Having grown up in northern Wyoming, I spent a lot of time riding in the bed of a pickup truck. Safety concerns aside, it was an unremarkable and ubiquitous method of travel for kids in small Wyoming towns.

There was one annual trip in the back of the truck that is far more memorable than the others. Side by side with my older sister, perched in lawn chairs with our backs against the cab of the truck, and awkwardly strapped in with black bungee cords, we would make the two-hour spring voyage to our family’s cabin in the Beartooth Mountains of southern Montana.

We knew we were getting close to our destination when we dropped down a hill and across a bridge into Red Lodge, Montana. About halfway down the hill, we could begin to sense that smell. Sweet and herbal, waxy and fresh, it was and is a smell that I will always associate with that small Montana town at the base of the Beartooths.

Young and rather unsophisticated about, well, everything—including plants—I never interrogated the origin of the smell; to me, it was just the smell of Red Lodge. It was and remains my favorite scent.

Green, shiny leaves emerging from a deep, red branch in the foreground, with a large tree trunk and stream out of focus in the background

Thayne Tuason, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It was over ten years later in Oregon when, serving as an AmeriCorps volunteer in watershed restoration, I realized the source of that unmistakable olfactory gateway to Spring: Cottonwood.

In Red Lodge, we would invariably stop by a riverside red caboose that served ice cream, and then continue on to our cabin.

These memories of riding in the bed of a truck in Wyoming and Montana are among the fondest I have, punctuated by the reminder, every spring, of that uniquely wonderful smell of water and springtime.