Our Readers Ask:

Our readers ask:

"Greg, How were you able to get those incredible shots of those magnificent buffaloes you used in previous blogs?"

Greg:

"I'm so glad you asked. Actually I have modified a technique once used by the wagon train scouts to get close to the herd. Indians used this trick to get close enough to get a shot with a bow and arrow on hunting trips as well. Since I don't have an actual buffalo hide (called a robe) and head to use, I creep onto the Plains wearing a fleece blanket with Koala bears on it (brown side out; green side down) while wearing a cheap buffalo head hat from Mt. Rushmore souvenir shop. I try to stay relatively still in the field in more or less a "Christina's World" position until I can get my shot. I'm always happy to answer your tough questions. Thanks for writing in..."

The technique is illustrated below:

The Forest AND The Trees

Well, first impressions can surely be wrong! On our second full day of driving through Lewis and Clark National Forest we saw both the forest and the trees- millions of them (conservatively!) I hadn’t realized that the plains were going to give way to the mountains and that was part of the park…, uh, forest. So an hour or so into the day and a climb of several thousand more feet in elevation we were in the thick of things- beautifully large and straight pine trees and the patches of snow we had been looking at from down below. Perhaps the expression should be, more correctly, “We hadn’t seen the forest for the mountains.” The same was true coming down the other side. We abruptly left the mountain and the forest and the trees and moved back on to the high plain. The change in topography was swift and certain and more than a little surprising.

Back on the mountain, though, we had stopped at the summit to play in the snow and a snowball fight was part of the agenda. The snow was still soft and fresh and balled up easily so….I wonder how long that little snowman will last.

Before leaving the summit, we talked for a while with the only other RV-ers who had happened along and stopped where we had stopped. It was a couple who lives in Alaska (our destination point) who were vacationing with their teenage grand-daughter who was from, of all places, Port Charlotte, Florida, just a stone’s throw up the road from our Cape Coral, Florida home base - proving once again: It’s a small world, after all. Everybody sing!

This post is made on our last day in the states for some time to come, as we will be entering Canada in the morning. Hopefully we have a working balance between preparation and trepidation, the known and the adventurous. Anticipation is the battery charger of life and we are running on full….

RV-ing Northern Montana

I present the following images of RV-ing Northern Montana for your consideration without further comment:

Ahead Of Our Time

Driving through the Cheyenne and Crow Reservations was disappointingly not noteworthy, at least to the eye of those “just passing through.” We did meet some folks at a campground who were just arriving to work on the reservation for a one year stint, but they were staying at the campground instead of the reservation- seems they were a bit concerned about the idea of the reservation being a “sovereign nation” unto itself and didn’t wish to live among the Indians, even though they were there to help. I did not get enough information to understand the real issues, but found that interesting at the least.

Found people! In the city (town) of Billings. Big, it seems, by Montana standards but not by those of many other states we have visited. The story of the day, though, announced itself coming out of Billings when we caught our first glimpse of the Absaroka Range of the Rocky Mountains- still covered with snow and looming large above the horizon. Our path took us along and occasionally into the mountains. We stopped for lunch at a scenic pull over, and aside from the two Bald Eagles that flew back and forth along the jagged face of the vertical rock wall, we had the place, and sometimes seemingly the state of Montana, entirely to ourselves. Surely we are AHEAD OF OUR TIMES. Or at least the time of the tourist in this part of the country. Since South Dakota, now quite a way behind us, we have not found a single welcome center open. Many of them have signs in the door reading: “See you in May.” Hello. It is May. I know we changed time zones a number of times on the way west, but I’m pretty sure the month has remained the same…
If not, will somebody clue the new guy in please?

They were putting up a new bronze sculpture of Clark (as in Lewis and…) in the Lewis and Clark National Forest. We took the first ever tourist picture of it. Like I said, we pretty much “own“ Montana at this point. Someone’s got to do it! I am still pondering tonight why it is named a National Forest rather than a National Park. My main reasoning here is that we saw almost no tress in the entire park. Is it possible I failed to see the forest for the trees??? Maybe I failed to see the forest OR the trees....

Checking Your Altitude

When I first moved from Pennsylvania to a small farm type house on two acres in Maine, way back in 1973, I was honored to have my grandmother's dining room set given to me to use in the house. It was a perfect fit in every way for that house, and it served as a constant reminder of how much she meant to me, then and now.
She only made the trip to Maine to visit us in the house one time. It was a very special visit. She was not a woman who was widely traveled. This was, I am sure, quite the experience for her as well as for us. But what I remember most about the trip was that she made note of the "elevation" at every chance along the route, saying, for example,
"Oh, it's 11:00 AM and in New York we are at an altitude of 680 feet above sea level."
I have never understood why that was of particular interest to her, but it surely was. She took her information from the state by state posted road signs.
Now many years later, and for whatever reason the fascination, Marilyn and I are making similar notes along our route. When we left Pennsylvania headed West, my parents bestowed upon us an instrument that, for lack of knowing another name (but realizing a coach is not a B-17) I will refer to as an altimeter. Whatever you call it, we use it daily now to note our elevation as we travel. We have no particular need to take note of this information, but we just like to check it and some days going over mountains of some size we check it regularly. An altimeter is not standard gear for RV'ers; for that reason, we feel , well, special! If you wish to know the elevation of our camp near the Little Bighorn in Montana tonight, just blow the picture up and read the outside scale...

Owning Montana

Some random thoughts on today's drive through the first leg of our three day stint in Montana:

Who owns Montana anyway? You can drive for absolutely hours and not see anyone or anything other than the deer and the antelope playing in a giant field of grass. That's cool, don't get me wrong. But I'm used to someone establishing boundaries, putting up a fence or at least a "No Trespassing" sign and telling all where they can and can't go. Of course as we looked over the expansive grasslands today, we wondered how in the world we would get "over there" even if we wanted to as we were already on the only road around. If anyone does own Montana, they aren't talking about it. Probably don't want to pay those massive property taxes. And further more, if there IS someone living on the other side of this hill - that I can't see is over there - where exactly do they go shopping. No people. No stores. No RV repair centers for sure!!!! Keep on trucking! Oh wait, there's a sign for a saloon just up ahead:

Stonewood Saloon: Cheap Beer, Lousy Food

OK, now I want to know who comes here for even the cheapest beer, especially if the food is lousy? I still don't see anyone around the joint. Beautiful state, but mystifying!

At the end of the day, we crossed the Little Bighorn River and site of Custer's Last Stand. Custer's men are buried in the cemetery there, but he himself was "transplanted" back East somewhere near West Point. That is one of history's battles that I do have a particular interest in. It was a battle that had to be fought. It was a battle that had to be won, for both sides. But in the long run, no one won the battle and all were lost in the end.

OK, Now I'm wondering how long that Stonewood Saloon has been around. Maybe the General and the boys stopped in for some cheap beer and lousy food before heading into that valley of death. It mighta happened that way- cause Lord knows I still don't see anyone around here.


Jacks Are Wild
This is not a poker term in Montana. (There's no one here to play poker- even at the saloon) Here it means you might see a Jack Rabbit or a Jack Ass or even the mythical Jack-alope. And whatever you see- it for sure will be wild- cause ain't no one around these here parts other than the jacks!

I'm anxious to see more of Montana. There must be someone around somewhere...and I want to know who owns Montana!!!

Why, Oh Why, Wyoming?

There is a theory for everything. Usually there is more than one. There may be a religious theory, a scientific theory, a science fiction theory…and then there’s folklore.

President Teddy Roosevelt set aside the so called Devil’s Tower as the nations first NATURAL monument in 1906. I have no idea and no theory, personally, on how it got the name of Devil’s Tower that it carries today---and I don’t plan to offer one; which is good for me ‘cause getting into religion at this hour of the night doesn’t suit my plan. But I would like to talk about the other three types of theories that attempt to explain the creation of this colossal rock right smack dab in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming.

First lets take a look at the rock itself. If you’re new to the blog, please understand that clicking on any picture will blow it up considerably. You can use your back arrow to return to the blog from the enlargement. I know- I keep repeating this feature, but we seem to be drawing new friends and readers all the time, and I’d like them to have the benefit of my technological wizardry. (Can anyone help me get my tongue out of my cheek?)



If you’ve never been to Wyoming, but do think you recognize the Tower, it’s probably because you are a sci-fi fan and just happen to love Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It seems that in that flick, the government was secretly sending out signals to aliens in the form of intergalactic music that was boom boxed out of the tower unbeknownst to all, who also found themselves mysteriously linked and drawn to the Tower. As it turned out, the inside of the Tower was set to receive the alien space ship and all ended well as the lovable and loving aliens landed and did their thing. So there’s theory one: The Tower was built by the government to communicate with beings from outer space. It’s a bit far fetched. After all, much of what the government plans gets screwed up along the way, and this actually worked!

Now for straight science. Millions of years ago, there was an enormous volcano on this site. There is evidence to this that I have seen with my own eyes and touched with my own hands, so perhaps this is the workable theory. After many centuries of erosion caused by water and weather, the outside shell of the volcano fell away to nothing and only the hardened material in the cone of the volcano remained to form the Tower. It’s believable, don’t you think? But like most science it raises more questions than it answers; after all, that’s the nature of the scientific method. Where is the outside of the volcano? Where do you see enough water to make this happen? Just how bad is the weather in Wyoming anyhow? And on and on…Plausible, but a bit matter of “factly” boring for my taste.

Then there is the Indian folklore. It tells the story in terms we can understand for the most part- in terms of the land and sky and the animals and the children and the power of the almighty forces that be. Exaggerated a bit perhaps, but I’m OK with that. What do you think?

One day, an Indian tribe was camped on the banks of the mighty river. Seven young girls were playing not too far from the camp. The region was known for its very large bears and one of them began to chase the girls. They tried to run back to their village, but the bear was gaining on them and just about to catch them. The girls sought refuge on a rock that was no more than three feet high, and they began to pray to the rock, saying,
“Rock, take pity on us; Rock, please save us.”
The rock heard the pleas of the young girls and began to elongate itself, raising them up and pushing them higher and higher out of the reach of the bear. The bear, angered by this big magic, jumped and clawed at the rock until he broke his claws and fell to the ground.
The bear continued to jump and claw at the rock until the girls were pushed into the safety of the big sky, where to this day they are found in a group of seven little stars (the Pleiads). The marks of the bear’s claws are evident in the sides of the Tower to this very day.

So magical is the appearance of the Tower that it really is not all that hard to accept the legend as fact. But have a good look at the pictures, and then decide for yourself.