Archive for October, 2007
October 10, 2007 at 8:44 pm · Filed under Places to go
I wish I had a photo of Moose’s. Not the large antlered animals, but the restaurant/bar in downtown Kalispell. But my first pictures of Moose’s Saloon, from our visit last summer, disappeared in “the hard drive crash of ’06“, and this evening I simply forgot to take out my camera.
After a long day at the laptop, a day in which absolutely nothing of note happened, it was great to head up to Kalispell for dinner at Moose’s with Eleanor, Emma, Bert and Janie. That’s because a place like Moose’s is a simple pleasure. It’s a place where you can throw your peanut shells on the sawdust-covered floor. A place where the pizza is just fine, and the topping list is limited to the familiar basics — no shrimp, spinach, or chocolate shavings.
At Moose’s you are apparently allowed (perhaps even encouraged) to crave your name on the wall and on the booth, because it has been done so much that not an inch of the place remains pristine. The plates are basic Boy Scout camp-ware, flat aluminum and slightly dented. The drinking glasses are cold and heavy goblets, so thick at the lip that you can barely drink from them.
A square bar makes up half of Moose’s and a dozen or so tall booths of dark wood are the other half. Waitress service is limited to someone delivering your pizza (after you order it at a stand-up window) and picking up the remains. It’s not a place where someone tucks in your bib or even offers little moist towelettes. But it is a place to hang with your good friends over a couple of 15” pizzas and share a pitcher.
It’s also not a photogenic place. From the outside Moose’s is a flat storefront without even an interesting neon sign to beckon you in. From the inside, it’s sleazy-dive dark (but refreshingly free of smoke). It would be a photographic challenge to get a picture that really represented the atmosphere.
If I hadn’t been so busy talking and eating pizza, I might even have remembered to break out my camera and tripod. Maybe I would have gotten a picture for the blog. But that’s what happens at Moose’s. It’s too easy to relax in there.
October 9, 2007 at 9:48 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
We’re parked at Bert & Janie’s house in Bigfork, MT, near the beautiful Flathead Lake. We’re here to catch up on a few things before we head across the border to Canada.
Mostly we have an enormous pile of mail to dig through. Emma’s school curriculum arrived in two large boxes which will probably put us 30 pounds closer to exceeding the Airstream’s Gross Vehicle Weight Rating. I also got a large Priority Mail box full of letters from Airstream Life magazine subscribers (mostly renewals and subscriptions) which I’ll need to process before we head out. With all the various things in the mail we expect to need all of Wednesday and Thursday just to catch up.
One of the articles to be published in the upcoming (November) Winter 2007 issue of Airstream Life will be about crossing the Canadian border. I re-read it this morning and remembered that I had neglected to call our insurance company for a new “Canadian Interprovince Liability Insurance Card.” That’s a little slip of paper that reassures the Canadian officials that we have insurance in the event of an accident. Fortunately, my insurance company was able to email the card to me in PDF format so I had it in two minutes via email.
The weather is forecast to be warm and sunny through the weekend in Banff, so at this point our little northern excursion is looking good. Our only real concern is another early snowstorm like we had in Yellowstone last week.
At this point, snow seems confined to the upper reaches of the Rockies. The drive up from Butte to here was beautiful, and Flathead Lake was glassy calm in the late afternoon. Montana, Eleanor has pointed out, looks like an amalgam of many other states we like: snow-capped mountains, pines and aspens, little cacti, broad lakes, dry valleys, hot springs. Driving through it can be as pleasant as a day’s hike.
October 8, 2007 at 8:08 pm · Filed under Places to go
One of the great things about traveling with Bert & Janie is that they bring us to places we’d be unlikely to visit otherwise. Case in point: Bannack, Montana. It’s so far off the beaten path and not on the way to much that we probably would have passed it by.
Bannack is a ghost town, the best I’ve ever seen. Once a gold rush town and the territorial capital of Montana, it has managed to escape becoming either a tourist trap like Tombstone AZ or a collection of dried-up ruins like so many Nevada settlements. The state made it a state park and thus Bannack is preserved and free from commercial inflammation.
For RV’ers, Bannack is an excellent stop because there are two small and tranquil state park campgrounds a short 1/4 mile walk from the townsite. These campgrounds are small, and border Grasshopper Creek (more on that in a moment). The sites are grassy and open, occasionally shaded by cottonwood trees, and have a expansive view of the surrounding mountains. There are no hookups, no cell phone service, no amenities of any kind, and no dump station, but for $10 ($6 for Montana seniors) it’s well worth a stay.
WordPress (the new blog software we’re using now) does not allow me to upload the Google Earth placemarks that I used to insert into the blog from time to time. But here’s the Lat/Long for the campground we visited in Bannack State Park: 45 ° 9’54.12″N, 113 ° 0’16.66″W. You can plug that into Google Earth (or any other mapping program) and see the location. The ghost town is just east of the campground.
Two days before in Virginia City I bought a book by Dorothy M Johnson called “The Bloody Bozeman.” It’s about the creation and history of the Bozeman Trail. The book starts in the historical epicenter of Montana in 1862 — Bannack — and describes not only the gold rush that started on the banks of the Grasshopper Creek and resulted in the founding of Bannack, but the surrounding stories of battles with the Sioux Indians, survival in the western wilderness, and the marauding “Road Agents” who operated between Bannack and Virginia City.
There’s nothing like reading these tales while I’m camped in the exact spot where they happened. It’s spooky enough to walk through the open dirt street of Bannack and look at all the empty buildings … but quite a bit spookier to have the stories of John Bozeman and Red Bear, Jim Bridger and “Clubfoot” George Ives fresh in my mind as I see the land where they once rode, shot, and died.
Up the hill from town is the gallows. It’s not much to see — a simple arrangement of poles, like field goal. But on the short hike up, you can imagine you’re going up to witness the hanging of Henry Plummer, leader of a gang of road agents, who said when finally caught and arrested that he was “too evil to die.” On the gallows high on the hill above Bannack, Plummer asked for one last favor: “Give me a good drop” so that he would die quickly.
This is antelope season. Although hunting isn’t allowed in the state park, many of our neighbors in the campground seem to be hunters who use the park as a base of operations. In the evening the results of one successful hunt were seen swinging from a tree next to our campsite … an eery reminder of the men who swung from the gallows just a quarter-mile away.
In the evening Emma challenged Bert to a game of checkers. No slouch at checkers or chess, Bert gave her a run for her money and eventually defeated her. I think perhaps my threat to mention in the blog that he was beaten by a 7-year-old put him on his best game. Then Emma challenged me and beat me handily due to my failure to see two double-jumps coming.
Tonight we are on our own up, about 90 minutes north, near Butte. Bert & Janie have gone on ahead to their home in northern Montana, and we’ve stopped at Fairmont Hot Springs Resort to have a swim in their hot water pools. The resort has giant indoor and outdoor pools (two each, running 92-94 and 102-104 degrees), and a huge five-story tall water slide. After all the cold weather we’ve seen lately, this seemed like the right stop to make.
Fairmont Hot Springs RV Resort: 46 ° 2’31.89″N, 112 °48’23.77″W.
October 6, 2007 at 10:07 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
The winter storm that has brought us the constant rain and snow the past two days was still with us this morning. Even in Ennis, below 5000 ft, we woke up to snow flurries and threatening gray skies.
We debated all morning about the choice between another visit to Virginia City, or driving 59 miles to Bozeman to see the Museum of the Rockies (which was highly recommended). In the end, Bert & Janie went back to Virginia City and we took the beautiful but snowy route east to Bozeman.
The Museum of the Rockies is adjacent to Montana State University, and it was highly recommended to us for the dinosaur exhibit. Emma is at that age when dinosaurs are cooler than chocolate ice pops, so even though we saw dinos just a couple of weeks ago in Thermopolis, we had to go.
Of course, what Emma doesn’t know is that every museum is an opportunity for homeschooling. She just soaks it up like kids do, and then spouts it back to anyone who will listen. Sometimes adults are a little taken aback when they hear her talking about the Cretaceous Period and what an Archaeopteryx looked like. (“Gee, they don’t have any feathered dinosaurs in this brochure, and those are the ones I know the best!”)
Montana has a “Dinosaur Trail” which has 16 places to stop (museums, parks, and field stations) in a giant circle across the state. We’ll get nowhere near all of those sites, but I’ve asked Bert to research and write a dinosaur-hunting article for one of the 2008 or 2009 issues of Airstream Life magazine. His article will include not only the great spots in Montana but also those in Wyoming, South Dakota, Colorado, and possibly Utah.
The storm began to move off to the southeast in the afternoon, which gave us views of the mountains that we hadn’t been able to see before. With the heavy clouds and fog, it was easy to forget that we’re in the northern reaches of the Rocky Mountains. Being in a valley between two ranges of mountains, Ennis has some spectacular views both east and west, and with the dissipating fog and golden fields it became quite dramatic.
Mountains over Ennis Lake Recreation Area. Click for larger.
The town is cute and very small, amounting to a two-block downtown. But everything is there, including a cafe where you can hear the local news being discussed in the morning, and a creaky old-time one-screen theater across the street. Being Saturday night, we decided to check both out. (We left Bert & Janie back at the campground — those poor folks are just too old to go out on a Saturday night, I guess.)
Emma has had quite a good day by kid standards (see her blog entry, following), and the parents have too, so I didn’t see any reason to stop the fun this evening. Besides, it has been forever since I saw a movie in an a really old-fashioned theater with Art Deco lighting, a balcony, and cracked leather seats with wooden backs. About 25 local kids showed up to see the movie with us. The theater is only open Friday and Saturday nights, and the movie changes every week. I got the sense that someone was keeping the theater alive against financial logic, because it was a good thing for the community. Or perhaps, it does a more lively business in the summer. In any case, it was nice to find.
We like small downtowns like this one. There’s a strong sense of community and a central gathering point for people, and a little bit of nightlife. One thing I never liked about living in rural areas was the sense of isolation that comes from lacking a town center. I think this affects our choice of places to travel. While many people dream of finding that perfect secluded spot and camping “away from it all”, we have seclusion available to us in abundance and so tend to seek out places where people live and commune.
But tomorrow we will definitely be out in the boonies. We are heading to Bannack, a true western ghost town where it is likely I will not be able to get online. If so, I’ll update the blog from our stop on Monday.
By the way, I uploaded a bunch of pictures from our trip to Yellowstone National Park. You can see them in our Flickr photo album.
October 6, 2007 at 9:46 pm · Filed under Emma's posts
- Playing in the snow
- Gameboy in the car
- Dinosaur museum
- IHOP for lunch
- Milkshake
- Popcorn
- Movie (“Mr Bean’s Holiday”)
October 5, 2007 at 7:14 pm · Filed under Places to go
For the next few days we’ll be following Bert & Janie as they research a few spots in Montana for articles they are working on. One of the articles is actually for Airstream Life magazine’s Summer 2008 issue, about things to see and do in Montana. I’m kind of shooting photos over Bert’s shoulder, in hopes of spotting a sidebar I can write to go with his article.
Morning in West Yellowstone, MT
As predicted, the rain last night turned to snow, and we woke up to about two inches of very wet snow. It makes great scenery and Emma loves it, but it also makes the process of breaking camp a lot slower. I keep a junky beach towel in the back of the Armada just for wiping stuff clean, and the towel got used a lot this morning to dry off things like the power cord.
With all the cold weather and snow I have to remind myself that it’s just early October. It seems like December in Vermont. The ride up into the mountains on Rt 87 and Rt 287 from West Yellowstone was stunningly beautiful at times, especially near Quake Lake, but it was just as nice to descend a little down to the relatively low town of Ennis MT and see the snow deliquesce into light rain and green grass. I would have been much more nervous about this drive if the roads were frozen, but it’s still early enough in the season that ice on the roadways is unlikely.
We are using Ennis as a base camp for the next two nights, while we make explorations into the nearby famous western town of Virginia City. (Virginia City does have a good RV park but there’s no cell phone service there and I wanted to be in touch over the weekend.) It’s 14 miles up and over some mountains to find Virginia City and the historic remains of Nevada City as well.
Boot Hill, resting place of several “road agents”
Virginia City is a true western town, perhaps the quintessential western town, and it is loaded with good examples of preserved architecture and lots of gory history. The museum, for example, includes the foot of “Clubfoot” George, but I’ll talk about that tomorrow when we go see it. Tons of westerns have been filmed in Virginia City or the nearby remains of Nevada City. There’s an amazing amount of preserved history here and it’s all fun to discover.
With the weather still fairly lousy today (light rain & snow, fog), we decided to save the intense browsing of Virginia City for Saturday. We found an old pub in town and settled in for a long lunch and some conversation with the proprietors.
Inside they were playing old big band favorites, and at one point Bert invited Emma to dance. Since we were the only customers all afternoon, the management didn’t mind our tourist antics.
Nevada City, just a mile or two down the road, is really not a town at all anymore. There were about eight original buildings remaining in the 1940s, but then others were collected from all over Montana to create a preservation site of old western rustic architecture. Now there are dozens of buildings assembled into a sort of museum, which you can tour for about eight bucks. This time of year, of course, the place is closed but there’s still a lot to be seen from the street.
Nevada City, MT
We’ll be touring ghost towns and preserved gold mining towns for the next few days. I’m also working on plans for a visit to Banff, Alberta. The weather in Banff is potentially tricky but this time of year we have a chance of being able to get up there, as long as we watch for snowstorms. Our arrival there is still a week away, so we’ll keep an eye on things and see if it remains a possibility.
October 4, 2007 at 8:53 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
A cold light rain is pattering on the aluminum roof tonight. It’ll probably turn to snow in a few hours. We’ve been disconnecting the water line at night and switching to the onboard fresh water tank because of the freezing temperatures.
This morning it was partly cloudy, and West Yellowstone warmed up into the low 50s. This constantly changing weather is expected to continue for a few days, but it hasn’t really impeded us. This morning Bert and I headed back into the park to a marshy spot about eight miles north of Norris where he’d seen a cow moose and calf yesterday. The grass was wet and covered with light snow and branches, hard for us to navigate, but it was exactly the type of marshy, protected area that moose love, so we figured she’d still be around somewhere.
As with the Great Gray Owl Hunt, we struck out on finding the moose, but still managed to have a great time. We slogged past muddy moose tracks and forded a small stream, climbed over downed trees and came out covered in wet debris. Bert was mightily disappointed about the mystery of the missing moose and yet we were both glad we’d come out to Yellowstone for another hike. It’s hard to get tired of the place.
Up the road we found some spectacular views of Electric Peak and Sheepeater Cliff, along with Roaring Mountain. A bit further south we dropped in on Norris Geyser Basin and toured a piece of it that I hadn’t seen last week with Eleanor and Emma. Bert and I kept saying to each other, “Yellowstone is just an amazing place!” He’s been here many more times than I, and yet he’s still amazed with it, so I know we’ll enjoy another visit someday.
Today is our last day in the area, so in the late afternoon we all went into town to walk the center of town and see the historic buildings in West Yellowstone. I hadn’t even noticed the collection of old Union Pacific Railway buildings that line Yellowstone Street, nor the little fragment of the original rail line built in 1907 that still remains. But the local Chamber of Commerce has a brochure that describes all the buildings and does a fine job of explaining how West Yellowstone came to be.
The town has always been a terminus of the railroad. It was originally a collection of buildings on land leases in the Madison National Forest, until Woodrow Wilson signed the land over and the town was officially established in 1920. You’d ride the summertime-only “Yellowstone Special” up from Idaho and then hire a stage ride into the park. It was pretty expensive for those days. A stage ride from Norris to Canyon (about 14 miles by today’s roads) was $5.00 in 1915, about equal to $102 in today’s dollars.
Now the railway buildings still stand, even though the railroad was abandoned in 1977 (passenger service ended in the 1960s). The huge and elaborate timber dining hall is on the National Historic Register and is currently undergoing renovation. The depot is now the Yellowstone Museum. The baggage building is now the police station. All of them still have the rustic timber-and-stone construction that predates the quasi-Adirondack “national park rustic” style that was popularized in later decades.
I gathered another professional opinion about our battery charging situation. The advice was to replace the Parallax completely with an Intellipower unit, which has a better reputation for reliability and will also offer 3-stage charging. It’s not a direct-fit replacement, but the cost of the swap is similar to the cost of upgrading the Parallax, so I’m considering that option as well. We can also get a unit that incorporates a true-sine wave inverter suitable for the laser printer (for a lot more money), which I’ll consider but probably won’t do.
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