Fort Peck in eastern Montana

Left the south unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park and headed to the north unit. They have had unusual amounts of rain this year and more than half of the scenic drive in the north unit is closed due to road damage. The Badlands experience a process called 'slumping' which means that whole portions of a mesa will just 'slump' off leaving a whole in the mesa and a corresponding hill at the bottom. As you might expect, this is tough on roads. So we explored the part of the scenic drive and checked out the visitor center and video. The weather was forecasted in the 30s at night so we decided we wouldn't dry camp. It was time to head on to Montana. The drive through eastern Montana is flat flat flat but scenic in its own way. We were near the Missouri River the entire drive but only saw it in Williston where there is a big reservoir. Mostly we signs of a huge new boom in oil and natural gas production. There were wells and natural gas burn off fires all along highway 2. The owner of one of the campgrounds we stayed at said there was enough natural gas found recently for the US supply for hundreds of years. It is truly a boom town, there are trailers and prefab housing everywhere.

After a very long day of driving we finally got to Fort Peck, MT. There is a beautiful Corp of Engineer campground there called Downstream Campground. It sits at the base of one of the largest earthen dams in the world, right on the downstream river with huge cottonwood trees everywhere. The sites are huge and level, the facilities are a bit old but in spotless condition and all for $9 per night. We loved this campground.

There is a terrific interpretive center with history of the dam which was built as one of the first Roosevelt New Deal projects in the 1930s. The area is also home to the first full skeleton T-Rex fossil (found 20 miles from the dam) and many other significant finds of period fossils. The museum has two reconstructed full body T-Rex skeletons plus one T-Rex that has been finished to estimate what it would have looked like alive. Additionally, there were at least a dozen other dinosaur and sea creatures from the period. It was a terrific museum and worth a stop on its own. There is a road across the dam that you are able to drive on with nice views of the reservoir. The reservoir is 134 miles long and has more coastline than the state of California. The scope of this project is huge and hard to envision on the flat eastern Montana landscape with the famous big sky. We thoroughly enjoyed a couple days here. It was just supposed to be a short stop between T. Roosevelt NP and Glacier NP but turned into a fascinating stay.