blackfoot-valley

tumes to visit every house on Helmville’s main street. In the 1930s, there was also the exotic show of an airplane stuntman barnstorming during the rodeo with wing walkers and rides offered to customers by a Missoula Flying Service. Pat reminisced, “ that people, used to go to Ovanda to dance all night, and then return to milk cows. The Powell County book notes also that even in the dead of winter, Helmville young people would think nothing of going in a bob sled to a New Year’s dance in Ovando. They piled sleighs full of hay and fur robes in case of an unexpected northeaster. A ‘northeaster’ storm lasted up to three days in the early century, but now seldom more than a day.” Arctic continental air masses occasionally pushing over the mountains still bring cold air with the coldest actual temperatures of all. (At least there’s no wind chill then.) As noted earlier, Tom Geary says that the coldest he re- members is 55 degrees below zero, when “it froze 86-proof whiskey.” During the winter of 1996-97, residents report, a cold snap reached -50 degrees F. But it is to be emphasized that these are the most unusual extremes in rare years. The general run of winters are much milder. Many of the community’s traditional activities center on the school, although the turn-of-the-century (1903) schoolhouse with its prominent bell tower in the center of town no longer serves as a school, but as a country “Sleighride to Ovando coutesy Wikimedia Commons 147