Whoa, Big Fella!

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With Glacier National Park in our rear-view mirror, we finally – finally! – put our plan to slow the hell down into action. We also headed east rather than following our original schedule, which had us moving west into Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. Not only that, but we’re now playing things a bit by ear, and will only pick up our original schedule when we’re darned good and ready, with any changes we decide will make us happy.

Among the issues that helped us make the decision to amend our aggressive schedule are fuel prices and campground costs along the west coast. We also feel we’re putting too much stress on Fati, and on ourselves, and it’s not “sparking joy.”

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Along with a desire to see the country, the point of this trip was to make up for more than a decade of being on someone else’s schedule when we travel, enjoyable as it has always been, and just going where we wanted to go, doing what we want to do.

If we were the ones setting an unreasonable pace, we were also the ones who could change that. So we did.

Admittedly, we had to do a little Montana campground hopping first, with two nights in Shelby, four nights in Great Falls, and two more nights in tiny Reed Pointe before a full, blissful week (!) in one place after crossing back into Wyoming.

Shelby was a stopping point to catch our breath after the full-on touring in Glacier and Yellowstone, and one of the tiny town’s charms was that there is nothing at all to do there. Nothing. We’d spend a day working and cleaning the rig, have two good nights’ sleep, then move on.

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It didn’t work that way, of course, and through no fault of our own (okay, entirely through our own fault) we found ourselves crossing the Canadian border into Alberta in Nippy, where the super-efficient, super-friendly border guard told us there was nothing at all to see until we reached Lethbridge, 60 miles north.

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So, Yay! That was our new plan!

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The area north of Shelby almost all the way to Lethbridge was rolling hills, farmland, a few pronghorns, and not a whole lot else. We did stop in a tiny, tiny town that probably has a name, but we don’t know what it is, where we found a tiny, tiny store where Simon hoped he could find a nice iced coffee (fat chance!). Instead, we found bottled ice tea and bottled Starbucks Frappuccino, but we also found a uniquely Canadian sweet, the Nanaimo Bar, with its chocolate, coconut, ground almond, and crushed graham cracker base, stiff buttercream middle, and chocolate ganache top. Crumbly, sweet, and probably the third most exciting thing Alberta had to offer us that day.

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The second most-exciting thing we found was a beautiful city park in Lethbridge, where the 99F temperature in Shelby that drove us out of our tin can home and into Nippy’s air-conditioned comfort was lessened to around 95F, and much of the city was enjoying the park’s swimming pool. We took a walk along the lake (no swimming!), staying in the shade as much as possible.

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Simon is drawn to trains the way he’s drawn to precarious places with steep drop-offs, and we’d seen a sign for the Lethbridge viaduct, the longest (5,327 ft), highest (314 ft) train trestle bridge in the world, so we headed there next. As luck would have it, a train made the crossing shortly after we arrived.

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But the winner of the Most Exciting award was the Canadian Duty Free shop on the way back into the U.S., which closed at 7 p.m. and which we reached at 6:59 p.m. A liter of Bombay Sapphire and a bottle of brandy later, we high-fived each other for our magnificent day, and for the fact the evening had cooled down considerably, making our home on wheels tolerable again.

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It was on to Great Falls the next morning, where we spent two days exploring the three sets of falls…

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…the Giant Springs Fish Hatchery park, where we found a spring that flowed into what is now the shortest river in North America…

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…and stood on the precipice of a sandstone cliff at First People’s Buffalo Jump State Park, where, for 12,000 years, countless bison met their end.

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The rocky cliff is the terminus of a vast grassy area where bison once roamed. Plains Indians would gather here, stampeding the bison, sending a “runner” into the fray, and running the bison off the cliff.

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The “runner” (who ideally stayed just ahead of the stampede) also jumped off the cliff, knowing a second cliff lay just below, which he could use to back against the mountainside as the bison tumbled past.

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While the mile-long cliff is an attraction in the area, it’s also a sacred site, with 18 feet of compacted buffalo remains below the edge. You can feel what happened here, all this time later, and, for us, it was both impressive for the creativity that allowed humans to take down massive animals that helped keep their tribe alive, and upsetting to our modern sensibilities for the lives lost, and the way in which they were lost.

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On our final day in the area we took the Cascade Scenic Loop from Great Falls to Wolf Creek, with a lunch stop at the Lazy B Bar & Grill (with dog-friendly outdoor seating), where Simon ordered hot coffee (which came in a tin mug) and S.O.S., which some (most? All?) Americans will know as “shit on a shingle.” It’s chipped beef in a cream sauce on toast, and Susan absolutely hates it. Simon dug in, and declared it “a classic American breakfast dish that everyone should try at least once.”

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It isn’t that, but he was happy, and that’s what counts with husbands. Susan had a BLT.

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Shortly after lunch we detoured up a big hill and discovered the gorgeous Holter Lake, where locals were fishing, boating, and cooling down in the crystal-clear water. It was a little enclave of easy leisure, and many of the homes there suggested “money.”

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Wolf Creek didn’t suggest money, but we were intrigued by what it would be like to live in a place where the elementary school was, still, a wooden, one-room proposition. It made a nice finale to the drive.  

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We spent the rest of the evening getting ready to move again, and to leave Montana behind. We had two more nights in the state ahead of our return to Wyoming, having discovered a campground in a “living ghost town” that, frankly, we both felt required exploration.