blackfoot-valley

been used, but I believe these are the most revealing and descriptive short ones). The Great Plains of eastern Montana fall on the “dry” side of that line. Parts of Rocky Mountain western Montana qualify as humid, although just barely. Both sides of the Divide have a great, definitely a “continental” tem- perature range from the warmth of summer to below - freezing averages in the winter months. (The higher mountains themselves are arctic in climatic character, but nobody lives there.) Are there regions with this same kind of “continental” climate, with seasonal swings from warm to cold? In the Southern Hemisphere there is no example of a region with a truly continental climate. The only southern conti- nent with land extending into the mid-latitudes is South America, and in high- er latitudes that continent is so narrow that temperature ranges - on the cold side, but lacking great extremes - are more oceanic than continental in char- acter. That leaves the Northern Hemisphere. The other large area on earth having the same general type of environment as Montana is the broad strip of “steppe” lands in north-central Asia. It lies in a nearly unbroken stretch of 4,500 miles east to west from part of North China and all of Mongolia, follow- ing the long border region shared by Russia and Kazakhstan, and extending into eastern Europe to include most of the Ukraine. And, just as in its North American counterpart (which also straddles an international border in the same latitudes), the landscape shows two distinctive parts: sprawling plains 40