Our end of summer parks trip was out west to Big Sky country starting in North Dakota. This summer was hot and dry in many parts of the US and ND in late August was no exception. At least there were no wildfires to contend with. For a change, we diversified our modes of transit, which totaled 3 planes, 3 rental cars, 5 horses, 1 van, 1 train, and 1 boat.
We started off in Bismarck. There ya go, North Dakota, way to brand yourself.
ND is bisected by the northernmost even-numbered interstate, I-94. The spaces out here are so vast that the nearest cities are 6 hours drive west and 4 hours east.
One of the obscure sites in ND is Knife River Indian Villages, which interprets the Native American settlements along the Missouri River that temporarily resisted extermination by American settlers
We saw many furs on this trip and even a few surprising ones still inhabited. Of the Knife River furs, our cat Tai-Tai has them all beaten for softness
Zap?
Right, Zap, ND, population 220. We ate our first dinner at the only restaurant in town.
We spent 3 nights at the fantastic Lone Butte Ranch in one of 3 cabins on a working cattle ranch in the middle-of-nowhere western ND. Talk about a change of pace from Lexington, MA
There was plenty of room for jogging. We thought about scaling the lone butte in the background
until we ran into this harmless bull snake and realized that harmful rattlers could also be lurking nearby
The gateway to Teddy Roosevelt National Park is the town of Medora, where a grief-stricken TR famously ranched in the mid-1880s. Medora celebrates all things TR and we tried our hands as rough riders for a few hours
Afterwards the kittens at the stables stole the show
TR National Park has two units separated by 60 miles. Medora has the South Unit, home to a large bison herd. They looked mighty uncomfortable in the 95-degree heat
As prelude to its patriotic musical show, Medora puts on a pitchfork steak cowboy dinner. You can see the forks on the right and they cook up the steaks in those cauldrons of oil
Latest addition to Tessie's collection: Mocha the Clydesdale draft horse
Before the Medora musical started a couple of elks were hanging out above the stage. They had to be run off because
the climax at the end of the show featured our horse guide from the morning racing back and forth with an American flag
The North Unit has more of the badlands terrain
The sandstones exposed by erosion in western ND are from the Mesozoic Era, aka the Age of the Dinosaurs. The Hell Creek formation in ND is famous for late Cretaceous fossils and not far from here is the Tanis site, which makes a very credible case to capture the day of the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs.
After Lewis and Clark mapped the Missouri River in 1805, forts were established that enabled the fur trade. Fort Union Trading Post, up there at the junction of the Yellowstone River, interprets this era.
We've been watching "The Gilded Age", set in the late 1880s and featuring the Astor family. They got their start from John Jacob Astor, a German immigrant who amassed wealth in the fur and opium trade as well as Manhattan real estate.
The bison pelt felt like the right garment for a Great Plains winter
Northwestern ND is underlain by the Bakken formation of oil-bearing shale and to drive the roads is to bear witness to vast number of pumpjacks dotting the landscape. The more infamous hydraulic fracturing is done by large drill rigs of which only a dozen or so are in operation in ND. A cab driver told us that even though oil prices are sky-high apparently they can't find enough skilled drill rig operators, a lesson that labor scarcity can contribute to inflation.
I think it might be time for ND to retire their creepy Indianhead state highway signage
We'd had a good experience with Amtrak's Lake Shore Limited a few years ago, and so rather than burn gasoline driving 9 hours across Montana, we rode the rails on the Empire Builder.
Midway through we stopped for a smoking break in Havre, MT. There were a group of Mennonites on the train and a surprisingly large number of the men smoked.
Can't enjoy a compostable cup of wine if you're in a car
And there they are, rising from the plains, the northern Rocky Mountains. Just like in Colorado they come out of nowhere after hours and hours of prairie
Entering Glacier National Park's Going-to-the-Sun road required a reservation made at 8AM sharp 3 days prior. On our drive up it was Going-to-the-Clouds road. Or maybe Crowds.
We found a spot in the Logan Pass parking lot just as it filled at 8AM. Heather and Tessie were to take the shorter Hidden Lake Trail but it was closed due to "high bear activity".
The Highline Trail was 11.5 miles and since it was open, one would assume it had low bear activity
We set off into the mist
A couple miles in, Tessie and Heather turned around
The hike was spectacular
enough for Erin to pose with her hiking gear
The Granite Park chalet offered a resting place 8 miles in
When we left the chalet, a group of hikers warned us that there was a bear up ahead
and right around the corner was a big grizzly bounding through the bushes. He didn't like the hikers near his huckleberries and charged at a family just ahead of us.
After the 1st grizzly ran off, a bunch of us concentrated on the trail and continued as a pack with lots of noisemaking. A couple dudes with bear spray took on the lead
10 minutes later we found this steaming scat on the trail and another grizzly popped out. Further on we walked into another one on the trail. After this, our pack of 20-odd concerned hikers marched the remaining 4 miles together and without a single stop because none of us wanted to be left on our own.
The next day we headed out down the Flathead Valley and stopped at a bakery for lunch. They sold bread and flour and also these 50 lb bags of wheat. Do Montanans grind their own flour? Apparently wheat kernels or "berries" can be added as toppings, boiled like oats, or eaten as sprouts. But 50 pounds, that's enough for a lifetime, unless you're stocking your prepper bunker
We rafted on the Clark Fork river, where the low water kept it tame. Jumping off the rocks got some adrenaline going.
We passed through the panhandle of Idaho, which is still 25 miles wide
Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area encompasses the area behind the Grand Coulee Dam in eastern Washington. When you're not on the lake, it's a hot dry place in August
We drove on many straight north-south roads in the flatlands of ND and WA. This otherwise straight road made a little jog and continued south. You'll see roads doing this in the northern plains and even more so in Canada. Can you think why?
It's called grid correction and it allows a 2D grid of roads to be mapped onto a 3D sphere
This barren stretch of eastern Washington is called the channeled scablands and the earth was etched by the phenomenally large floods caused by the ice dams melting that held glacial Lake Missoula. Imagine a lake as large as 2 Great Lakes emptying at once and careening downhill for hundreds of miles. The NPS now celebrates this area and the Columbia River gorge as Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail.
Outside of Walla Walla WA is Whitman Mission NHS. Dr Whitman came out west as a missionary in 1836 and as always, relations with the Native Americans were good until they weren't. In 1847, after successive waves of measles (that Dr Whitman treated but was unable to prevent) decimated the Natives, an angry mob massacred Whitman and 13 others, hastening organization of the Oregon Territory in 1848.
Ermine, snowshoe hare and arctic fox. All of these are softer than Tai-Tai, our Siberian snowball.
Reminiscent of the potatoes we found in Idaho that fell off a truck, heading out of Walla Walla we found a pile of sweet onions on the side of the road. We took a couple home and fried 'em up for another vegetarian roadkill side dish.
At a Walla Walla winery the kids had a milk tasting
while the parents tried a wine sampling
In bouldering you follow colored paths up a rock wall without harnessing
The girls have remarkable upper body strength
On our final day we drove west towards Portland and crossed from the northern half of the Northern Hemisphere to the southern half
The main unit of John Day Fossil Beds has a great museum displaying 40 million years of mammal fossils, but that's not where we went
At the Clarno Unit, there are plant fossils, that despite our best efforts, we could not discern in the rocks
The mighty Columbia River always impresses, as did the many windsurfers zipping along
Fort Vancouver in Portland was established by the British Hudson's Bay Company, who controlled the fur trade west of the Rockies in the 1800s. The company, now called HBC, still exists selling apparel.
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