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The Lonesome Crowded West

That old Modest Mouse album title I used for the heading of this blog entry seems like a fitting description of our trip across the upper western tier of the United States this month. The wide-open spaces of north central Oregon and eastern Washington gave way to the busy little metropolis of Clarkston/Lewiston on the Washington and Idaho border, where the Clearwater River meets the Snake River and groceries cost more than anywhere else we’ve been.

This map shows the route we’ve taken to Backus, Minnesota, where we are waiting for a weld on our camper to be fixed this week and--we hope--a new step to replace the one that got squashed a week into our adventure last fall. Not sure exactly how we’ll continue from here, but I will try to catch up on our trip from eastern Washington to north central Minnesota.


A map of our trip back so far

From Hell’s Gate State Park in Lewiston, Washington, we headed out on U.S. 12, the road through Idaho’s beautiful Bitterroot Mountains. It follows the Clearwater and then the Lochsa River through barely inhabited areas (I mentioned our days camping on the Lochsa previously), then over the Lolo Pass into Montana; first Missoula, where we passed the Hotchkiss HVAC Company. It’s a busy university town, and I guess school was getting ready to start. We stayed on U.S. 12 up to Helena, the capital of Montana, and it was almost a ghost town—no one around while the statehouse was not in session. On down to Billings, a big busy city where we stayed in an RV park that had us packed in like rats in cages, and it didn’t help that the temperatures were over 100 degrees both days we were there. Some RV parks are great. This was not one of those.


Ghost Cave near Billings, Montana

We spent one day seeing some sights around Billings, including caves near the town with Native American pictographs (mostly faded away now since they were uncovered; the dirt that had filled the caves had preserved them for thousands of years). We also went to a city park with a nice swimming lake; I thought I might have to save a drowning kid there, but he wasn’t really drowning, he was just scared of the water. Once he discovered he could stand up, since it wasn’t deep, he was fine.


The cave pictographs near Billings have faded
since they were uncovered, and the really
old ones are all but gone. However, these images
in red pigment of rifles, only a couple of hundred 
years old, are still evident on the cave wall.

We were pretty glad to leave Billings, and we took I-94 out of town to finish the trip through Montana. We didn’t quite get through; we stopped for the night in Glendive, a town near the Montana/North Dakota border that is very proud of its dinosaur connections. They have a life-size but oddly not very lifelike statue of a Triceratops—Mike said it looked like an Art Deco dinosaur—way on the outskirts of town, but they make a big deal about it, so we went to see it on our way out of town.


An odd-looking Triceratops sculpture in Glendive

Then we headed north to cross into North Dakota up toward the North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. We had been to the South Unit, but the North part is about 80 miles farther, so we hadn’t explored it on our previous trip. But since we were already fairly far north in Glendive, we decided to take the time to visit.


Landscape, afternoon and evening, in Theodore Roosevelt National Park

It’s a beautiful park, with lovely long views, the Little Missouri River, and wild looking “badlands” type formations throughout the place, along with bison and prairie dogs. We were surprised to find there were plenty of spaces available at the primitive campground (it’s a park that is definitely off the beaten track, and not as well publicized as a lot of national parks), but unfortunately the area where we camped was filled with extra large RVs that all ran generators so they could watch television all day. A noisy place in a quiet park. The camp host gave us some tips on how to stay away from the generator crowd in the future (look for back-in sites; the generator people have vehicles so big they have to have pull-through sites), and just look around for signs of generators and move on to another loop. He also suggested a type of shoe to Mike, whose sciatica had been getting worse. An all-round font of knowledge!


Weird concretions in the Badlands landscape at Theodore Roosevelt National Park

I was glad to leave the campground at the park when the generators started up again at 8:15 am, but we had had a nice time the evening before, staying away from the campground. We went to a ranger program about the adaptations of flora and fauna that are active at night. Did you know cacti are nocturnal? I did not know that. And their range is larger than I thought, too. There are plenty of prickly pear cactus in the park in northern North Dakota.


Nocturnal prickly pear cactus are very quiet
during the day in North Dakota

We drove (well, I drove; Mike’s sciatica still getting worse) a state road across a lot of North Dakota, and it was lonesome but lovely to not have any traffic, mountains, or cliffs to navigate. We made it to Carrington, where we stayed at the nice Chieftain Motel and looked up urgent care places for Mike. Based on our breakfast waitress’s suggestion the next morning, I drove down to Jamestown, North Dakota, on U.S. 52 (a familiar route number; it extends on to Cincinnati and beyond) to an urgent care right on the main street, easy to find. The nurse there was pleased to see fellow Ohioans; she was from Amelia and just moved up there a couple of years ago. They checked Mike out and gave him some prescriptions, which we filled before I drove on to Fargo and then into Minnesota. He was already feeling better when we stopped for lunch in Glyndon, Minnesota.

The Scamp factory is in Backus, and it’s hard to get there, especially going west to east. I was driving and Mike was navigating, and I was pretty sure he was sending me in circles. But no, we finally arrived in Pine River, just south of Backus, and headed a bit further south to a lodge in Pequot Lakes where we had stayed when we picked up the Scamp last October. On the advice of our physician nephew-in-law, we made arrangements to stay at the lodge for four nights, longer than we need to for the camper repair weld but hopefully long enough for Mike to get over this sciatica attack.


Pine River riffle dam near the Damsite Supper Club

We are in walleye country, as well as the Land of 1,000 Lakes, so we went out for a walleye dinner at the Damsite Supper Club in Pine River, just a few miles from where we were staying. The walleye was delicious, and the dam site was interesting—in lieu of a traditional earthen/concrete dam, they have a riffle dam made up of a series of rows of big rocks that make Pine River into Pine Lake for a stretch.

We also took a walk on the Paul Bunyan Trail (Mr. Bunyan is very big around here, as you might imagine). The trail stretches from Brainerd, Minnesota, up to Bemidji and beyond. Looks like it was a rail to trails project, and it’s used by hikers and bikers, as well as snowmobilers in the winter.


Most of the depictions of Babe, Paul Bunyan’s
Blue Ox, around here are not quite this
frightening, but I liked the scary teeth

We spent four days at a nice AmericInn lodge in Jenkins, Minnesota; we got the Scamp repairs done; I wandered around one afternoon looking at all the lakes in the area. All in all, a productive stop up here in Paul Bunyan territory. Now to get back on the road again for a leisurely trip south toward Ohio.

Our shiny new camper step replacement 



 

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