Glacier to Devil’s Tower Monument Sept 7-10

The Indian Memorial at Little Big Horn

Home on the Range

The Aliens are coming!

These have mostly been traveling days across the great plains of Montana.  Once we left the Rocky Mountains of Glacier, we immediately arrived at big skies, rolling grasslands, and emptiness.  Straight two lane highway as far as the next horizon.  A good portion of this land is Indian reservation, mostly untouched, with a few hay farms scattered along the highway.  Big rounds of hay sitting in the fields awaiting to be collected after they have dried out I suppose.  Most of the towns are in unexpected valleys along the rivers.  One drives along for miles on these high plateaus then to suddenly descend into a narrow valley into small town, protected somewhat from the wind that I’m sure blows hard most of the time.  There are exceptions of towns and cities out in  the open on the high plains, but I don’t think they would be very pleasant to live in.  One example  is Judith’s Gap, high on a hill surrounded by wind farms a hundred miles from anywhere, a town of maybe 200 souls.  I think only the main street of town was paved, the houses small and dreary, fighting against the heat in the summer and the frigid cold in the winter, and constant wind across the plains.  I met a girl in college from Judith’s Gap, I don’t remember her name but I do remember how happy she was to no longer be living in Judith’ Gap.

We spent a couple of days in Great Falls, a pretty good sized town with every fast food and restaurant  franchise in the world.  It also sports more casinos than you can shake a stick at.  If you have a video poker game you’re a casino.  Our main purpose in Great Falls was to provision.  Bobby, bless her heart, figured out how to get our mail to us via overnight UPS.  I had the truck serviced and went to the RV store to buy some parts that had broken or fallen off along the way.  We went to Walmart, a store I detest, but hey, they got a lot of stuff, and sometimes you just gotta do it.  For culture, we visited the Louis and Clark Information Center and learned all about their journey from St Louis to the mouth of the Columbia River and back.  It turned out that the falls on Missouri river were not so great but that there were five sets of rapids that caused L&C to portage 18 miles around them.  The is where the city of Great Falls is today.

After getting all our stuff together we travelled on east.  After driving for ever on the high plains we came to Billings Montana, a big city, nestled far below us as we approached from the north west.  A huge modern city in bottom of this unexpected hole in the plains.  We went on and stayed in a little town of Hardin.  Nothing special about Hardin, but it is near the Little Big Horn.

Next morning we went to the Battlefield of the Little Big Horn, where Sitting Bull won the battle against Custer, but eventually lost the war.  It is now a national cemetery, with military graves from the Indian wars through to Korea.  On the actual battle field they have marked where the individuals soldiers died.  On an adjacent field there is a monument to the Indian tribes who fought in the various Indian Wars.  I thought it was impressive that the monument represented and paid respect to all sides of the conflict, although it was originally dedicated to the US soldiers exclusively.

Today we have arrived at the Devil’s Tower Nat’l Monument.  A very peaceful place, where we are awaiting a close encounter of the 3^rd kind.  This tall monolith of rock is very surreal to be near as it has an “other worldly” ambience surrounding it.   It is a solid rock with vertical columns that span over 800 feet up the sides.  The Indians believe that a giant bear shredded the monolith trying to attack seven little Indian girls, who eventually turned into the stars that make up the Big Bear and Little Bear constellations.

Oh if I were but 40 years younger, this is a rock climbers Mecca.  I spent quite some time watching the climbers through binoculars making their moves up the near vertical columns.   More than 5000 climbers a year come here to climb this challenging rock.  I am afraid that if I signed up with a guide my mind would be writing a check that my body couldn’t cash.