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Judith Gap

Travel Montana

A view from 1939:

JUDITH GAP (4,582 alt., 288 pop.), is built around a hill. On the summit are a church, a school, and water tank. Many of the town's buildings have been removed or abandoned. The village looks faded and tired, and it may well be tired, for it is buffeted perpetually by winds and scorched intermittently by drought. It was once a busy grain-shipping center; and its roundhouse, coal chute, and water tanks are reminders of the time when it was a busy division point on the Great Northern Ry. The roundhouse and shops were closed in 1922.

Judith Gap, in which it sits, is a funnel that attracts northern blizzards of a ferocity unsurpassed in Montana, and then lets them blow back, seeming colder than before. The gap makes a pass between the Snowy Mountains (L) and the Little Belt Mountains (R) that was important in the days when freighters, prospectors, cattle drivers, hunters, and settlers passed northward into the Judith Basin, or southward toward the Yellowstone or Musselshell Valleys. These travelers followed a path made by Indian hunting and war parties seeking or defending the rich hunting grounds of the Judith Basin.

Before the World War the gravel benches around Judith Gap produced wheat that won prizes at big expositions; the few surviving old-time farmers wonder why such wheat has never grown since then.

Source: Montana: A State Guide Book; Compiled and Written by the Federal Writers' Project of the Work Projects Administration for the State of Montana; September, 1939.