Montana Wyoming Trip 2013

I finally took a vacation by myself with no agenda except to see a friend and

some relatives. I love to drive and don’t mind hours in the car, some of which I spend thinking, some listening to music or books. But even I was a bit wary of what I consider the big nothingness between Minneapolis and the Rockies. The vegetation started getting sparse in western Wisconsin, and after Minneapolis, the view got quite flat. But I was actually surprised how many forms of nothingness there were. I think I was most surprised by North Dakota, which was greener than I expected and full of fertile fields, water, and trees and hills around the towns. I lucked out that a friend had just moved to Mendan, twin city to Bismarck, ND, so I had a place to stay and I got 360 degree fireworks display that went full blast for about 3 hours. I had heard that North Dakota was a booming state with its oil, and it was interesting to hear how the North Dakotans are cautious, not wanting to build too many housing units for the workers, just to have them be empty in a few years. And that it is Sakakawea not Sacajawea in North Dakota.

I am a national park fan, so my first real stop was at Theodore Roosevelt
National Park right off of I-90 on the far western side of ND. I was first greeted by one of many prairie dog villages and then drove trough a terrain that reminded me of the badlands, but there seemed to be a lot more green. I took a few trails to scenic views like the Little Missouri River. I saw my first buffalo herd of the trip. They were close to the road, so we could look closely at the massive animals. Later there was a herd of wild horses, half of them just standing in the road. There were quite a few young foals, and it looked like family units of ma, pa and baby, though my horse lover friend could not confirm that they would hang out that way. She had gotten her horse from the wild horse herd in this park. I started photographing wildflowers, which became one of my obsessions during the trip.

There is a heck of a lot of Montana between the border and Glacier National

Park, which was my goal for the day. I understood the „Big Sky” moniker for Montana better, as there sure was a lot of sky. At any one time you could see the sun, various cloud formations, and dark clouds getting hazy towards the ground, which indicated rain. At one point I was just pointing straight into a black cloud, and sure enough it just came down in sheets. I was told to fill up with gas whenever my tank was half full, as you couldn’t be sure how far the next gas station was, so I filled my gas tank four times, before getting to my destination. In Montana there were still some cultivated fields,but more cattle ranges and I started seeing those endless fields of sage. Sometimes it was flat, sometimes hilly. There was some shimmering grass at the sides of the road that caught my eye and I later discovered that was Foxtail Barley. My last stop was Browning, where I filled my tank and called my friend, as it was the last place with cell coverage for a while. This was also one of the largest towns on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, which I visited another time to see their museum and buy some art work from a local artist.

My friend built a log cabin in Essex, MT, population 32 with only 5 families living there year round. It is just off a road that follows a valley with one of the lowest passes over the Rockies, so it also has the railroad tracks and the Flathead River. To the north of them is Glacier National Park, to the south, a wilderness. There is a place on the Flathead river called Goat Lick, where you can often see mountain goats, and we saw the mothers being followed by their young. At Bear Creek we saw an Ouzel, a funny bird that bounces to its own beat and walks on the bottom of creeks, flapping its wings in the water, gathering food. I didn’t see the flapping wings, but I saw it go under water for a long time, and it looked like it was bringing food back to its young under the bridge where we were standing. I sighted my third ever bear in the wild – a black bear on the side of the road, but as I pulled off the road past him, he scampered into the woods.

My friend and I took a day to drive along the Going to the Sun road, which is the only road that crosses Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park east to west. Yes, that is the full name of the park. The Canadian side was called Waterton, and U.S. side Glacier, but at some point they decided to combine the two, though there were still plenty of signs that just said Glacier NP.  Going to the Sun Road was closed just a few weeks ago, so I had come at the right time. The road starts out along Lake McDonald – and I have to say Montana, and especially Glacier NP has the most beautiful and clear lakes and rivers, some are bright turquoise blue. There were times when the sights just took my breath away. At one stop we saw more mountain goats, one up close, and what we think were marmots playing in the valley. Up on the continental divide, at Logan Pass, there is a visitor center and a 1.5 mile trail going up the pass overlooking Hidden Lake. Most of the trail was lost under fields of snow, so we trudged up carefully, though there were young folks that ran up the mountain and slid down the snowy slopes on their shoes or bottoms. At the top there were more mountain goats and some very frisky and large chipmunks. The view of Hidden Lake was breathtaking. We also got to see a marmot up close. Where the snow had melted there were expanses of glacier lilies, a small delicate yellow flower, that seemed incongruous in the harsh climate. Coming down the slippery trail was another feat, and we felt proud to have accomplished this trek. We continued our drive through the snow capped mountains, and I had a hard time recognizing what was a glacier and what was just last winter’s snow. Much of the last part of the Going to the Sun Road took us along St. Mary Lake, another beautiful blue lake, and my friend knew where to stop and take the best photos.

I went up the next day by myself to Many Glacier, a valley where the road takes

you along Sherburne Lake and at the end of the road there is an old lodge, a visitor center and numerous trailheads that can take you along the glacier lakes or even up to the glaciers themselves. There were definitely glaciers visible here. I took a walk to a lake to take more pictures of wildflowers. One of my favorite flowers of the trip was Paintbrush, which could come in a variety of colors, though I saw the salmon color most often. There was one more spectacular flower that I got to photograph here – Beargrass. Tall stalks grow in groups, and have these

bulbous clumps of white flowers that are unlike anything I have seen. The road back led through the reservation, where cows and horses grazed freely on the side of the road and would run in the road. I crossed over to the western side of the park looking for a former hippie village, and found it was interesting to drive through huge tracts of burned forest that were now growing back. In general I saw quite a lot of burned areas out West, which is what supposedly needs to happen, but a lot is destroyed and it takes a long time for forests to regrow out there. On the way back I ran into rain, but was treated to the most intense double rainbows I have ever seen.

As I left Glacier NP, I traveled through a wide valley between mountain ranges, with Flathead Lake in the center. I drove through the Flathead Indian Reservation, where road signs were in English and in their language. I stopped for lunch in Missoula, which seems like an interesting town with the University of Montana, but it was very flat. Heading south I stopped off at my only historic site – St Mary’s Mission which was established in 1841 by the Catholic Jesuits or Black Robes at the request of the Salish and Nez Perce Tribes. The Indians wanted to meet those who spoke directly with the Great Spirit. Interesting.

I had one more state to visit in the lower 48 – Idaho, so I kept going south through the Lost Trail Pass, which seems to have created lots of hardships for Lewis and Clark. While I was in the mountains, it was still beautiful, but then I hit the driest and flatest land I had driven through so far. At one point I realized I had not seen a car for five minutes or more. As I approached Idaho Falls, I started seeing bright green – the greenbelt of Idaho, irrigated by water from the Snake River. It looks like most of the 1.5 million people of Idaho live along the southern edge of the state following the Snake River. A ranger told me the Idaho farmers also own the top 30 feet of Jackson Lake at the Grand Teton National Park where they built a dam on the Snake River in the early 1900’s. In Idaho Falls there actually was a falls in the town. These falls ran at a diagonal across the not very wide Snake River, and behind the natural falls there was a long line of a man-made falls.

Since I was in this part of the country, I couldn’t resist driving through some of my favorite national parks. I have a poster of the Grand Tetons above my desk, a view I look at every day. They continue to be spectacular, though having spent a few days in Glacier, they didn’t blow me away as much. It was still a beautiful drive, as the areas outside the national parks tend to be more arid and uninteresting. 

Though it was my third visit to Yellowstone, I could not resist going to see Old Faithful. Even with the huge crowds it is still impressive and worth seeing. My big sighting of the day was an elk with a huge rack of antlers. I left Yellowstone through Cody crossed the Bighorns at sunset and made it to Story, population 828, the home of my cousin.

My Wyoming cousin is living off the land, as so many of us fantasized doing

back in the day. He keeps goats and chickens for meat, eggs and cheese. You would not believe what he can make with the goat milk. He had made feta, cheesecake, ice cream, and the most impressive - Brie. He has a a huge garden with fruits and vegetables, so we had wild plum sauce over our cheesecake and choke-cherry syrup with our pancakes. He ran a bookstore for 10 years and is an award winning writer. His brother is also neat, lives in New Orleans and runs the Med school bookstore for Tulane. Actually, at one time, all three of us ran bookstores, now only one is still working at a bookstore, one writes, and I am a librarian. It was a sweltering day, so we went up into the Bighorns mountains where  it was pleasantly cool. We picnicked at Park Reservoir, bringing our own table and chairs, which seemed funny at first, but was really convenient.  Getting back to the hot lowlands we went for a swim in refreshing Lake De Smet (named after the father who first came to the St. Mary’s Mission I visited a couple of days before).

The timing of our trip was set by the Sheridan Wyoming rodeo days, as my New

Orleans cousin wanted to see the bed races. The two of us went into town early to the pancake breakfast. We found two empty chairs and all of a sudden my cousin hears his brother’s name mentioned by a woman at our table. Of all the hundreds of people around us we sit next to someone talking about our cousin/brother.  I knew I was in the right flow, when serendipitous things like that start happening.

We watched the 3K/5K race and the bed races. I had never heard of this, where four guys put bicycle wheels on a bed frame, sit a couple of girls in the bed, get dressed up and then run a long sprint while pushing the bed. And if they win their heat, they have to do it again. Afterwards there was an impressive parade with the theme of Cowboys and Indians. Lots of horses, and  an impressive number of real Native Americans dressed in their beautiful traditional clothes.

On my home, I stopped at one more national park - Devil's Tower - another place that never ceases to amaze me.  I took one last walk around the tower, one last tourist stop at Wall Drug in SD, last overnight on the east side of SD, so I could get home at a reasonable time. More varieties of nothingness, beautiful clouds, etc. I really don't mind the long drives. They give me time to think and listen to books. I got through three and a half

books on the trip plus started a couple of print ones. I just loved my trip, saw beautiful places, friends, learned new things, rested, walked, and got away from my daily routines and problems.