Montana, the new Maine

After a full year of a joyful alliance with Ñu, it was time for yet another pilgrimage to her cradle in Montana: we wanted some upgrades and fixes, and there’s no one better to do that job than the shop that converted Ñu into the versatile beast she is. Since the situation was reminiscent of our multiple trips to Maine years ago, during Ñandú’s gestation, Ada came up with calling Montana “the new Maine”. As usual, we made a big trip out of an errand, and visited five states, two provinces, and a bunch of national parks.

Nevada

Adventure started earlier than anticipated. The second day. On our previous trip to Montana we had discovered a wonderful half-way stop to spend the night: 12-mile Hot Springs, so called because it’s located 12 miles north of Wells, Nevada. The only downside is that the last section of the road is the worst I’ve ever driven on. Okay, the second worst, after one in Costa Rica, but that one was a different kind of bad (42 kilometers, twelve rivers, and zero bridges… actually, one bridge, but it was safer not to use it) . This one was… let me see how can I describe it. Start with your standard dirt road. Throw a grenade here and there every few feet. Wait for a few cycles of rain and sun, and voilà, you’d get something similar. I knew it was passable on a high-clearance 4WD, because I’d done it before. Let me rephrase: I knew it was passable as long as it was dry, and it was dry on our way there.

Because it was Saturday of a long weekend (an oversight on our end—we had no necessity of starting our travels on Memorial Day weekend), there were several trucks going up, so we decided to set up camp half a mile before the springs, rest, and hike to the hot pools very early in the morning. As we hoped, there was nobody at 6am. What we didn’t expect was to find a war zone in terms of trash: beer cans (both empty and full), pieces of clothing including cowboy boots, a cell phone, and many other items.

It didn’t look like the welcoming place we remembered, but the water was clean and gloriously hot for that cold morning. We enjoyed the place to ourselves for almost one hour, until a truck parked almost on top of the pool. Two young men got off, disheveled, shirtless, barefoot, and moving slowly and tentatively, exactly as you would when you are suffering from a hungover. They were looking for a wallet, as we later learnt.

“Were you here last night?” Kathy asked them.

“Unfortunately” responded one.

“You didn’t have a good time?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Are you going to clean this up?”

“Yes, we will” they promised, with a voice that reflected shame and resignation.

They soon found the wallet. On the truck’s bed.

During our walk back to the van it started raining. And then hailing. Uh-oh. Yeah, that’s what transformed a terrible but negotiable road into an almost impassable slippery inferno. I’ll spare you most of the details, but the drive back was very scary. The wheels had almost no traction and the van was as likely to go sideways as forward. On one occasion only three wheels were on the ground, the other about two feet in the air. On another, a post of the barbed wire fence that sided the road stopped the van from skidding off the road. It took us a while to extricate Ñu from that mess. The van has now a war scar to show.

Since then, we had rain (or snow) every day of our trip for almost four weeks.

Idaho

I’m only including Idaho because I like this picture (which we owe to my small bladder).

Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming

Our great friend and top fan of this blog hosted and pampered us for a couple of days in her home in Jackson. She has such an amazing playground right out her door. (Hi, Donna!)

Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

The same month a year ago Yellowstone received almost one million visitors. While the park is huge, that’s still a whole lot of people crowding campgrounds, parking lots and trails. We had initially resigned ourselves to just quickly drive through the park on our way to Montana. Just on a hunch, two days before, I checked if by chance there was any campsite available due to cancellations. Absolutely nothing. Two hours later my hunch was still there, so I checked again, and there were two sites available on two different campgrounds for the two nights we wanted to stay, which I grabbed immediately.

Our strategy was to arrive at the campsite in the evening, set the alarm for 4:45am, and be behind the wheel by 5 (which is so easy with Ñu: wake up, pee, wash face, put some layers on, turn engine on, go). Visit a place or two at dawn with the park entirely to ourselves, and then choose a spectacular view to park and have breakfast, before the crowds started to show up en masse. It paid off handsomely.

Six days later the park shut down all of its entrances and evacuated tens of thousands of visitors because of the unprecedented floods caused by extreme weather that dumped a month’s worth of rain in a bit more than one day.

Bozeman, Montana

My fifth time here, but the first time I took time to explore. It’s a lively city, with great outdoor opportunities.

Glacier National Park, Montana

Glacier National Park—Montana’s jewel—did not disappoint, and provided the perfect scenery for some more wet adventures. We got meticulously ready for what was going to be a longish hike on a rainy day to Grinnell Lake, but the first attempt got cut very short on the news that there was a mama grizzly with her cub on the trail. (For those of you unfamiliar with bears, a grizzly is scary enough; a protective grizzly mother I’d rather avoid at all costs).

On the way back to the van to reconvene, we bumped into a very large group going out. They invited us to join them and enjoy safety in numbers. “We even have two rangers with us” they said, so we followed them. They were not going very far, though, but when they reached their destination four people, the two “rangers” among them, said they were going to the lake, so the six of us continued together. We never saw a trace of any ursus, but in bear territory we felt safer with rangers. In retrospect, even if their jackets and hats made them look like rangers, there were some dead giveaways that we didn’t make much of, such as the determination to go through harder and harder obstacles, but with little clarity on how to best proceed. Those obstacles included a rickety, partly submerged bridge, and a trail flooded with knee-deep freezing water, which would have likely stopped Kathy and me, had we been on our own. Bear in mind that we were under the effects of the same storm that caused all that damage in Yellowstone.

We had to turn around half a mile before the lake, because the last obstacle was insurmountable, even for our brave rangers: raging waters had wiped out the last bridge.

On our way back, while recounting all the craziness of the day, Kathy said to the two guys who were not dressed like rangers something like “we’re lucky we’ve had the rangers with us”. They were puzzled. “What rangers?”.

“Those two guys.”

“They are not rangers! They are our friends!”

Oh well. It was very nice to share the rain with those four young, friendly and energetic guys.

Banff National Park, Alberta

I don’t have words to describe the magnificence of Alberta’s landscape, so I’m not going to try. That’s why I take pictures anyway. It reminded us of Chilean Patagonia.

We were impressed by the care and respect for wilderness that Canadians profess. Among other things, roads across the parks are fenced to prevent road kills, with wildlife corridors over the road once in a while. They are also enlarging areas of the park that are entirely closed to human access.

British Columbia

No more rainy days! Warm and dry weather was a very welcome change.

Seattle, Washington

After a short visit to Kathy’s brother in Seattle we spent a few days in a forest in Oregon. Sorry, a graphical or written report about the adventures we had there do not belong in this blog, ha ha. That’s all for now folks. Stay tuned.