This is one of the few and far between “this is where we are right now” blog posts. I’m usually weeks behind, but every once in a while we have a forced stop and I get things up to date. The last one was when we were waiting for the turbo in Missouri; this one is because Tom’s project is taking a little longer than expected and he needs to stay near good internet. When we got to Missoula on Monday last week, he thought he’d be done by Wednesday. Wednesday turned into the end of the week, which turned into “after the weekend,” which has now turned into the end of this week which is, I believe, the final deadline since the company is supposed to deliver by end of day Friday. 

However, we are making good use of the time and getting all sorts of things done.  We spent one day while Tom was waiting on some data driving back and forth on Rt. 12 between Missoula and Lolo with the truck diagnostics on line with the tuner in Missouri, and we now believe the truck is running as it should.  And, if it isn’t, we were here long enough for our very own HP Tuner to arrive in the mail so if we have any problems, we can have the tuner dial in no matter where we are.  We’re also waiting for a replacement fan for our composting toilet to arrive in the mail, since the fan that came with the toilet was considerate enough to crap out (pun intended) while we are sitting somewhere long enough to have another shipped.  I have to give a big up to Nature’s Head, since they not only ship a replacement for free, but have told me that they send two, just in case the second one goes when we’re in a place where we can’t get a replacement. I mildly wonder why they didn’t send us an extra with the original kit, but suspect this is a problem that’s cropped up since we bought the toilet almost two years ago. Part of the reason we picked this brand was because they get five star reviews on customer service, and I would support that. Their phone is answered by a live human who is actually helpful, and who is willing to work with you to get you what you need.  

Lisa has gone above and beyond not only in allowing us to share her space, but also in showing us the best of Missoula.  We’ve taken some great hikes both in and around the city, and we’ve had some delicious food, including the best ice cream.  We went to the weekly farmers’ market downtown on Saturday, and have learned how to use the bike & hike trail to get just about anywhere.  The city is super dog friendly, so getting the dogs out and about has been fun.  Lisa had planned to be away for the holiday weekend and part of the week, but was gracious enough to not only let us stay at the house, but also make us feel like we might actually be helpful by watering the gardens and keeping Cheese the cat company. And, it gives her a break from us so we don’t start to smell like old fish.  

​If all goes as planned, at least at the moment, we should be heading for Glacier National Park on Saturday morning.  In the meantime, we are enjoying lovely Missoula. If we have to be stalled somewhere, I can’t think of a better place.  

We left Cabela’s with the intention of stopping for a hike at lunchtime, then getting to Helena, then finding someplace close to camp for the night which seemed like it would be easy since the entire area is National Forest. Tom wanted to get settled earlier rather than later because he had more work to do for his Belize client, so this seemed like a good plan. Around lunchtime, I looked at All Trails for a nice place to take a hike, and found a perfect 4 mile loop around Skidway Campground, just before Townsend. We pulled off at the campground sign, and drove around the campground looking for the trail head. We found the trail head, but we also found a perfect beautiful spot where we really wanted to spend the night, so we decided to check in, eat lunch, and go for a hike. The hike was lovely, winding along a creek, through a pine forest, and then up a hill though a meadow strewn with all colors of wildflowers to a majestic 360 degree view of the mountains at just above 6,000 feet. We took longer than planned on the hike because we spent a lot of time gawking at the views, but since we had decided not to move, Tom had time to get his work done. 

In the morning, we did the hike in reverse before setting off for Helena. Tom had determined that his project was going to take longer than anticipated, and he needed good reliable internet, so we contacted our friend Lisa in Missoula who we had planned to visit anyway and asked if we could camp in her back alley for a few days until Tom finished the project. Lisa said it was fine, so we shopped and did a few errands in Helena before visiting the Capitol, which isn’t the biggest or the fanciest or the most beautiful, but which is set in the middle of the small city and definitely holds its own as far as stateliness goes. 

We walked around the city, and then started the drive to Missoula.  We took the back roads rather than the highway so we could see more of the scenery, and this turned out to be a great decision since we got in the middle of a serious hailstorm. On the county road, we had no trouble pulling over, along with a lot of other people, until the storm passed. If we had been on the interstate, we would have had to have kept driving, and kept up our speed, just to be safe. That would have been miserable, and probably not very safe for us either way, so we were glad we had decided to back road it.  The weather holdup was only a short time, so we still made it into Missoula in time to go to an indoor picnic - because of the weather - with Lisa and some of her friends. 

We probably wouldn’t have bothered with this National Recreation Area if it hadn’t been so close to the Little Bighorn Battlefield NP, but we found the Yellowtail Dam to be very interesting. The dam itself is very impressive, and the setting is stunning. The visitor center at the top of the dam had interesting exhibits, as well as a most impressive view of the dam. To us, the most interesting thing about this dam is that it was built upstream from an existing dam, so not only is there a reservoir above the dam, but another lake sits between the Yellowtail Dam and the lower dam, and both dams are used to control the water. 

We looked at the Yellowtail Dam from the visitor center, then drove down to check out the campground, which is on the lower lake, and walked around that area. We tried to walk to the lower dam, but the trail ended at an uncrossable ravine filled with water from the previous night’s rain.  We then drove to the closed visitor center near the lower dam and walked on the trail back to the ravine, and then down to the lower dam. The dam is also a bridge for pedestrians and vehicles, which gave us a great viewing spot to watch the fishermen putting their float boats in the rushing river.  A lot of trucks and trailers were at the boat launch, and as we watched we figured out the game.  Each boat had three occupants, two to fish and one to man the oars and steer. The three man crew would come with the truck and trailer, and another car or motorcycle. They would take the boat off the trailer at the base of the dam, then two of the three would take the trailer to another boat launch about five miles down river, and drive back in the car, or on the moto if one person did the transfer.  Then all three would get in the boat to do the float to the next boat launch, where their trailer was waiting.  The river was moving quite quickly, and we wanted to go to the other end to see how long the float took, but by this point it was mid-afternoon, and we decided we had to head west. 

Our next major stop was Helena, the capital of Montana, so we had to go through Billings. We found that the Cabela’s in Billings is considered one of the best Cabela’s in the country, so we needed to check it out.  It is indeed entirely set up for boondocking RV’s, and even has dog kennels and a horse corral.  It had a hydrant for fresh water, but the lines froze in the winter and they haven’t fixed it, so no water.  It has two small lots of long pull though spaces, each long enough for a class A towing a car.  We had heard that the lot fills up, so we pulled to the front and another short camper pulled in behind us and we shared the space.  It felt more like a campground, and we talked to a number of our neighbors, which doesn’t usually happen at those types of boondocking spots. The only negative was one very long Class A pulling a trailer with a Cadillac SUV, who pulled in and straddled two spots so they had room to pop their slide outs, and who then ran their generator all night because they obviously needed air conditioning during the 50 degree night, and because they were self absorbed entitled assholes. They probably didn’t even notice that the lot did actually fill during the night, although those who came in late just parked in the regular lot and nobody at Cabela’s seemed to care. 

Our plan to avoid the high winds worked, but that’s about as far as we got with plans.  Because we got to the Little Bighorn Battlefield so early in the day, we figured we would be out of there by lunchtime and would head over to the Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area to see the Yellowtail Dam.  By lunchtime, we had walked around the area surrounding the visitor center, and were sitting in the little auditorium waiting for the site’s movie to start.  Tom’s phone buzzed, and it was one of his Belize clients sending him a text asking him to call her ASAP.  He texted back that he’d be a half hour since the movie was about to start, and we watched the most excellent movie…more on that later.  As we walked out of the visitor center, he called back and found out that they had a problem that needed immediate attention.  So, instead of getting some lunch and heading out on the site’s driving tour, we drove into town to find a parking place with internet where we weren’t taking up needed space for a business or a park.  Tom spent about four hours working on the problem, while I worked on the blog offline.  This was on a Friday, so he needed to get enough information from the client in Belize before the close of business so he could work on it over the weekend.

He did that, and we packed up and headed back to the Little Bighorn Battlefield.  The movie we’d watched in the morning had been a detailed dramatization of the battle, which we learned was having its anniversary just two days after we were there.  It also highlighted a few spots we hadn’t walked to in the morning, so we set out to see those spots before driving the road.  We walked to the top of the famous hill of Custer’s Last Stand, and then went to the Indian Memorial.  We’d walked around the National Cemetery in the morning, but we had learned from the movie that the entire area was basically a cemetery, since all of the soldiers were buried where they were killed, although the Indians had taken their fallen warriors.  We were planning to walk to the path that wound through most of the battlefield to see these markers, when the thunder started rumbling.  It very quickly got dark and windy, and the thunder got louder and more frequent, and we started to feel raindrops.  We abandoned the plan to walk the entire battlefield and ran for the truck.  We thought we could maybe do the drive, but the thunderstorm quickly turned into a deluge with very high winds and very low visibility because of the sheeting rain.  So, we sat in the truck and waited for it to pass.  

We never did get to drive the road, but sitting in the truck gave us time to process what we’d seen.  We’ve visited a number of historic battlefields, and the National Park Service seems to try very hard to be even handed, fair, and non-judgmental.  Of course the victors of the battle usually get top billing, but as part of American history, the losers are also fairly represented.  This site is different, because nobody won this battle, and while the US wouldn’t be what it is today without the western expansion, current understanding of basic human rights makes contemporary thinkers, if nothing else, at least feel compassion towards the Indians since not just their homes, but also their way of life were being destroyed.  Custer’s men lost this battle, with most of them killed and the rest fleeing for their lives, but the Indians also suffered many casualties, and ultimately lost the war since the white man’s retribution drove them to increasingly smaller reservations and they lost their homes and were forced to compromise to the white man’s way of life.  The movie and the entire organization and presentation of the site do a great job of making this clear.  

When we were working and realized we wouldn’t be getting to the Yellowtail Dam that day, we’d looked for camping options.  We found that all of the rivers have access sites like where we’d stayed the previous night, and we had three options along the Bighorn River between the Little Bighorn Battlefield and the Bighorn Canyon NRA.  We planned to start checking the sites out from north to south, with the backup plan of going to one of the official camping areas in the Recreation Area.  What we didn’t think about was the effect of the torrential rain on the river levels, and the first site we pulled into was already going underwater when we got there.  We drove partway in and realized we were driving in the river water, so we made a quick exit and headed towards the next access site.  The next one was also right on the river, but the boat launch was more of a ramp going down to the river, rather than a straight shot, so the river would have to rise at least a few feet before getting to the parking areas.  Even with that observation, we parked away from the river, and did the trick we’d learned in Belize of putting a substantial rock at the water line so we could look later to see if the water was rising.  We took the dogs for a walk and ate dinner, and checked the rock before bed and determined that while the water may have risen a little, we weren’t in any danger of it overflowing the banks.  Even the next morning, after another night of hard rain, the river had risen about two inches over the rock, but we still had plenty of room.

​We drove from the Summit Campground south of the North Unit of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park to the Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site, which straddles the North Dakota/Montana border.  It’s a small site and isn’t much more than the partially reconstructed fort, but it was good for a walk  with the dogs, since dogs were allowed everywhere, even in the fort.

The mosquitos were again a major annoyance, so we left the fort and drove back into North Dakota to see the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers.  The state has a very nice visitor center with a partially paved trail and lots of informational signs, but the mosquitos were also really bad at that site, and you couldn’t really see the actual confluence because of the trees, so after reading signs about how various members of the Louis & Clark party abandoned the group at that point because of the mosquitos, we got back in the truck to head into Montana.  

After some hit and miss campsites through North Dakota, we were pleased to find that Montana has tons of free to cheap places to camp.  On the eastern side of the state, these are mostly fishing access sites along the river.  The first one we found was Matthews Recreation Area, which actually has a camp host who is in the only official campsite.  He told us to park wherever we wanted, so we pulled into a big field and watched a beautiful sunset over the Yellowstone River.  We also walked along the river and found a gopher snake, which made us glad we’d decided to park in the field rather than one of the riverside spots.

We left Matthews RA early the next morning because high winds were predicted from midday through the afternoon, so we were parked at the Bighorn Battlefield National Historical Monument in time for breakfast before attempting to tour the site.