Montana

Driving through Montana has been a wonderful experience. It is kept me on my toes and surprised by so much of what I saw. First a few words about North Dakota. I told you about how few and far between the school bus stops were. However, I forgot to tell you about the exits from the interstate and even US highways. More often than not, the exit would say a street, a town or just a road name and at the exit ramp would say," No Services". At first we thought this was funny but as time went on we began to realize no gas, no food, no nothing. While we were in Medora, we attended the" world famous" play which has been going on there for 20 years. It's a musical with North Dakota as its theme, it is rewritten each year so that people who have seen in the past can return. Anyway, it was fun, it was cold, it spoofed "No Services".

Anyway, we left North Dakota yesterday, the 29th, and crossed the Montana border after about 20 miles. As usual, when I cross a border I'm looking for something different. We went miles into Montana and I saw no change. In fact the part of Eastern Montana that I saw was the same as North Dakota. It wasn't until we were 150 or so miles into Montana that I saw the Montana I had imagined. There were lots of flat river bottoms and flat high plateaus with broken rock and high heels off to the sides. I also saw a lot of snow fences. At first, I didn't recognize them for what they were. Imagine two triangles set parallel to each other and across the face of the two triangles are nailed boards about three or 4 inches apart parallel to the ground and going up six to 10 boards. These constructions would be set next week other to form a long fence. But we hear defense, connected to nothing. I finally looked it up on the net and found this is the proper way to build a snow fence. Furthermore, the higher the fence, the higher the drift of snow it creates around it. Since we were traveling the interstate, I assume this is the best defense against closing the road.

We traveled Interstate 94 to Interstate 90 in Billings. Then we traveled 90 West to Bozeman, much of the way we travel through the beautiful Yellowstone River Valley. The river flows north to the Missouri but through most of the distance we traveled along it, it meandered through Oxbow after Oxbow back and forth. If I understand it correctly, this meandering is due to the fact that it is nearly level. That is, there is very little drop in its progress. Anyway it created a thing of the beauty and we crossed it a number of times, much like Interstate 89 does with the White River. The real difference is that the White River valley is quite narrow and the Yellowstone River Valley is very wide and filled with hay fields, wheat fields, and horse ranches. There are some really notable differences in the agriculture practiced in the Yellowstone River Valley. I noticed that the productive fields, hay and wheat, are all irrigated. Furthermore we saw fields being cut today, August 30, and bailed into big round Green bales. Some of the bales were being transported on trailer trucks toward the east.

We stopped in Bozeman at an AAA recommended spot called the Museum of the Rockies. The section of the museum on the geology of the Rocky Mountains was excellent. I really felt I understood the formation of this important feature of our landscape. It was also a King Tut exhibit which was pretty good. Included in the admission price was a presentation in the planetarium on what the Egyptians saw in the night sky and how it related to the way they lived. Did you know that Polaris, our North Star, was not the North Star for the Egyptians. Apparently, unbeknownst to me, the earth has a wobble that moves due north over a 26,000 year period. When the Egyptian civilization was at its height, a much dimmer star was located over the pole. Once you know this, the Egyptian system of aligning temples, pyramids, and other public buildings makes sense.

We drove down Route 191 from Bozeman through the Gallatin Mountains, into Yellowstone Park. The pass through the mountains was very narrow and winding. At the end of the pass, we climbed quite high. As we crested the hill, a huge valley opened before us which was the beginning of the Park. I was totally surprised. Somehow I thought Yellowstone Park was going to be in the mountains. Tomorrow we'll enter through the West gate to see Old Faithful and other things and I will learn what Yellowstone Park is really like.