Road Trip! Montana

View Larger Map

The standard speed limit in Idaho, Montana and North Dakota is 75 mph.  This may not be good for gas conservation, but it sure is good for the person who has to cross these states in 2-1/2 days. (Normally, 75 mph would be good for more fatal car accidents, but there are so few cars on these roads that I doubt that's much of an issue -- aside, I suppose, from one-car accidents.  I reckon I spent five of the thirteen hours I drove today with no other cars in sight, except occasionally on the west-going side of the divided freeway.)

So I started today a little ways west of Yellowstone Park; drove up through the Targhee National Forest, and past the Harriman State Park (of Idaho, not New York) -- originally a cattle ranch purchased about 1900 by a wealthy railroad baron, Somebody Harriman, it gradually became a family retreat for his family and the Guggenheims. His brother (or his son) donated it to the state of Idaho in 1977, and it laid the foundation for the whole Idaho park system.

I took photos, but forgot my camera in the car tonight, and so I'll post them tomorrow (if any turned out).  Instead, here's one from Wikipedia, of the next forest after the Harriman State Park -- the Gallatin National Forest.

Gallatin National Forest (photo from US Forest Service). What this photo doesn't show is the lovely blue-green rivers that run through it and the Targhee Forest, full of trout fisherman today.

Eventually, I drove out of the "Yellowstone Ecosystem", as it's called, north to Bozeman and the relatively less impressive environs of the interstate motorway (I-90/I-94 at that point).  I have driven that route many times, and always remember eastern Montana as long boring stretches of flat nothing, punctuated by oil drills in the distance. Today, at least (at 75 mph), it was a progressively changing dramatic landscape: tree-covered mountains (the Glacier Range of the Rockies in the far northwest, the Crazy Mountain range to the northeast, the grand Absarokee Range -- and Grand Tetons beyond -- south in Yellowstone Park) melted into greenish bluffs studded with gamboling horses and blown-out trees, which in turn hardened into the multicolored striations of painted hills (I can't find any names for the area online, but they are clearly the northern cousins of the Badlands in South Dakota).  As the sun neared the western horizon, I raced through the softer hills of the National Grasslands of the Little Missouri.

(The National Grasslands of the Dakota Prairie -- photo from the US Forest Service again.)

Not boring or dull or ugly at all.  Except that there's a lot of miles of buttes and grasslands.

I had intended to stop the night in Dickinson, ND, and pushed myself through tiredness and low level worry to arrive there about just before sunset (about 8:30). For the last 200 miles I had been racing just south of major thunderstorms -- the radio blared alarms every 30 minutes or so, about the large hail and damaging winds (possibly tornados) to be had, and how everyone in the path should seek shelter immediately.  I was never in the path, but didn't want to slow down to let the storm notice my little Mini tootling through its district.

Apparently everyone else on this empty road decided to stop, in Dickinson, too.  I personally went to four hotels, and then phoned another five or so -- every one was filled with travelers preferring to wait out the storm.  People were standing outside in the parking lots, watching the black thunderclouds and sheet lightning turn slowly from its westward march to start tumbling back southeast towards us, blanketing the remaining twilight about half an hour early.  The wind was high, and there was that literal electricity in the air, an urgency and excitement.  I called ahead to Bismarck, pretty much the next town on the highway -- an hour and a half further east -- and got a room.

Without stopping to eat, I dove onto the highway to drive through black night (no street lights on I-94 in North Dakota, and no major towns, either) to the Bismarck Radisson, where I'm writing this.  The storm did notice me, and has followed. Although I didn't experience a drop of rain when I was driving, buckets are dumping from the thundering sky now, about an hour after I parked my car in the hotel garage.