THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN FRONT Introduction
Introduction:
On Sunday, September 22, my brother and I started our 2019 Fall Foliage Tour, which encompassed portions of Montana and Wyoming. In late September and early October of 2007, Doug and our good friend Steve spent two weeks traversing Colorado, with a short jaunt into southern Wyoming. This gave me the inspiration for our excursions in these great northern states. However, instead of flying in and driving to various destinations, as they did on that two-week pilgrimage to the Centennial State, we divided our itinerary in three separate, but shorter, routes. The first of these expeditions, which I will cover in detail over the next two to three weeks, focused on the Rocky Mountain Front Tour.
I did not want to miss any more Tennessee football (and when I say Tennessee football, I mean the University of Tennessee Volunteers) than was unavoidable, so we decided to leave on the Sunday immediately after Tennessee’s game with the ninth-ranked Florida Gators. Despite losing the first two games of the season, for the first time since 1980, we still had hopes for the Vols against the reptilian horde. That game, however, is not one that we enjoyed watching, nor would we want to remember it. The Big Orange had a bye week before hosting the Georgia Bulldogs, the fifth-best team in the nation. Therefore, most of our travels would occur in the two-week span between those games.
Despite starting the season with a 1-4 record, head coach Jeremy Pruitt righted the ship, and the men in orange finished by winning seven of their last eight games, including a thrilling come-from-behind victory over the Indiana Hoosiers in the Gator Bowl. Their only loss, during that period, was at top-ranked Alabama. And that game was still in doubt during the fourth quarter. The Crimson Tide led 28-13 midway through the final stanza, but the Vols drove the length of the field and had the ball at the Bama one yard-line when quarterback Jarrett Guarantano fumbled into the endzone. A Tide defender returned the errant pigskin 100 yards to seal the win. With their star quarterback Tua Tagovailoa sidelined by injury, who knows how the game would have ended if Tennessee had scored on that play and seized the momentum. With a 2-5 mark after seven games, this team could have fallen apart. Nevertheless, our resilient gridiron warriors, under the leadership of a man who I think, is on the verge of becoming the next great coach in Knoxville, Tennessee, finished the season with five straight victories and added the exclamation point by rebounding from a thirteen-point deficit with less than five minutes remaining to defeat Indiana University 23-22 in the 2020 Gator Bowl.
This article is not about Tennessee football, but anyone who has known me for more than two minutes (some might say two seconds) knows everything revolves around those guys, clad in orange, who go forth to do battle on the gridiron every fall. I will eventually start doing articles about football, and more specifically Tennessee football, but for now, we will focus on the Rocky Mountains and the photographs I was able to take.
The Pictures taken on the first day include some really nice shots of the Crazy Mountains, including some from areas that we had not previously visited. They also include a nice sunset as we were entering Great Falls, and the piece de resistance, an exceedingly rare look at a white buffalo.
