We’re at an Army Corps of Engineers campground on the Missouri River back in Montana for one last stay. I thought I was setting us up for four days here, but I found out I was wrong and had to make this stay shorter.
I use an app called Campendium to plan our trip. It lets me see all the campgrounds in an area on a map. I search an area a reasonable distance from the last campground I’ve booked. I found what looked like a nice COE campground under 200 miles from Grasslands, Downstream Campground. Since it was a federal campground I went on Recreation.gov to make our reservation. I looked at the campground map, selected a site, and reserved it for four days.
The last thing I do is write the information in a notebook I keep. I also record the approximate drive time and mileage so we can plan the travel day. I put my reservation destination in the map program and it came up with a route that was 445 miles long and would take about 8 hours (without towing a trailer or stopping for gas). What?!?
It turns out I made the reservation for Downstream Campground below a dam on the Missouri in North Dakota and not Downstream Campgrounds below a dam on the Missouri in Montana. So I moved my reservation by a couple of days and added a new reservation for this campground, Downstream Campgrounds.
This campground is below the Fort Peck Dam.
The Fort Peck Dam is the largest hydraulically filled dam in the U.S. and is one of the largest earthen dams in the world. Most of the soil fill was dredged up from the river both upstream and downstream and pumped onto the dam. It was built as a Works Projects Administration project, started in in 1933. The dam was closed in 1937 and the reservoir started to fill. Then in 1938, just as the the dam was reaching its final height a whole section of the front slid out and into the new lake. Eight men died, six of their bodies were never found and are buried in the dam. An investigation decided the material was too slick for the steepness of the slope and the dam was widened. It is now 4900 feet wide at the base and just fifty feet wide at the crest. The last load of soil went on the dam in 1940.
The campground has nice walking trails, some around the ponds left by the dredging.
It also has a disc golf course that I liked a lot (I won).
And there is the beautiful lake with a marina on the upstream side of the dam.
But we only had one day to explore because tomorrow we are leaving Montana after 12 stops circling the state and returning twice. We will drive to my initial reservation, Downstream Campground below the Garrison Dam on the Missouri in North Dakota. I only hope it is as nice.
On the Roam Again 