blackfoot-valley

only the Blackfoot River, but of its North Fork as well. It’s a bit of a stretch to call it part of anything other than part of the Blackfoot Valley. The town’s ori- entation, indeed, is essentially east-west along this part of the Blackfoot Riv- er’s course and State Highway 200, which very closely bypasses the town on the other side. However, since there are no significant barriers to travel, and the northern part of the Ranch is essentially as close to Ovando as it is to the Ranch Headquarters and Helmville, for our purposes we’ll consider Ovando as marking the northern end of the Nevada Valley. (The large acreage of the southwestern area of the Ranch, including the Murray Creek area, is all within the Nevada Creek’s drainage basin although mostly in hill country, not valley bottomlands.) Upstream from Helmville, Nevada Creek and its valley extend due southeast for some eighteen miles as the crow flies until one crosses a low di- vide, south of which the drainage is into the Little Blackfoot River - again, not to be confused with the (Big) Blackfoot, the two rivers being in entirely sepa- rate drainage systems - but the divide between them is once again so level that the apprearance is of one continuous valley running between mountains on either side. Consequently the upstream, southeastern part of Nevada Creek’s valley, along with the adjoining northern part of Little Blackfoot’s drainage basin, is simply called the Avon Valley, with the town of Avon situat- ed on the Little Blackfoot itself. As noted earlier, the Northern Pacific Railroad laid its rails east to west along the Little Blackfoot in 1883. 111