Sunday, July 12, 2009

Coulees and Canadian cows


I frequently use the term "coulee" in my blog posts. Many readers aren't sure what I'm talking about. So today, I took pictures. This is Fox Coulee, looking south. It's smaller than a valley, wider than a ravine, deeper and longer than a draw. The buildings in the distance are my cousin's ranch, and our nearest neighbor.
This is the Milk River coulee. The land in the foreground is in the U.S. and the area back by the river is in Canada. They are separated by that wire fence you can just barely make out in the middle of the picture (you might have to click on the picture for a full screen view to see it). If we'd been close enough, I'm sure those cows up on the bench were saying, "Moo, eh?"

5 comments:

J.L. Johnson said...

Lol, it's "Moo,eh?"

And I've never seen so much flat treeless land before.

Kari Lynn Dell said...

Jannette,
I never know how to spell that. And the pictures are deceptive. There is actually very little flat ground around here. If it hadn't been so hazy, you would see the Rocky Mountains in the background, only fifteen miles away. But treeless is definitely accurate. The wind here is murder on them, so the few hardy survivors are clustered in the coulees and draws.

Gay Degani said...

Thanks for posting the coulee pix. I have a story I'm writing and setting in the Washington territory near Coulee City. I'd seen a couple pix of coulees but I want as much a sense of the place as possible. Once I get a hold on a word like "coulee" it seems to show up every where!

Lori Folkman said...

Ha! We are being overrun by all of our Canadian neighbors right now...more Alberta cars on the roads than Montanans. At least it's good for the economy, eh?

Anonymous said...

Relieved at finding at last a good explanation for "Coulee". I´m just plaaning a visit to Montana and found innumerable coulees on topo maps od eastern Montana and didn´t know hoe to make sense of that.
Greetings and thanks from Germany