After taking Shannon and Izzy to the West Glacier Airport, we continued on our drive home. Highway 2 along Flathead Lake is so beautiful. Off and on views of the largest natural lake west of the Mississippi and cute communities nestled in pine trees. Then through rolling hills of wheat. The last 30 miles from Plains, MT to St Regis MT (just at the Idaho border) was a state scenic byway and followed a river through the mountains. Just spectacular. And the little town of St Regis is very cute and has a nice RV park.
Next day we headed for Spokane which meant three states in one morning; Montana, Idaho (panhandle) and Washington. We had planned to stop and sight see in Spokane and ride their bike path but an ugly dust storm blew through so we just kept going. Arrived at Lincoln Rock State Park, just outside of Wenatchee for our first night back home in good old Washington. Yea! of course it rained the first day but what else would you expect.
We plan to spend a couple days in the area and visit with our friends Kirsten and Cline in Leavenworth before heading to Brier on Thursday. So excited to see family and friends. By the time we are back home we will have been gone exactly a year since we pulled away in the coach. Fortunately we had trips home to celebrate new babies and 50th wedding anniversaries. It is true, home is where the heart is.
Monday, September 26, 2011
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Too much fun at Glacier with Shannon & Izzy
The week at Glacier National Park with Shannon and Izzy was crazy, hectic, and fun. Some or all of us drove most of the Going to the Sun Road, hiked the Trail of Cedars, Stanton Lake, and the Hidden Lake trail at Logan Pass. Had a beautiful cruise on Lake McDonald with a very informative park ranger. Checked out Whitefish which Budget Travel says is one of the "10 coolest small towns in America". But I think the highlight for Shannon and John was seeing a herd of mountain goats and a hoary marmot along the trail to Hidden Lake. The highlight for me was spending time with the girls, especially our hike to Stanton Lake. Too hectic to write much so as they say "the pictures are worth a thousand words".
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Scoping out Glacier before Shannon & Izzy Arrive
Glacier is more than a days drive from Fort Peck, so we made another long drive and arrived in Cut Bank, MT late afternoon. Cut Bank is still in the flat plains part of Montana, about an hour from the eastern edge of Glacier National Park. The Riverview campground was pretty nice so we decided to stay two nights to catch up on internet and also see parts of eastern Glacier NP that we likely won't get to with Shannon and Izzy (S&I). We are on a mesa above the Cut Bank River and there was a nice walk along an old road down to the river the first night. Good stop over spot.
The next day we drove to the St Mary Lake Visitor Center to check it out and also find out about a good hike in the Many Glacier area of the park. They have an interesting video on the history of the Going to the Sun Road that was built in the 1930s and the work they are doing to restore the historical road. Then on to the Many Glacier area which is fantastic. It was a really windy day so we ate our picnic lunch in the car overlooking Shelburne Lake and the majectic Rocky Mountain Front Range with many glaciers (hence the name of the area ;-)) Just awe inspiring! Then a pretty hike to Red Rock Lake and Red Rock Falls. On the way back there was a wildlife jam on the trail. That is where lots of people are all stopped looking into the distance and you just know they have spotted some interesting wildlife. This time it was three grizzly bears, a long distance away across the valley up on a high meadow. Exactly where you would want to spot three grizzly bears on a hike. I was able to see one with the binoculars but the others were hiding in the trees by the time I got there. Very Fun.
Next we took a very pretty drive up a winding road overlooking Two Medicine Lakes. We took a short hike in the Medicine Lake area to a lovely waterfall that comes right out of a hole in the mountain. Of course on all our hikes I am making noise like mad to scare the bears away before we come around a corner.
The lakes in the park looked very low with much of the shoreline about 20% low. All of the national park has been affected by climate change. There is no mistaking how low the lakes are and how small the glaciers are compared to 20 years ago. We can even tell the difference from when we were here less than 10 years ago. The projection is that there won't be any glaciers left in the park by 2010. What a loss.\
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.
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