Great western trip of 2022--part 1
I know I did a blog post only about a week ago, but we've got so many great pictures from our recently completed Great Western Trip '22 that I will have to do several posts to show y'all just a fraction of them...so no point in waiting! We left Monticello early on a Saturday morning, once Hope and Stephen had return (just hours before) from a 4-H trip to Washington, D.C. Our destination on this first day--Omaha, Nebraska--was a relatively mild 600 or so mile drive from Monticello, allowing us to make a few stops. One place we visited was the small city of Carthage, Missouri, home to (amongst other things) a pretty epic county courthouse and a number of monuments related to a Civil War battle that was fought here on July 5, 1861--only a few short months after hostilities commenced:
The monument in front of this courthouse is probably not legible in this photograph, but a description here at a nearby local park that was a scene of some of the action noted that the larger force of Confederates is credited with winning the battle over the Union force, even though their losses were significantly higher. While the numbers of soldiers in most of the Civil War battles west of the Mississippi were smaller than those on the more eastern campaigns and the engagements less publicized, the action was just as fierce in the many fights that occurred in places like Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana.
But this was not a trip about the Civil War--although it ended up having a martial theme more than we expected! But not on day 2--that was all about spending time at Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium (https://www.omahazoo.com/). Some months ago when Stephen and I were traveling together, we got on the topic of zoos and he decided to look some up--and he found some interesting information! Although not necessarily well-known outside this area, the Doorly Zoo is one of the largest in the world in terms of animals on exhibit, and it has many very well done habitats and displays, from domed indoor tropic exhibits to more traditional outdoor areas. While there were many neat species to see--some we've never seen before--perhaps the highlight of this trip was Beth getting to see a herd of takin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takin), a large ungulate species related to goats and sheep. The picture below doesn't do them justice--the animals behind us were probably the size of small cattle. Beth watches a number of zoo shows on TV, and became enamored with this charismatic species (which is native to the Himalayan Mountains in southern Asia)...so the joy on her face below was quite real!
One of our other goals when we travel is to sample local cuisine and foods that we cannot get where we live. One of the treats we tried in Nebraska was a local handheld meat pie called a "runza"; for lunch on our zoo day we went to a neighborhood dominated by people from Central America and ate a Salvadorian restaurant (below). While I don't remember exactly what we all got, it was very authentic and further highlights the fact that foods from south of the border are much more varied than we see at our typical Tex-Mex-style restaurants!
We left Omaha to spend the next evening in Fargo, North Dakota--a town that has grown dramatically since Hope and I last passed through there in the 1990s (due to the oil and gas boom in that area). After a good night's stay, we turned west, but stopped at a couple neat sites just off of the main highways we travel. One such location, right off the interstate and a little east of Bismark, was a small state historical site called Menoken Village (https://www.history.nd.gov/historicsites/menoken/index.html). This was the site of a prehistoric Native American village that had a number of earthen lodges and fortifications and had received a fair amount of archeological work. The picture below is Kenny standing in the midst of some of that work:
The pit he is in was once the site of one of these earthen lodges, but had been excavated in the 1930s in a rather brute-force manner and never returned to its former condition (we don't excavate in such fashion today). The site is well-maintained, with a number of very good interpretative signs...and some rather prickly small cactus, which dislodge easily, as Kenny found out (yes, that is sticking to his finger!):
What became one of the "themes" of this trip--again, unintentional, but well worth pursuing--was that much of our route to the west coast followed the Lewis and Clark expedition. Below, Kenny stands next to a set of sculptures outside of the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center in Washburn, ND:
What an adventure--and so far, we were only through about one-third of our planned trip! Although there were a few bumps in the road--literal and figurative--we had made it to the mountains and forests of the west, and were soaking it all in! Stephen's illness began to respond to treatment, and we were hopeful that that was the last such health hiccup to have--but that is a story for another blog post!
North Dakota seems to have a lot of very nice historical interpretive sites, operated by their state historical society, state agencies, and even some hidden gems run by the National Park System. While the need to make time meant that we had to pass by most of these locations, we did stop at several that intrigued us, including the Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site (https://www.nps.gov/knri/index.htm). As you can see from the pictures below, this archeological site features reconstructions of traditional Native American earthen homes, constructed from sod and logs and designed to hold extended families:
Lewis and Clark visited some of these of the Mandan Nation during their expedition, and these recreations we visited were designed accordingly.
As we headed further west, we drove a bit out of our way to visit another location that looked intriguing--Killdeer Mountain Battlefield State Historic Site (https://www.history.nd.gov/historicsites/kmb/index.html). At the end of a long and dusty road, passing by oil and gas wells and drilling rigs, we came to a small monument on private land near a group of low mountains. Here, in 1864, the US Army engaged a large village of Sioux. Even though the Civil War was still raging in the east, the US was fighting Native Americans in various theaters. During 1862, a bloody uprising by repressed and maltreated Sioux in Minnesota left many settlers and Indians dead; this 1864 fight was part of the later retribution sought by the Americans. In this particular battle, it appears that over 100 Sioux were killed (as claimed by the US Army at that time) and hundreds of their lodges were destroyed, as were food stores for the coming winter. The only monuments left today on this site are the graves of two US soldiers killed while on picket at the end of the battle.
This, unfortunately, was another all-too-common theme we encountered on this trip--the brutality of the decades of war against the Plains tribes as the "West was won"...
Our ultimate goal for this day was to reach Theodore Roosevelt National Park (https://www.nps.gov/thro/index.htm) in western North Dakota. Unfortunately, our long drive and the numerous stops along the way limited how much time we could spend at this fascinating and beautiful national park--we ended up only spending a few hours at the end of the day in the northern unit. But it was well worth the stop! Below, Kenny is pictured by a natural rock formation called "Cannonball Concretions":
Those very round rocks are naturally formed and some look very much like large stone cannonballs--they formed when iron and other minerals leach from the other rocks and concentrate into a resistant form of stone. The scenic drive we took in this park follows the majestic badlands and bluffs along the Little Missouri River, and were the refuge for Theodore Roosevelt before he became President of the United States:
En route along this scenic drive we saw some bison (at a distance), a couple of bighorn sheep, and lots of glorious overlooks:
That evening--the 4th of July--we spent in a hotel in Williston, ND, where it sounded like every household in that booming oil town was launching their own fireworks...well into the night! The next day we crossed over into Montana heading towards the mountains. As we crossed the Great Plains of that state, we found time to stop at a small town park and rest area to eat our lunch...which ended up having an interesting bit of history of its own. There, we found a small monument dedicated to the memory of 13 airmen killed in December 1992 when two C-141 military cargo planes collided into each other during a training exercise and crashed near the small town of Harlem, Montana:
We would visit another tragic site of the conflict between the US government and Native Americans later this day; we visited one of the units of the Nez Perce National Historic Park south of Chinook, MT (https://www.nps.gov/nepe/planyourvisit/bear-paw-battlefield.htm). This site, the Bear Paw Battlefield, is where the fleeing Nez Perce were resting in their desperate effort to get to Canada to escape the pursuing US Army. After months of flight and numerous fights with the Army, the exhausted and depleted Nez Perce were finally surrounded and after a several day siege, most surrendered, including the famous Chief Joseph. We just happened to show up at this small park unit expecting to walk the trails and read some signs on our own (there is no visitor center at the site), but when we arrived there was a park ranger there, waiting to give a scheduled tour with another group of people. He happily invited us to join, and gave us a very informative tour around the site:
The weather was generally good, although some pop-up small storms in the area sped us along the trail...however, as you can see in the picture below, these showers helped add a touch of place to the wide grasslands of the Great Plains:
Indeed, the starkness of the prairie and the lack of development here really helped make the scene feel more real to us:
Yet another example of the hard struggle the Native Americans have faced in this area, the tales the ranger provided of the plight of these Indians and how they suffered in places like Bear's Paw stood in stark contrast to the older markers of sites like this that fail to document all of what really happened here, and at untold numbers of other places:
Our destination that night was Shelby, MT, which is about an hour east of Glacier National Park, which was our planned goal for the following day. Unfortunately, circumstances greatly limited what we ended up being able to do... Stephen had started feeling poorly not long into the trip. His cough and congestion increased as we went further west, causing us considerable concern. We had packed several rapid covid tests in case we needed them, but he tested negative (repeatedly)...So, not seeing it to be covid, but also not seeing an improvement, we decided to modify our travel plans to skip our drive through Glacier (the road across the park had not been opened at this point, either) to get to an urgent care clinic in Kalispell right after they opened that morning. We did see some of the snow and ice-capped mountains and skirted the very bottom of Glacier en route to Kalispell, stopping at one point (Marias Pass) in a nearby national forest to use the restroom facilities and check out this obelisk (dedicated to Teddy Roosevelt) and statue (dedicated to a railroad engineer credited with "discovering" the pass...long used by Native Americans to travel from the mountains to the plains):
We got Stephen to the doctor, and it was determined he had a bad cold that was developing into bronchitis, so after some prescription medications, we continued through the mountains. As we went along, we took a brief side trip into some more national forest lands to look at the forests and timber harvest there--typical forestry geek stuff! Below are some logs from a timber thinning:
We also stopped at some local ice cream shops to indulge our sweet tooth:
We actually came very close to the Canadian border in this part of Montana--less than 10 miles away! In this part of the world there are numerous large reservoirs behind imposing dams--we drove for miles along one lake and stopped at the dam--run by the US Army Corps of Engineers--for a rest stop. Libby Dam, pictured below, on the Kootenai River is 422 feet tall at its highest and over 3000 feet long:
We then drove through the city of Libby, stopping by a very popular destination right on US Highway 2--a county park dedicated to Kootenai Falls on the Kootenai River. One of the more impressive sights there--to me as a forester, of course--was a couple large and old ponderosa pine at the beginning of the trailhead:
At this part, the Kootenai River tumbles over a number of rock outcrops:
While the falls itself is not terribly tall, the Kootenai is a large river and it is very impressive to see:
I only have Kenny and Beth in this picture because the hike to the falls was more than the knees and lungs of Hope and our still sick Stephen to navigate.
But our busy day was not done yet! Another forestry geek think to do is look for old-growth forests where they remain, and northwestern Montana has a real (if small) gem! After our visit to Kootenai Falls, we continued driving down the winding mountain roads, eventually coming to Ross Creek Cedars Scenic Area (https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/kootenai/recarea/?recid=66084) of the Kootenai National Forest. This relatively small tract (about 100 acres) at the terminus of a narrow, winding, but paved road, is dominated by a stand of old to ancient western redcedars, some of which are hundreds of years old (and perhaps up to 1000 years old!):
While many people may not be familiar with western redcedar as a standing tree, they may be more familiar with is use in house siding and other places where decay-resistant wood is required. Western redcedar can grow to very large size--the tree pictured below getting a group hug from Kenny, Beth and Hope is big, but not one of the biggest at Ross Creek:
Kenny and I explored many of the trails of this popular destination, but didn't see everything there...The picture below is of Kenny looking up in a particularly impressive grove of these cedars--in addition to being broad, they are also quite tall--here, I measured them well over 150 feet tall (and probably some get up to 200 feet tall, or about twice as tall as the pines on our Rhinelander property!):
Below, I am looking up while stand in a group of three enormous redcedars:
The trees can grow so large in this part of the northern Rocky Mountains because they get a lot of rainfall, which feeds many streams, such as the creek Beth is crossing below on a fallen log:
I could have spent hours walking in this stand, measuring trees and enjoying the lush forests...but we still have several hours of driving to get to our hotel, and it was already evening (being that far north in latitude meant the sun set really late compared to what we've become accustomed to in Arkansas). However, on the drive back to the main highway, we were able to stop at a spectacular overlook that spanned across a heavily forested area at the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness:
Stand tuned for the next update, coming soon--Washington and Oregon, here we come!
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