Jill and Bud

Indian Creek Recreation Area

We moved south and downstream along the Missouri River. We’re now in South Dakota along Lake Oahe. This lake, formed by the Oahe Dam near Pierre, is 230 miles long and over 200 feet deep, at its deepest. We’re about half way down it, not far south of the border with North Dakota.

It was not a long drive down, but there was a bit of drama. It actually rained yesterday (rain has been a rarity this whole trip as we’ve mostly been just east of the Rockies in the dry lands). The rain wasn’t an issue driving but the roads were wet. Just south of Bismarck our route had us turn east on 138A. As we started to make a left Bud said, “It’s gravel”. “Don’t turn,” said I, but it was too late, Bud was committed. The road wasn’t gravel, it was being rebuilt. There were two road graders tearing the top off the road. There was no place to turn around. After Bud squeezed by the first grader (they were coming towards us) the surface really got bad. It was loose and wet and muddy. “Are we sliding?”, I asked. Yes we were. And let me tell you that is a bad feeling when you’re towing a 35 foot trailer. Up ahead there was a second grader. “I don’t know how I’m going to get past him.” Not what you want to hear from your driver. But the grader pulled off to the side to let us pass, as did another construction truck. The surface was more firm past the second grader, and happily that part of the route was only three miles long. We were quite relieved to see pavement again.

And now we are here and the rain is gone.

It is lovely.

We can even sit out if there’s a breeze. There are flies here, too, but not as many.

We played disc golf this morning. Bud played regular golf this afternoon while Matey and I took a walk. This is from the high point of the Prairie Falcon trail.

Our campsite is out on the peninsula in the distance.

Even the walk through the campground was pleasant because we could cut through the trees as this place is also pretty empty. I like fall camping.

Garrison Dam National Fish Hatchery

Soon after the dams were built on the Missouri River it became evident that the native fish populations were suffering. The native fish were used to a fairly warm muddy river. The dams created deep cold lakes separated by clear water, since the sediments dropped out to the bottom of the lakes. Fish that were used to migrating the length of the river could not. The hatchery was built to offset the loss. The hatchery uses the cold water of Sakakawea Lake, above the dam. Since it sits below the dam, all the water needed is gravity fed to the tanks, races and ponds, then flows into a wetland and from there through culverts and back into the river.

This is a quiet time of the year for the hatchery and although it was open for self-guided tours there was no one around.

The first room we entered was the tank room. There were rows and rows of bottles, where the fertilized fish eggs are hatched. Each quart jar can hold 60,000 northern pike eggs or 120,000 walleye eggs. The jars are connected by pipes to tanks where the fry will swim once they’re hatched.

From there the fry are stocked into outdoor ponds, now empty. The ponds are fertilized with alfalfa meal about two weeks before the fish are added. That promotes the growth of plankton, which feeds the fish. After about a month the fish are ready to stock in lakes in North Dakota and Wyoming. There are 64 ponds on the property. This hatchery produces about one million northern pike and ten million walleye fingerlings each year. It is the largest walleye production in the nation.

Not everything was empty. There were races with running water and fingerling fish that looked like muskellunge.

This race had these sturgeon, a pallid sturgeon and two shovelnose sturgeon.

There is a separate Sturgeon Building. The races you see here held thousands of rainbow trout.

The tanks had sturgeon. I believe these are pallid sturgeon. This is an endangered species, their normal migration to spawn has been interrupted by the dams. Every year wild adult pallid sturgeon are captured and spawn in the hatchery. The young are kept for a year and tagged before being released. Individuals can live 60 years. The hatchery has prevented the extinction of these fish.

There is also a Salmon Building. It is used for salmon and brown trout.

There were fish in both the raceways and the tanks, but I’m not sure what they were.

Two of the outdoor ponds had some water. We could see fish in the very shallow water of this pond. We don’t know what they were or why they were out there.

From the way they were jumping at this inlet pipe, they seemed like salmon.

We enjoyed looking around, but would have loved to have someone from the hatchery there to explain things. I guess that’s what we get for visiting in September.

Is This Downstream Campground Better than the Last One? Yes – Except

This is another Army Corps of Engineers Campground and has the typical nicely paved, well spaced sites, just like the other Downstream Campground. But this campground has three loops with 101 sites and there are 16 campers here. That is really nice.

This campground also has walking trails and they start right next to our campsite.

They are well made gravel paths and they go through a woods; even though the trees are all cottonwoods, they are big broadleaf trees.

In the morning I saw the sun rise…

and the moon set.

There are beautiful views of the Missouri River. That is very nice.

There is a fish hatchery here, too, and we got to walk through it. (That’s the next post.) So all in all this is a better campground except…

there are flies. Hundreds of little houseflies that land on you whenever you are outside and come in the truck or the camper whenever you open a door.

They are so bad we asked the campground host how they dealt with them. He said they have never had flies like this before. They can’t eat outside and inside they hang flypaper. He told us the hardware store in nearby Garrison had the flypaper.

Happily we found a good disc golf course in Garrison because the hardware store was out of flypaper. Apparently the whole area is having a fly problem. They had this sticky six sided column that is supposed to attract flies with its colors and patterns. I’m not sure about that, if you look closely you can see 6 hapless flies stuck to it, but since in the two and a half days it’s been out Bud has probably swatted three times that many, I think these poor losers just landed on it by chance.

And now I have to go in because the wind dropped and I can’t take the flies anymore!

What a Bust

Life on the road has its share of challenges, but for us most days have gone smoothly. Yesterday was not one of those days.

The last time I had Matey groomed I looked ahead to where we’d be in six weeks so I could get an appointment and keep our poor dog from getting terribly shaggy between trims. This is where we were scheduled to be and there is a PetSMart in Bismarck. That’s 54 miles away, so not exactly convenient, but I figured we could combine the trip with other errands so I made the appointment.

We needed propane, we needed to do laundry, Bud needed a refill on one of his medications, we needed to replace the filter part of our water filter, we wanted a new vinyl map of states we had visited to stick on our camper (and now we had provinces, too) and we needed to replace some kitchen gadgets that were left behind in a drawer in our old trailer. So the plan was to visit an RV place, drop off Bud’s prescription at Walmart, drop off Matey for his grooming appointment, drop off me at the laundromat, then Bud would go back to Walmart and get his prescription filled do the shopping and then come back to the laundromat and finally pick Matey up all clean and clipped.

We probably got the wrong filter core and the RV place didn’t have a map that included Canada. We did fill the propane, which has to be carried upright and since we now have 30 pound cylinders has to ride in the backseat, seen above with part of the laundry.

The first Walmart we stopped at didn’t have Pharmacy marked on the outside and wasn’t listed on my map program as having a pharmacy. The one that did come up when you entered Walmart pharmacy was too far to get to before Matey’s appointment. So we went to drop Matey off first. That’s when things really went wrong.

I had found out Matey had a heart murmur at the vets in Spokane. The vet there said she couldn’t tell how severe it was, didn’t seem overly concerned and said when I got somewhere where I had some time I should get an ultrasound of his heart. If the murmur was bad enough they would not anesthetize him to clean his teeth. So in talking to the grooming department I said maybe I should have his teeth brushed since he may not be able to get them cleaned again. Well, alarm bells went off. It seems PetSmart has new rules (just this month) about dogs with heart murmurs. The salon called the office in Seattle to see how severe the murmur was. The office there listed it as 4 out of 6. They won’t groom a dog whose murmur is more severe than 3 out of 6, so no grooming for Matey.

That meant someone would have to stay in the truck with Matey while the other errands happened. We went to the Walmart that was listed as having a pharmacy and Bud went in. No pharmacy. North Dakota has a law that prohibits a pharmacy in the store.

So Bud did the other shopping, but I didn’t want Bud and Matey to have to wait the two hours it would take for the laundry so we came home.

We drove about a hundred and twenty miles for groceries and propane and came back with dirty laundry and a raggedy dog. What a bust.

This Is Nice, Too Bad I Goofed

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.

Grasslands National Park, Saskatchewan

This is probably the most remote location in which we’ve camped. We had to fill our water tank before we came, there is nowhere to fill a tank in or near the park. We got gas at Cadillac, a tiny town 50 miles north of the campground. We checked in at the visitor center in Val Marie and then drove about five miles on a bumpy secondary highway and another fifteen miles on a gravel road to the campground.

There were 20 campsites and they did have electricity, they even had 50 amp service. There were vault toilets (modern outhouses) and that’s about it.

Our rig was the largest we saw, by far, and with our satellite TV antenna I’m sure we looked out of place. We were there two days, the first day the wind blew steady at close to 30 mph all afternoon with much stronger gusts and the temperature reached 100 degrees. The second day it was overcast, very windy again, and it never got above 64. This morning, before we left, it was still, but only 30 degrees. I was glad for our large, comfortable trailer.

This is prairie, but it is dry grassland, and there are cacti…

and sagebrush. This is the northern limit for prairie rattlesnakes, which we did not see and the black-tailed prairie dog. We saw hundreds of those, but they are so quick I never got a picture. We drove by several prairie dog towns. Matey avidly watched out the truck window. We couldn’t let him out, prairie dogs carry bubonic plague and their fleas can transfer the plague to humans. The fleas will hitch a ride on dogs, if dogs are allowed near the towns, so we stayed in the truck and Matey just got to watch.

On the hot day we drove the “backcountry loop”. It was beautiful, but stark.

We did see animals; coyotes, bison, antelope, mule deer, prairie dogs and ground squirrels and lots of birds, including two smaller types of raptors (trying to ID those) and a bald eagle. My iPhone isn’t good with animal pictures and none of these were close enough or still enough to get a good shot, so no pictures.

On the cool day we took a short hike. We started on the 70 Mile Butte trail, but it was only about 50, then, the wind was whipping, and it stared spitting rain.

It was a nice trail, but we decided it was not the day for it.

Instead we did the Riverwalk. The wind was not so intense there and the rain never really came.

Our truck is the white dot in the trees. That’s the trailhead. All the land was as open and empty as this. A great place to get away from human sights and sounds.

Matey liked this campground, because even if it was too hot or too cold for me to sit out with him, he could still sit inside and watch the ground squirrels.

And I enjoyed the vastness and solitude.

A Great Day for Golf

This morning we went to another disc golf course in town and played the nine holes twice.

I like disc golf because it’s almost always free, and Matey can almost always come, it’s set up in public spaces that are often quite pretty, and I can sometimes win. (I did not win today, but we were tied on the second round.)

This afternoon I went out with Bud and acted as his spotter when he played eighteen holes of regular golf.

That was great for me, I didn’t have to pay, I didn’t have to lose, and I got to drive around the course on the cart.

Golf courses are usually pretty and this one was exceptionally so.

It had hills and a stream that meandered all through it.

It had corners that were tucked away,

some beautiful houses up on the hills,

and a lot of broad vistas.

It also had some intriguing cart paths.

This one even had guard rails!

So while Bud paid good money to put up with the frustration that is golf, I just got to enjoy the ride.

Medicine Hat, Alberta

We came across about a hundred miles of rolling grain fields, watered by an extensive irrigation canal system using water from the snow and ice melt of the Rockies. The land got a bit more rolling about 10 miles from our destination.

We drove into the entrance road for Cottonwood Coulee Golf Course and RV Park and the land dropped away and this is what we saw. It is far prettier than I expected for the plains of Alberta.

The RV Park is tucked away in the cottonwoods near the clubhouse in the middle of the golf course.

It’s small and old with 10 sites backing up to the golf course parking lot…

and eleven sites across a lawn and along the creek.

The sites are tight and there’s not much room outside. But everyone has been so friendly and the area is so pretty that we don’t mind.

The little creek that keeps this place green is the Seven Persons Creek. And right next door in the coulee along the creek is another golf course.

Matey and I have enjoyed our walks. I like the scenery.

He likes the deer.

In the evenings the deer make themselves at home…

and they seem unfazed by people or dogs. The man was gathering up range balls, I think because the clubhouse was closed and he wanted to hit some balls. It’s a pretty laid back place.

Bud has been hitting balls on the range every day . He’s not sure he wants to play because his golf game is still so rusty. I hope he plays because they said I could ride along as a spotter and it’s such an interesting layout. The place where this was posted is not even the steepest cart path I’ve seen.

Medicine Hat is a very nice little city of about 100,000 along the South Saskatchewan River. It has a lot of green space, like Gilwell Park…

where we played a couple of rounds of disc golf.

There seem to be walking trails and bike paths everywhere.

Medicine Hat has a Junior Hockey League team, the Tigers. Bud says there are currently five NHL players who came up through Medicine Hat. Today we set out to find an official Medicine Hat Tigers shirt for Bud. We found they only sell them at the arena store and that was closed. But we did walk in and watch the end of team practice. They even had some music and were using the Jumbotron. I guess the folks that operate those things need practice, too.

I hope we continue to be happily surprised on our journey.

“The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

The Most Interesting Golf Game I’ve Ever Played

I am not a golf person, but when Bud saw the course at Waterton National Park he really wanted to play. This time I decided to play also.

I agreed to play eighteen holes, though that is more golf than I can usually take at one time. I used to quote Mark Twain, “Golf is a good walk spoiled.” But I found out it is not likely he ever said that. In researching the origin of that quote (unknown) I came across my new favorite, which was published in a South Dakota newspaper in 1913. “You hit a ball as far as you can, and if you find it the same day you have won.” By that definition I won today. By any other measure I was abysmal. Which is not to say the game was.

It’s hard to have a bad game when this is your view when you first get in your cart at the clubhouse.

I usually stand behind Bud when he tees off to watch where his ball goes, since his eyesight isn’t too good anymore. It was hard to concentrate on the ball when there were views like this everywhere.

Like the on-line brochure says, “the mountain scenery is a often a ‘hazard’ all its own”.

Sometimes I looked up from a putt and was just a bit stunned at the beauty all around.

Another time I turned around and was startled to see the valley of Blakiston Creek with the Sofa Mountains in the distance.

From here you just get a glimpse of Middle Waterton Lake (past the water hazard on the course) and you can see the roof of The Prince of Wales Hotel on its hill.

The course offers its own challenges. Coming down from this tee it felt like there should be a guard rail on this cart path.

And if you missed the green on this par three hole (like I did) you faced a serious uphill climb. The first nine holes were built in 1929, the back nine added in 1935 designed by Stanley Thompson, a famous Canadian golf course architect.

We were pretty excited to see this bear scat on the edge of one of the greens. Just a reminder that you are playing in a national park.

But the most excitement and greatest hazard came as we looked from the thirteenth green towards the fourteenth hole. There was a very big brown bear hanging out on the fourteenth fairway! He wasn’t leaving, so we drove the cart back to the twelfth green, told the father and son playing there about the bear, and then followed a track that took us past the fourteenth green to the fifteenth tee. The bear was still in the fairway. I wrote Bear! on our scorecard for the fourteenth hole.

I didn’t play well, but I had a wonderful time. If you like golf and you like wild places (Jack and Randy and Chris) this place is one you will love.

Exploring Again

When we visited Glacier National Park we learned that the protected land continued across the border in Waterton Lakes National Park; the two parks were designated the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park in 1932. So in planning our route back from eastern Washington, I routed us through Canada to visit the other half of the Peace Park. Fortunately, our detour to Missoula to get a new camper did not interfere with our reservation here.

We started our day by driving up Red Rock Parkway. There were two short trails there, one up Red Rock Canyon and the other to Blakiston Falls. We decided to walk just a few hundred feet down the very pretty canyon to the trail to the falls.

We crossed Bauerman Creek on our way to Blakiston Creek.

I looked down as we crossed and saw the same beautifully colored stones we’d seen in Lake McDonald, reminding me that even though it’s been over a month since we visited Glacier, we’re only about 20 miles from there.

It was a nice trail and there were lovely flowers along the way, but all the trees were burned. I found out that this whole area had burned in 2017 along with 38% of the park. The recovery in just five years is remarkable.

Blakiston Falls are lovely, and the two new viewing platforms to take you for a closer look are very well made.

And everywhere around you…

are the peaks and ridges of the Rockies.

You can get some idea of the scope of the fire damage in this picture of Blakiston Creek flowing down the valley below the falls.

After our hike we came back and drove down Akamina Parkway to its end at Cameron Lake. Here we saw ice areas that are probably large enough to be called glaciers. I tried to find them on the map, but that far mountainside is in the U.S. and not labeled on my map.