Montana

Monday, July 8 Cont'd

Near the Idaho Montana Border is Lookout Pass and the Continental Divide.

We traveled through beautiful wooded country until we reached the very small community (312 pop.) of St. Regis.  This is at the confluence of the Clark Fork and the St. Regis River.  It is also near the highway leading north to Glacier National Park.  Its a pretty popular stopping off place.

We stayed at the Nugget RV Park, which was really nice.  John really liked the feel of the park and the people.  He would have liked to have stayed in this area and explored.  It is a place to which we would come back. 

Our opinion was tempered by the fact that it was one of the rare occasions when we could sit outside
for dinner and also enjoy a beautiful sunset, compliments of the storm we had passed through. However, it is coming our way, so we enjoyed our brief time outside and listened to the rain throughout the night.

Tuesday July 9, Day 78

While we are going through some pretty country, it is also a heavily mined area.  We began to see these leveled hills.   

Butte, Montana. I don't know what I expected, but it was very industrial.   There were refineries and manufacturing stuff on both sides of the road.

Evidence of coal mining as well.  

Up on a hill above Billings is a huge statue, Our Lady of the Rockies. Standing 90 feet tall, and 3500 feet above the city of Butte (which is already a mile high) it is pretty impressive.  It is the nation's largest statue of the Virgin Mary.  It was begun in 1979 as an homage from a man whose wife was battling cancer.  He planned to put a small statue of the Virgin Mary in his back yard.  The idea morphed into a larger statue and the community (and military) got involved.  In 1985 the statue was dedicated to women everywhere, and there is a memorial where names can be engraved.

Since Butte is an industrial town, there were plenty of people who could lend a hand and donate materials to make this happen.   At the end, the Army National Guard used s helicopter to put the 4 sections into place.

You can take a tour, but this must be a destination, since it takes 2 1/2 - 3 hours (weather permitting), time that most passing tourists don't have.  There is a gift shop downtown and plans to install a tram that  will carry visitors over a mile-long vertical rise of 2,000 feet to the base of the statue in about 5 minutes. 

At any rate, this statue takes your mind away from the fact that the surrounding area has been strip mined and completely devastated. In a note of humor, the plan was to originally make the statue 120 feet high, but the FAA said she would need a beacon on her head.  Kind of hard to think of the Virgin Mary with a flashing light on her head, so they made her 90 feet tall.

We stopped on a frontage road near Warm Springs, Montana.  Uncle Buck's was the only thing around, since the population of Warm Springs is zero.  No cars were parked at Uncle Buck's, but it was another famous place we didn't eat, since we made our sandwiches , surrounding by construction crews , flagmen and heavy equipment, and we moved on.  

We passed the exits for Lewis and Clark Caverns, the Madison Buffalo Jump, through Bozeman and the cutoff to Yellowstone, and arrived at the Greycliff Prairie Dog Town State Park.  This was a place where John humored me and we pulled off to take a look. 

Prairie Dogs are a type of ground squirrel, and in the era before European settlement, their "towns" covered most of the area west of the Mississippi. Prairie dogs, since they make burrows, are good at turning up the soil, which helps hold ground water, nutrients, spreading grass seed,  etc.  They are an important part of the food chair for ferrets, fox, eagles, badgers and hawks.  (Hence the Eagle we saw early at a prairie dog town.)  Between prairie dogs and the buffalo, they kept the prairie filled with grassland.

Once farmers and ranchers began grazing their beef herds, prairie dogs were quickly identified as a nuisance species, and attempts are still underway to eradicate them from these areas.  It is estimated that 98% of the population has been destroyed and they cover only 5% of their original habitat.

That being said, I know my sister, who owns farmland in Nebraska, can testify to how devastating prairie dog towns are to farmers.  Much time and effort is spent on eradicating encroaching prairie dog towns.  Nevertheless, they still inhabit about 11 western states and the estimated population is between 12-20 million.  Imagine what it once was!

Just about the time we were getting into the prairie dog scene, this van pulled up pulling an old VW bus, and they let the dogs out!  All prairie dogs promptly disappeared!

Here we are at the Yellowstone River. It goes almost 700 miles and empties into the Missouri River.

We will follow for a little while until 90 turns south.

Hmmmm - These festivals certainly are popular. This is the second one we have come across.  Guess you have to be there....

We are seeing more rolling hillside and farmland.  Signs for deer, antelope, elk and grizzly crossings! 

More high prairie features to the landscape and long vistas to the hazy mountains beyond. 

This almost looks like Switzerland!  These are the Tobacco Root Mountains. 

Odd to see a flat top mountain and a pyramid shaped one at the same time.

We are stopping for the night at Columbus, Montana.  We are not too far out of Billings.

Our campground is off Sheep Dip Road and as you can see, I'm not making this up!  The

outside temperature is over 90 degrees, so we are headed into some hot weather. 

We have driven 375 miles today, one of our longest. (And one of the longest blog posts!)