We got electrons. More leftover photos.

We're connected to a wi-fi system.
We got fast electrons!
Here are some more leftover pictures.

Some photos of Nevada City, MT

We spent 6 hours in the "rebuilt" ghost town of Nevada City, MT.
T'was neat!
Here are a few photos.
F.

We got electrons. Here are a few photos.

This blogger seems to limit me to 4 photos per posting.
So I'll try to do a few separate postings and post some past photos.
Here's the first.
The truck crash in Yellowstone, in reverse order.
F

Glacier National Park - A Million and a Half Pictures Later

Yahoo! Back in the land of electrons.
We're on our way to Bonner's Ferry.

(Cheryl) Once again I ran out of memory on my camera! My hobby for the rest of my life is all set, editing pictures and video of Glacier National Park. The mountains here win the trip prizes for most craggy, most ice capped, most lake and river kissed and most narrow twisting roads around. The photos don’t come close to showing them to you. You gotta take this trip, somehow, someday, sometime! Rob a bank if you have to.

(Frank) Beautiful! Yadda, Yadda. Magnificent! Yadda, Yadda. Beyond belief! Yadda, Yadda. Incredible! Yadda, Yadda. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If I see much more nature my head is going to explode. The only thing keeping me going is the anticipation of seeing the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington and the Spruce Goose in Oregon. And frankly, the most beautiful things I saw in Glacier were the circa 1930 Red Busses originally built by White Coach Company. These 8-door touring cars ran continually until 1999 when they were shipped off to Ford Motor Company for complete frame-up restoration and all new drive line components. They returned to service in 2002 and they are beautiful!

The other scenic sight to catch my attention was “Goat Lick.” I figured I’d never licked a goat so I turned in, and it turned out, to be a natural salt deposit the Mountain Goats liked to lick. Of course there were no goats there. Booooorrrrrring! Another group was there and I said “Goat Lick sounds like a Mason Williams poem.” All the youngsters (less than 50) looked at me like I was crazy out of my mind but the other old fart there smiled and said “Yeah, it does.” So, in homage to Mason Williams (Google: “Mason Williams, “Toad Suckers” and “Moose Goosers”), here is my Goat Lick poem.

Goat Lickers.
By Frank (M. Williams) Del Monte
How ‘bout them goat lickers,
Ain’t they a card!
Lickin’ they Mountain Goats
In they yard.

Ya’ wanna be a Goat Licker
Well here’s the ticket!
Grab yourself a Mounty-Goat
And ‘rair back and lick it!

Love from three Montana goat lickers. (Mmmmm. And tasty too!)

8:30 a.m. – Monday, August 17, 2009 – Glacier Meadows RV Park
(Cheryl) We are currently in the technology wilderness, so we’re blogging in Word until we can get to someplace with electrons.

Both of us have been experiencing sensory overload and now understand why some people only spend 45 minutes in, say, a four-day park like Yellowstone. The vistas across miles of flowering land to the tops of craggy mountains followed by lakes and rivers of majestic proportion soon limit our ability to comprehend what we’re seeing. Such beauty must have to be processed in small doses in order for us to do it justice in filing it to our metal landscapes. All the adjectives we can muster like awesome, brilliant, majestic, out-of-sight and beyond belief don’t come close to describing what we’ve seen and continue to see of this seemingly endless array of western states. Of them all, so far, my all-time favorite is Montana. I now get the meaning of wide-open spaces. Wowzer!

We can’t even capture what we’re seeing with digital photos and videos. You just have to come here and experience it. I encourage you to somehow make the time someday to travel this broad expanse of jeweled landscape. We are thrilled to think of our children, our grandchildren and their children inheriting all this WEALTH! Thank God for those who had the foresight to put in place our national park system. By the way, we got a “senior pass” for $10 that gets us into all the national parks for free. However, don’t wait until you’re 65 to see all of this!

Speaking of God, we’ve seen all sizes and shapes of churches. A little white tent set on a hillside not too far north of Ennis, MT, caught my attention, The Cowboy Church – All are welcome. I don’t know about you “pardner, but that appeals to me in a grassroots kinda way. Stained glass may excite the Lord, but he met His flock on hillsides if I recall my childhood stories accurately.

Today we’re setting out to tour Glacier National Park on a rather wet and misty morning. The kind lady in the office of our RV Park loaned us a CD with a complete audio tour of the park. One side is East to West (the one we’ll use) and the other is West to East. We had thought we’d take the “Red Bus,” but $80 per person seemed a bit unreasonable. So KB Truck and indestructible “Frank the driver” will continue to facilitate our transportation deluxe. As I remember, the “Yellow Bus” in Yellowstone was almost as expensive at $60 a head.

Glacier Meadows RV Park is 16 miles from the East entrance of Glacier and one of the most scenic parks we’ve ever experienced. Vast meadows stretch out to woods on either side of our meadow perch and impossibly high mountains surround us in this small valley. Peanut runs around in the meadow catching little winged bugs, chomping them, depositing them on the ground and then rolling on them. Evidently they smell really delightful to doggie noses. Freedom to roam is a wonderful thing and Peanut took advantage by wandering away from me while I took a picture. He paid a visit to a Class A Coach, the home of a pretty little Sheltie. He’s such a Romeo! Man, I panicked when he disappeared so quickly.

More Later, F&C&P

Technical Difficulties, please stand by.

We're in (near) Missoula, MT. in a Jellystone RV Park.
I usually avoid this type of "Theme" park as they are full of kids.
(I subscribe to W.C. Fields opinion of kids.)
Anyway, I can't seem to upload photos.
The Alltel Quick-whatever keeps kicking me off.
Oh well. Maybe later.
We're on our way to Glacier Nat'l Park.
Maybe I'll get a good connection there. Ha!

Later,
Frustrated Frank.

Montana: Huckleberry Jam, Fly Fishing, Vigilantes, Old Friends, Trains and Buster Keeton

(Cheryl) Yellowstone seems like a distant memory, and I can’t believe we haven’t blogged since our visit to the Fishing Bridge where I managed to get a picture of a large beaver in the water. On our way out of the park we made a lunch stop on a sweet little scenic road next to the Yellowstone River. We had this spot all to ourselves and a deer peeked out of the trees on the other side of the river. Frank fixed chicken and cheese tortillas in the trailer while I dangled my feet in the cold, clear waters of Yellowstone.

(Frank) While we ate our lunch on the river bank, a scene directly out of Apocalypse Now replayed as five green, completely-unmarked, conspiracy-theory helicopters in tight formation thundered directly over our heads. There were three transports and two Blackhawk gunships. The only thing missing was the Ride of the Valkyries being played over loudspeakers and Robert Duvall enjoying the smell of napalm in the morning. The copters passed directly over our picnic at low altitude as I sat there with my camera in the trailer. About an hour later I heard the thunder again and ran to the trailer just in time to grab my camera and get a fuzzy long distance photo as they returned from whence they came. Later I found out they were secret service helicopters and part of the preplanning for President Obama’s visit to Yellowstone.

By the way, about the river; Cheryl got to dangle her feet in it, which is a “girl thing”, but she wouldn’t let me take a whiz in it, (even down stream) which is a “guy thing.” Now I’ll never be able to say I peed in the Yellowstone River. Women just don’t understand the significance of these small manly gestures. Sigh, what an opportunity missed.

(Cheryl) We got to Ennis, MT around 3:30 p.m. and caught up with our friends, Pam and Richard Lessner, just as they were heading out to their home 20 miles outside of town. They met us at the Ennis RV Park, and after hooking up the trailer we all headed out to “The Grizz” (Grizzly Bar & Grill), their favorite place to eat hereabouts. I munched down on some of the best ribs I’ve eaten in ages accompanied by beer battered onion rings (to die for) and tenderly grilled asparagus. We both slept like well-fed hogs when we returned to the trailer for the night.

Pam and Rick suggested we take in Virginia City and Nevada City the next day so on Thursday morning we headed out. We were so fascinated with Nevada City’s collection of over 60 pioneer buildings and contents that we didn’t even make it to Virginia City on Thursday. All but about a dozen of these log buildings were moved to the site, content and all back in the 40s before vandals had a chance to destroy things. It seems that when better opportunities came along, people would just lock up their store and all its wares and head to a new city to start again. Most of the buildings stood like that for years until an enterprising guy here collected them all and moved them to Nevada City.

There were rooms full of goods still in their wrappings, buttons, fabric, candy, tins of cookies, celluloid collars, shirt studs, razors, corsets, period clothes and all sorts of firecrackers and other goods, some wrapped with Chinese markings in the China section of the little reconstructed town. We paid the $8 bucks each to get in thinking it was too much, but by the time we finished looking and taking pictures until late in the afternoon we decided it was well worth the money. It was a self-guided tour so we were free to linger and walk through houses all on our own. Trust is a major factor here in the wilds of Montana and our friends don’t even lock their house. Pam said, “If you get there before we do, just go on in, make yourselves at home, and we’ll be along.”

We toured Virginia City on Friday and took in a silent movie featuring Buster Keeton. The film was accompanied by a photoplayer , a combination piano and sound effects unit played by a talented guy who may be the only person left who knows how to handle such a machine. This photoplayer is the only one in the world still in operation housed in a theater. The one other known to reside in a theatre was moved to a museum in Australia recently.

(Frank) In Montana’s early days the local folks were vexed by highwaymen, claim jumpers, thieves and killers. It got so bad the local Virginia City good folks got together and formed a vigilante committee. They posted warnings of their intent and then followed through. On one major occasion they hung five scoundrels from the center rafter of a shop that was under construction. Now the shop is open to the public and has the ceiling exposed to show the rafter, complete with rope burns where the bad guys swung their last dance step. Cool! I just love frontier justice. We need more of that.

We spent last evening out at Pam and Richard’s house having a cookout and great conversation as a rainstorm passed through their valley and the sun behind the clouds put on a great light show on the surrounding mountains. Thunder boomed and Peanut curled up in a fuzzy kitty bed in front of the fireplace content to be “home on the range.” Thanks Pam and Richard for such a lovely and memorable evening.

There is so much more to tell, but we’re going to the Farmers Market in Ennis this morning to get a rhubarb pie and other yummy local produce along with breakfast at a local pharmacy café. We’re heading out to Missoula, MT, today and possibly on to Glacier National Park. We hope to be in Seattle next weekend to visit with our kids. Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose is now in Middleville, OR, at Evergreen Aviation, so that is now on our agenda after Seattle.

Love to all of you from Roy, Dale and Trigger

Geezers, Geysers, Bicycles and Boats at Yellowstone Lake

After a breakfast of cherry turnovers and a batch of bacon, we mounted our trusty bicycles and headed down to the Fishing Bridge Visitor’s Center. We talked with the ranger about bicycle paths in the area and chose to ride the one by Bay Bridge which goes out to Natural Bridge. It’s only a three-mile round trip and it is right next to the marina where we were to take our cruise on the lake.

There were several people walking and riding bicycles to Natural Bridge. When we got there we decided the steep path to stand on top of the bridge wasn’t worth it. The ride back was mostly downhill so we had nearly an hour to kill before our cruise. After a short hop over to the marina we bought a sandwich and some cheese and crackers for lunch at a covered picnic table overlooking all the big boats moored there. We both agreed it would be cool to be able to say that one, “keeps a boat moored at Yellowstone.”

Our hour ride around the lake was on a 40 passenger boat captained by a young woman ranger, who handled the craft like a pro. We were impressed with her energetic, friendly manner and frankly, she was cute and petite and one of those irresistible people. We talked with her after the ride and got a picture of her posing by the boat. We told her about the mini-submarine tour we took in Hawaii that was also piloted by a woman. She said to tell our granddaughters, “Just don’t settle. I never have.” It’s great to see someone doing something she loves so much, especially when that means taking on a role normally thought of as male. She told us she has only been doing this for three months, and hopes to drive a tourist snow cat this winter.

The afternoon was still young so we decided to return to camp and do some “down time laundry.” The camp Laundromat is huge with 12 washers and 12 dryers. We figured that early afternoon was the time AFTER most folks leaving the park have left, and most folks coming into the park are busy setting up, so the Laundromat would probably not be busy. Turned out to be true. Only saw one other couple in there. T’was wonderful.

It is fascinating to watch camper rigs come and go through this camp/park. A rig will pull out at 11 AM and another will pull right into the same slot at 3PM. It’s sorta like running a hot-sheet motel. Tonight will be our third night here and we’ll be pulling out at 11AM tomorrow to go to Ennis, Montana. I think I’ll leave a mint on the power box.

It’s 5:30 now. We’re going to unlimber the bicycles again and ride down to the “No Fishing, Fishing Bridge.” We found out why it is now a no-fishing-fishing-bridge. It seems that it once was a very popular fishing spot but the Park Service realized it was also a popular spawning spot for the local trout. Working on the theory that if you want to keep a healthy fish population you shouldn’t catch and eat the spawners, they declared it off limits to anglers.


Tuesday, August 11, 2009 – The Geezers Watch the Geyser


(Cheryl) Yes, I know it’s only 4:00 a.m., but we were so tired last night we were in bed by 8:00 p.m. and seriously looking forward to sleep by 9:00 p.m. I’ve been reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society to Frank while he drives, but with no TV or other diversions last night, we read for a couple of hours before going to sleep. I’ve already read this book, and it’s just as enjoyable the second time around. If you haven’t read it, pick up a copy or download it to your Kindle.
The altitude is well over 7,000 feet here at Fishing Bridge Campground, and yes, there is a bridge named “Fishing Bridge.” It has a nice, big sign on it that says, “No Fishing.”

The altitude has really slowed both of us down a bit. We left Peanut in the trailer long about 10:00 a.m., and took off for Old Faithful geyser yesterday. On the way we walked around some pools of boiling water and took some pictures. About three-quarters of the way on up to Old Faithful traffic halted. We figured there were bears on the road, but unfortunately we discovered a pickup truck had gone over the side of the road and down an embankment about 100 feet. They had already airlifted the two passengers to the hospital and arrested the driver by the time we joined the line of cars on the road.

According to the “Rangerette” at the head of the line of cars, the driver ran off the edge of the road on the right, then over-corrected to the left, losing control of the car and plunging over the edge of the road next to an overlook, missing the guard rail by a foot or so. He must have been going much faster than the posted park limit of 45 mph. We pulled over to the side of the road out of the line of cars and walked up to the accident scene to watch the truck being pulled up the hill. It was quite an operation, and I’ll let Frank recount the process and post a picture.

(Frank) I figure he was clipping along at speed plus too much when he passed the overlook, decided he wanted to stop, slammed on the brakes, tried to turn in, decided he wouldn’t make it, tried to straighten out, couldn’t do it, and ran straight off the road past the end of the guardrail. I don’t know why the recover troops decided to pull the truck up and over the guardrail, but that’s what they did. I’ll post a few photos.

(Cheryl) After the road-stopping event, we didn’t have far to go to reach our destination and eat a forgettable lunch at a fast food place in the Village near THE geyser. Feeling every bit our ages of 64 and 66, we huffed our way over to the front of the pack waiting to see Old Faithful. I suggested we sit under a tree in the background, but Frank urged us onward to a spot on the boardwalk in front of the crowd sitting on the benches. I can remember clearly when I could just plop on a ledge, dangle my feet and think nothing about it. Now, I have to get down on all fours in an unladylike pose to sit myself down. Sigh! Those WERE the days, we just didn’t know it!

Three young boys (probably 8-12 years old) sat easily down beside us, and Frank immediately struck up a conversation with them, telling them how the geyser plays with us by sending up little short bursts of steam and water several times before letting go with the “full banana.” He also talked about pipes and the guy who turns the valve that lets the geyser spout. They knew he was joking but loved his banter and kept up a steady stream of comments. They were really well-behaved kids, and we enjoyed talking with them.

(Frank) “Old Facefull” is impressive. Everyone should see it once. I carefully shot video as it erupted. Unfortunately I shot it with the camera rotated to vertical so I could get its full height. This puts the whole video laying on its side. Now I gotta figure a way to rotate the video. Dumb.

(Cheryl) On the way back to our campsite, Frank stopped at the marina on Yellowstone Lake to make reservations for today at 1:00 p.m. We’re going to go for an hour cruise on this mammoth mountain lake! I’m thrilled beyond belief. I’m a water bunny, and getting out on a lake is high up on my emotional fun scale. Yellowstone Lake really surprised us with its enormous size and the fact that it is 8,000 feet on top of a mountain! We both were ignorant of its existence and fascinated when it came into view on our way to Fishing Bridge when we arrived.

I hope we see some animals along the shore today. Yesterday we did see two elk leisurely munching grass near the lake as we drove over to see the geyser. Other than that, we have seen no bears, lions, tigers or zebras. Not even a puma. We keep telling each other, “It’s not a puma!” Some of you may remember a Schwarzenegger line from Kindergarden Kop, “It’s not a tumor!” Oh well, I guess you had to be there.

Our plan is to leave here Wednesday in route to see our friends, Richard and Pam Lessner (I met Pam and Richard at the Republic and Gazette Newspapers where we all worked in the 80s and 90s). They “retired” from a stint with the government during the Bush admin in D.C. to the wide open spaces of Montana. Their cabin has a wrap around porch and sits in the middle of a valley surrounded by enormous mountains. They watch large herds of elk wander past their windows and fish for trout in a nearby river. Pam now drives for a fishing outfit (12 hours a day during this high season) while Rick manages some sort of foundation in the little town of Ennis near Bozeman, MT. The trip up there should only take us a day, and we’re looking forward to visiting their place and catching up after not seeing them for at least 10 years.

Love from three intrepid high altitude explorers,
Frank, Cheryl and Little Toot