with cars on the highway—had to be near fifty miles an hour.

The ride always ended at the irrigation ditch. After a thaw, it filled with water, but when the freeze came back, it left only a crust of ice over a hollow gap. One blustery day Jonny, the youngest, got carried clean away. Light as a feather, he sailed over the ditch and tumbled safe into the cottonwoods.

Billy wasn’t so lucky. Bigger than Jonny, he hit the ditch and vanished. All I could see were his moon boots sticking straight up out of the ice. My heart near stopped, I thought he’d drowned. But when I reached him, he was grinning. The ditch had turned into a frozen tunnel, and he’d fallen straight into an ice cave.

We spent the rest of that day exploring. Lying on your back in that hollow, you could look up and see the sky through a glass roof of ice, blue and clear as a windowpane. It was an accidental adventure, the kind only a Montana winter could make.