Destination - Beautiful View, West Shore State Park, Flathead Lake, MT

Since it was a nice sunny afternoon, my oldest daughter and I grabbed the video and still cameras and headed out around the west shore of Flathead Lake to do some photography.

Flathead Lake is the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi, so it offers a variety of activities, even in winter.

Last weekend, we tried to shoot some video footage in Sommers (town at the north end of Flathead Lake). The sun wasn't bright enough and that was part of our reason for heading back out today. The bay near Sommers is still covered in ice. Last weekend, there was a group out playing hockey. This weekend, we saw a couple guys out on the ice in the bay with land boards. They are basically wheeled windsurf boards. I wish I'd gotten a shot or two of them, but I wanted to get to somewhere on the west shore of the lake before losing the light. It was nice and sunny, but there were a couple large white fluffy clouds. The wind was very brisk and pushed my little car around quite a bit, so the clouds were really cruising.

We were trying to find the State Park that we turned around in 2 summers ago as we thought we'd get the best light there with sun starting to crest over to the western skyline. The thought was to get some shots out over the lake with the sun at our backs. Of course, we had no luck finding the elusive park and drove almost all the way to Polson. We hadn't seen the sign we were expecting. Somewhere we missed it, even on the way back, so we stopped at the West Shore State Park instead.

It might have been a better spot to stop and we had a great time. Looking at the map, we may have been looking for Big Arm State Park, so maybe we didn't go quite far enough towards Polson. ;-)

Here's a couple shots in and around the park. Notice the ice on the shore in the pictures. We're still cold here, though it was up near 38 degrees F today.

Even with the cold and wind, there were actually a few brave souls out fishing by the island in these photos.

As you can see from the pictures, the clouds were fairly kind to us, leaving us enough sun to work with. It's hard to beat the views near Flathead Lake!