Sunday, July 26 Medora to Glacier

So much for sleep…the trains go by periodically all night and I heard them all. It wouldn’t be so bad if they only blew their whistles once or twice, but they blow them repeatedly…like 8 or 10 times, every time they go through. So, they wake you completely up! I finally got up around 5:30 since I was awake (due to a train), and went for a half hour run. It felt great to stretch my legs afer a long day in the car the day before.

The Little Missouri River Near Our Campground - Medora, ND

I got Rosie up to shower and we were on the road by 7 a.m. We made pretty good time with stops at the border, Glendive, Glasgow, Malta and Havre.

"The Centennial House"

We've driven by this house on every trip to Glacier...it's north of Glendive on Hwy. 200.  Montana's Centennial was in 1989.  This appears to be an abandoned house.

We took Hwy. 200 west of Circle and then cut up to Ft. Peck on Hwy. 24. This is a pretty road with a lot of badlands, and very little traffic. It is also fossil country and sometime I’d like to work on a paleontology dig out there. This is truly the land of wide open spaces...you rarely see another person or car and when you aren't at the bottom of a hill, you can see forever.  I love it!

We stopped briefly at the lake created by Fort Peck Dam

and then continued on our way on Hwy. 2, that "High Line" road across northern Montana that I love.  We've always driven by the "Sleeping Buffalo Rock" but this time we stopped.

Sleeping Buffalo Rock

Because it's behind a barrier it's hard to see, but you get a sense of the resemblance to a sleeping buffalo.  At the same site:

We pressed on, making good time.  As we got close to Browning, the skies to our south grew black…really, really black. And north of us it was pretty gray. We hit some rain after Browning but still made it over St. Mary ridge without a storm. We got to Johnson’s Motel in St. Mary and called Kathy, who was driving back from Babb in pouring rain but it hadn’t hit us yet…5 minutes later it did. We joined Kathy, Bruce, Alex, Nate, Lynn, Lisa and Dawn for family style meal at Johnson’s restaurant. It was a really great dinner, especially after eating sandwiches for two days! Then it was off to Many Glacier in the pouring rain.

The Mountains Behind Many Glacier Hotel

 

Thankfully, Jack Gladstone’s performance was at Many Glacier Hotel instead of the campfire circle, because that would not have happened on a night like this. Scot and Mariah had saved us seats. It was a wonderful show, as always. Mariah warned us that Jack was going to sing “Old Shep” and he did, and dedicated it to Rosie and her "best friend", Hayden -  and later to dogs everywhere, here and watching over us from heaven. Rosie didn’t cry, but I did. It was very sweet and thoughtful of Jack.

He also sang some songs that he doesn’t do very often such as “Roman Road “ and “Wolf”, which of course is one of my favorites. He gave us some background on the Blackfeet view of the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone which was very interesting and contradicted what I had heard before, that the Blackfeet are anti-wolf. That never made sense to me.  They actually formally supported the reintroduction.

After the show we helped Jack take his equipment out to his van since he is still recovering from his surgery and then the plan was to head to the Cattle Baron for a “brouhaha” as Mariah called it. But the Cattle Baron had run out of food! How is that possible? !? So we went to Two Sisters for pie instead. It's always fun to hang out with them.