Into Big Sky Country

We got an early start on Saturday morning leaving just after breakfast. We thanked the Conklins for their hospitality and started on our 14 hour drive to Montana. The drive through North Dakota was just how you would expect; long stretches of nothing but flat farmland with a rolling hill here and there. Most are cattle farms or they are covered in “amber waves of grain”, beautiful, but they can get just a little boring after so many consecutive miles of them. Every once in a while we would pass a sunflower farm. In the midst of all the brown and pale blue landscape the view gets a bit drab. But then, out of nowhere there would be acres and acres of bright yellow and green sunflowers; cheery faces smiling to us in the morning, and pointing away throughout the afternoon.
The coolest thing to see in North Dakota are The Badlands. They are these huge, sandy canyons with enormous sand/rock formations jutting out.

The pictures cannot possibly do this place justice. There is nothing really to show how huge it is. This place is amazing!!
Driving through place like that really does something to your depth perception. It’s a little weird at first driving into a town like Fargo for example. There’s nothing for miles. I mean miles. Like ‘not one radio station on the FM for three hours’ kind of miles. Like ‘bring an extra can of gas’ miles. Then you come over a hill and you are suddenly in a highway town with big signs in your face, restaurants, car dealerships, etc. It can almost be a little invasive at first. But the people are friendly. At every stop along the way we spoke with people who were both kind and helpful. Lots of tips about watching out for birds and deer. Once you get into the hills with a 75 mph speed limit you don’t want to swerve for anything, “so if it’s a bird, just go on and hit it, but at 80 miles an hour, you are going to want to NOT hit a deer.” So we crept on, acutely aware of every bug and bird along the way.

That night, we headed to a national forest near Great Falls. Mary and Josh Greune happened to be returning there from a horseback camping/fly fishing trip. They would spend Sunday night in a hotel before flying home Monday so our goal was to be as close as possible in order to enjoy most of Sunday with them. Using our trusty atlas, we found the dirt highway that would take us to the forest, but driving slow at night on a gravel road makes for two tired girls. We weren’t quite sure exactly where to go once we got there either so, for the first time, we slept in the car. Wasn’t that bad really. We just found a safe spot on a straight away with plenty of shoulder, whipped out the sleeping bag and pillows, sipped on a little bit of the mead Amber brought from home, and hit the hay.

When we woke up it was like Christmas morning. The topography had changed so much but we couldn’t really tell in dark. We were surrounded by beautiful foothills and mountains, and we even saw two enormous elk, just as we started heading to Great Falls. Awesome. (We thought they were moose at first, but, our search for the moose would continue.) They were in the middle of the road at dawn, just hanging out. Huge things- maybe three or four times as big as a deer. There was a fence for cattle on both sides of the road. These guys just hopped right over them...no problem. You can't see them very well in the photograph because we got a shot of them headed away...but if you look real hard...
Great Falls, Montana is named for the huge damn there, seen here.

There are also trout hatcheries near the welcoming center as well.


In Great Falls, we caught up on some errands while we waited on family to arrive. (Phone calls, laundry, oil change, mini blizzards at DQ, the blog…this was where the previous four blog entries were posted as well, right inside the business center of a Best Western—very nice facilities by the way-- in the heart of Great Falls, Montana. Oh and for those of you who enjoy literature from the first person present tense; right now we are sitting in the community house at Finney Farm in Concrete, Washington. You know, that small town from that DiCaprio/DeNiro movie, “This Boy’s Life.” It’s rainy out so why not blog.) After a very short, but awesome visit with Mary and Josh, we parted ways and headed to Glacier.