Road Trip!
Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho, Washington
The mission - escape the world of COVID and enjoy a road trip style vacation without putting ourselves at risk. The result? Attach your home to you back, carry most of your food and other necessities, and travel from place to place while enjoying a somewhat normal existance. Being our first attempt at camping, we decided to revisit some previous favorites and compare results. Sparing the drama (flat tire, etc), yes, the results were favorable and we will be doing this again in the future.
Itinerary -
- Stop 1 - Walla Walla, just poking around town, visiting and snapping pictures in Pioneer Park
- Stop 2 - Missoula, Montana
- Garden of One Thousand Buddhas- kind of a zen sort of place
- Bison Range 18,000 acres of spectacular scenery and Bison
- Missoula Flood - giant ripples and ancient shorelines
- Stop 3 - Billings, Montana
- Pictograph Caves - pictographs are only minimally visible, and weather dependent, but a very scenic area
- Larsen Loop Trail - nice views and spring wildflowers
- Stop 4 - Medora, North Dakota
- Theodore Roosevelt National Park - TRNP is a lesser known but exquisitely beautiful National Park
- Petrified Forest - part of TRNP south unit
- Medora
- The Castles - NW South Dakota at Reva Gap
- Stop 5 - Sturgis, South Dakota
- Wildflowers - campground had access to hiking trail in nearby forest area
- Black Hills Central Railway - Pulled by a 2-6-6-2T, nice scenery along the route
- Spearfish Canyon Scenic Byway - Gold mines and waterfalls
- Mt Rushmoor - Been there a half dozen times - just a few snapshots
- Stop 6 - Hot Springs, South Dakota
- Mammoth Site - way cool hole in the ground full of Mammoth bones.
- Toadstool Park - Long story, great place to take pictures
- Carhenge - yes, it's a thing
- Misc - Hot Springs, Ligntning, Cascade Falls, Agate Fossile Beds, Chimney Rock, Scenic Rd (79F)
- Stop 7 - Billings, Montana
- Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument - Custer's last stand
- Stop 8 - Craters of the Moon National Monument & Preserve - Lunar landscape plus wildflowers
- Stop 9 - Almo, Idaho
- City of Rocks National Reserve - Landmark on the California branch of the Oregon Trail
- Castle Rocks State Park - More rocks and flowers
Notes:
Photos: I strive to present large, crisp images. Each link above opens a 'thumbnail' page, with many individual photos, some with captions. Clicking on a thumbnail opens a slide show that allows you to navigate forward and backward through the collection, and there may be additional comments at this level. Set your browser as large as possible. Clicking on the image again will open that image without additional browser 'stuff' surrounding it. Depending on your system and browser choice you may see a magnifier with a '+' indicating you can enlarge the image even further. Use your browser's 'back' button to return to the slide show. Very wide panoramas can be scrolled horizontally to take in details.
Wildflowers: I have a more than passing interest in wildflowers. You will see wildflower photos sprinkled throughout the collection. You may see pictures of the same flower many times in many different locations. This simply indicates how widespread a particular plant might be. I try to identify flowers as accurately as possible. However, most of the identification process takes place retrospectively from the photos. Many plant species simply cannot be distinguished from photographs. Most wildflower books present an extremely limited selection of plants from a wide region. When possible I compare multiple sources when making an identification. Sometimes I get lucky and a nature center will have a guide to local flowers that will help identify otherwise difficult species. Some identification is made through a statistical process of elimination rather than anatomical dissection or genetic analysis, considering the most common to be the most likely. Sometimes I just need to pay closer attention - I didn't realize there were at least three different stickseed species in City of Rocks that look very similar. So, take what you see here as a pretty good, though not perfect, indication of what's out there.
3D photos: Every now and then I throw in a 3D photo. These can be identified by the red and blue 'ghosts' in the image. Get a pair of those red/cyan filter glasses (red on the left) and enjoy. 3D is not for everyone, and color anaglyphs can sometimes be problematic. Just ignore if it's not your thing.
