Tuesday, August 4 Yellowstone to Theodore Roosevelt National Park

My alarm went off and it was still partly dark which I thought was strange, but I quietly began to take down camp and finally woke Rosie to just go wait in the car while I took down the tent. I also had to set up for the woman who had given us money to get a site for her. I kept wondering why there was no one around and then got in the car and the clock said 5:50! Rosie had set my alarm on my phone, forgetting it was still on central time. So, I had gotten up at 4:50 a.m.! So now it was 5:50 and we got to the end of the Slough Creek road at 6, the perfect time to look for wolves. We hung out for a while and nothing was being seen except bighorns (a strange spot for them, I thought…) so we watched them for a few minutes. We finally told Jeff thank you for his help the past few days and moved on to Lamar. Jeff had told us about a car rolled over out there – he had seen it coming in from Pebble Creek very early that morning and had gotten out with a flashlight, etc. but there was no one in it so they’d already been taken care of. I still haven’t seen any details but he speculated that it may have been a case where a bison charged the car, as it was in an area that had been very heavily populated with bison for the past few days. They were still there when we passed the car in the valley that a.m.
On our way back out of Lamar we got into a LONG bison jam.

One bull just stood in the middle of the road and blocked us all for over 10 min. A ranger coming the other way tried repeatedly to get him to move but he didn’t care or even acknowledge her attempts. Finally he decided to go on his way. We stopped a few times to scan the river but there were no bears or wolves. We did see the ospreys on the nest. We stopped at Roosevelt for a few pictures we had forgotten to take and then headed toward Mammoth.

Roosevelt Lodge Entrance

Leaving Roosevelt Lodge

We saw a Yellow-Bellied Marmot while driving up from Roosevelt.

We saw a few elk outside of mammoth but too close to “count”…they are probably tame Mammoth elk. We stopped a few times in the Paradise Valley for pictures…it looks so different driving north through that valley, and we usually only drive it going south.

The only real stop we made on our way to Medora was at the Canyon Creek battle site outside of Laurel, Montana. I never knew it was there until seeing it in a battlefield site book I bought at the Range Riders Museum early in my trip. This was a place that Chief Joseph and his band stopped on their run from soldiers after the Big Hole battle, on their way to the tragedy at the Bear’s Paw Mountains.

It probably isn’t visited very often but there is a stone ring where people have left things such as sweetgrass, etc. I left a rock I’d brought from NW Montana. 

We stopped at one of the beautiful Montana rest areas and I tried to take a nap while Rosie did soccer drills. Her ball rolled under a bush tough, and there are rattlesnakes around and she was foraging in the car for hiking poles to try and get it out… and I gave up trying to sleep. In Miles City we drove by the 519 Club, one of the places featured in the “Haunted Montana” book that Scot had been reading to us. Rosie refused to go in so we just took a picture from the outside.

We stopped for dinner in Glendive, it was late enough that we didn’t want to try making dinner, we were still hoping to get a campsite at Theodore Roosevelt Nat’l Park. The first place we found was Subway, we figured that would be good, lots of fresh veggies. But it was the slowest Subway in existence and we were there over 20 min. even though the line wasn’t very long. And, the cheddar cheese they put on my sandwich was shredded pizza cheese. NOT ok. They also gave me half the amount of tuna that other Subways do. We were not impressed and will not be stopping there again.

We said a very sad goodbye to Montana…I love that state so much and we figured we wouldn't be back for a year.  We arrived at Theodore Roosevelt National Park around 7:30 p.m and got one of the last two campsites…not a good one, in sort of a group area, but it was still a campsite in the park. We quickly set the tent up and took off for a wildlife drive. We saw LOTS of horses, about 50 that night.

One band that we saw was quite large, around 13 horses, and then there was another band nearby that seemed to be separate but the two were tolerating each other. It was interesting to watch the smaller stallion keeping the larger one away from the herd. We saw lots of snaking and other horse behaviors that Rosie interpreted for me. We did see some bison that night also.