September 14 - 25, 2007

Well, we are back in the motorhome. We flew from Philadelphia to Spokane, WA, on September 14. On the 15th we took Molly Habel (Jennifer’s daughter) and 3 of her friends out to dinner. On the 16th we drove around Spokane and walked the Spokane River Walk. It was a beautiful day and we just enjoyed the park-like atmosphere of the River Walk. There is an old carousel that has been beautifully restored with its original calliope put back into working order. It is inside a building built especially for it. The music from the calliope is heard along the River Walk and sounds really great.

We had to wait for our mail to arrive, but while we waited we learned a lot about the area. The entire southeast part of the state has been formed by many Ice Age Floods. These are also called the Missoula Floods or the Great Flood.

First, there were many volcanic eruptions that laid down lava to a depth of about 6,000 feet across Idaho and all the way to the foot of the mountains in Washington. If the lava cools quickly, it is just a porous rock. If it cools slowly it forms into 5 sided columns of porous rock. When you look at the sides of the cliffs, you can see that sometimes the top part is just porous rock and under that there are columns of basalt. You can see that in lots of our photos.

About 15,000 to 13,000 years ago, an arm of the glaciers came down into Montana near Missoula. As it advanced, it completely blocked off the Clark Fork River. The water flowing up the river had nowhere to go and just backed up to form a HUGE lake containing 500 cubic miles of water. Eventually the ice dam holding back the river couldn’t contain the water any longer and the water breached the ice dam. It is believed (because no one can really remember…) that the entire Lake Missoula emptied itself in 48 hours. As the water made its way to the Pacific Ocean it scoured the land breaking away the basalt lava and tearing up anything in its way in its rush to the Ocean. As it tore away the basalt it carried the broken-off pieces along with it until the current slowed down enough to let them drop onto the bottom. Also, since the raging water had broken apart the glacier damming up the river, there were huge ice flows with huge boulders frozen inside. As the ice melted and the current slowed, these huge boulders were dropped to the bottom and just stayed there. (Some of these rocks are granite from Canada. These rocks that are not from the local area and are just sitting there all by themselves are called “erratics”.) This same “ice damming the river” process was repeated dozens of times with the new water tearing away more and more of the cliff walls until the cliffs are 400’ to 500’ high.

In addition to the Clark Fork River being dammed by an glacier, the north flowing section of the Columbia River in Washington state also was blocked by a glacier. The River overflowed its banks and found a new route to the Pacific Ocean. It flowed through this alternate river bed for a long time and created the canyon that is now known as the Grand Coulee.

When the next Ice Age Flood from Glacier Lake Missoula broke through the ice, it had the nice Grand Coulee river bed path to follow for part of its trip to the Ocean. There is one section south of where the Columbia was blocked near Grand Coulee Dam known as the Dry Falls. This is where the basalt had been worn back by the water flowing over a cliff making a waterfall that undercut the cliff so that it moved back 20 miles from where it used to be. This Dry Falls is 3 ½ miles across and 300 to 400 feet deep. When the water from the Ice Age Floods went over the falls the water was 400 to 500 feet deep. That made for a 700’ to 900’ waterfall. The water was so deep that there really was no actual falls, there was just a “dip” in the running water.

All of this water got bottled up trying to get through the mountains. The only way to the Ocean was through the Columbia Gorge, the river bed of the Columbia River, which is the border of Washington and Oregon. The water was so backed up that it formed a lake in the northwestern part of Oregon and dropped all of the good basalt top soil that it scoured off the ground in Washington onto the Willamette Valley of Oregon.

Now that you know the geology of the area, you’ll be able to understand our absolute fascination with the rocks, cliffs, erratics and river beds of this area.

On Tuesday, Sept 18, we drove south to the Tri-Cities area of Richland, Pasco and Kennewick to see what we could learn about the Hanford Site. Before 1942 Albert Einstein had written a letter to FDR about the German scientists coming to the US and the possibility of using uranium and plutonium for bombs. During 1942, after Pearl Harbor, the US Government was looking for a place that was about 600 square miles, near a city of 10,000 people, had few people living on the site itself, and had an abundant supply of water and electricity. The Government identified an area north of Richland that had only 2 small villages and 1500 “head” of Indians and fit the other requirements. In December 1942 the residents of the 2 small villages, the Indians and any farmers and ranchers in the area received letters from the Government telling them they had 30 days to vacate their premises and get off the land. They were given payments based on the Depression Era values that had been in effect in the 1930’s. Lots of people were unhappy with the amount of their payment, but it was the War atmosphere and people wanted to do whatever it took to win the war. (In the last 20 years or so, people have sued the Government for more appropriate payments and many have won more money.) In March of 1943 the first buildings were going up on the Hanford Site. The small town of Richland saw a building boom as the Government built housing for the people who were pouring in to work at the Site. (Architects designed 26 different houses, duplexes and multi-family buildings and named them “A”, “B”, “C”, etc up through “Z”. These houses were only rented to workers during the time the Site was active. Later they were sold to the people living in them or put up for sale to the public. We drove around the area and saw LOTS of the houses that have either been remodeled or left exactly like they were.) The Grand Coulee Dam had just been completed and power lines were run to the Site. “B Reactor” was built and the process of turning Uranium 238 into Plutoniam 238 was started.

I KNOW that this is a very simplified explanation of what occurs, but I am not a scientist. The Uranium 238 is formed into pellets or into slugs and many of these are put into the middle of a double walled tube. Water flows in the hollow space in the tube around the outside of the pellets or slugs. These tubes are placed in a specific pattern in blocks of graphite drilled with holes for the tubes. The uranium is then bombarded with neutrons that sends all of the atoms running around bumping into each other. When they hit each other hard enough they change into Uranium 239, then into Neptunium 239 and then into Plutonium 239.

(Jim and Brian, if you read this please do NOT fall off of you chair laughing!)

(As an aside, Uranium contains 99.28% Uranium 238 and .72% Uranium 235. In Oak Ridge, TN, they separated the Uranium 235 from the Uranium 238 in a very complicated process based on the very slight difference in weight of the two. This Uranium 235 was used in the bomb Little Boy. The Oak Ridge site also developed and tweaked the Plutonium making process used at the Handford site.)

The plutonium itself is separated out by processing chemically and in a centrifuge. The plutonium was then carried IN SOMEONE’S BRIEFCASE to Los Alamos to be first tested and then actually used in the bomb Fat Man.

However, now that they have made and removed the Plutonium, there is a LOT of radio-active waste water as well as the spent uranium fuel cells. All of this has to be stored somewhere because they don’t have any place yet to dispose of it! The original tanks that stored the waste were single walled tanks and there was some problem with them leaking. New double walled tanks (steel, then concrete with small air channels for cooling, then steel) have solved that problem and NONE of the double-walled tanks show signs of leaking. There is hope that a new process (new to us, the French have apparently been using it for years) that turns this waste into a glass that can be stored safely for 1 million years will be approved soon. Then the waste will be turned into glass and trucked to the Yucca Mountain in Nevada. (The people in Nevada are not real happy about this…)

The last reactor that was built (in the 1950’s) was designed so that it could also produce power for the Site itself. It wasn’t used for long, but it was very efficient when it was in use. The reactors use a LOT of electricity. They were getting it from the Grand Coulee Dam until the Bonneville Dam came on line. Then they generated enough power themselves with the power plant (completed about 1963) in conjunction with the last reactor that they could actually put some power back into the grid.

There has not been any Plutonium produced at the plant since the 1980’s. However, they still employ thousands of people to maintain the site, monitor the waste tanks, and work on the vitrification process.

We went to this museum (CREHST) that had so much information on the internet. When we pulled up to it, Mark said “This CAN’T be the place!” because it looked more like a run-down VFW Hall. However, we went in anyway and paid our $2.50 admission. WOW, what a place. We couldn’t see and read and understand all that we wanted to in one afternoon, so they marked our ticket so that we could come back again the next day! The men who work the front desk are all retired workers from the Hanford Site and know it inside and out. They are SO happy to share everything they know with someone who is interested. We rate it a “10”.

When we left the Museum we drove out Route 243 which actually goes through the Hanford Site. We could see some of the buildings off in the distance, but the land sure is a lot of nothing. Once a year they have public tours of the Site. They are in October, but we won’t be there then…

Washington is definitely DAM country. The mightly Columbia River has at least 14 dams along it route from British Columbia to Oregon and the Pacific. It is wonderful the way the power plants can use the water to generate electricity, spit it out the bottom of the turbines and send it on down the river to be used again at the next power plant! Talk about a renewable energy source! The largest dam is the Grand Coulee Dam but it is a “peaking dam” so it only produces power when it is needed, not all the time. If power is needed in the grid, they flip a switch and are generating power within 20 seconds! We got a tour of the power house in the new section of the dam.

The Dam was first proposed in the 1920’s as an irrigation project. In the 1930’s FDR asked Congress to approve it as a power project as well. He managed to get it financed by making it part of the WPA projects instead of asking Congress for money for a dam. FDR was a firm believer that the GOVERNMENT should own the dams and generate the electricity, not big businesses. Before the irrigation part could begin, the War made the need for power in the Northwest for manufacturing war material the most urgent need. After the war the irrigation project was again a priority. There are now 2,300 miles of irrigation canals irrigating 500,000 acres of desert. “Desert” is the key word. As you drive along, where the land is irrigated it is green, fertile, beautiful farmland. If you look 50’ past the fields, where there is no irrigation, it is simply desert. Again, the photos will show that “Water is everything” when it comes to farming.

We visited three dams along with the fish ladders at two of them. Grand Coulee does not have a fish ladder or any way for the young fish to get to the ocean. However, the rest of the Columbia River is quite concerned about getting the baby salmon out to the ocean and getting the adult salmon back to spawn. During the 5 months or so that the salmon come back upriver to spawn, there is actually a live person sitting at a computer watching the fish go up the fish ladder for 16 hours a day counting the number of each species of fish! I don’t know if fish aren’t allowed to go through for the other 8 hours or if they extrapolate their data to fill in that missing time… There are fish nets at the underwater entrances to most of the power plants to divert the young salmon to tubes along the sides of the dam. There they are counted and sorted by size. The largest fish are allowed to fend for themselves and continue downstream braving other dams and other predators. The smallest fish are actually pulled out and transported in either huge barges or tanker trucks down to the river below the last dam so that they have a better chance of making it to the open ocean to grow to adult size.

We drove along Route 2 to Wenatchee, WA, and then on to the Bavarian Village of Leavenworth. It reminded us of Fredicksburg, TX. Nice quaint shops. What impressed us was that every building went along with the Bavarian theme, including NAPA Auto Parts and McDonalds. Most of the design work to make things look Bavarian were actually just painted on the buildings. That is a really inexpensive way to create an atmosphere without a lot of rebuilding. (See photos) Someone there asked about accommodations during the “off season” and the Visitor Information lady told them there was NO “off season”.

On Sunday, Sept 23, we drove to Chelan at the south end of Lake Chelan. This is a glacier formed and glacier fed lake that is about 60 miles long, 1300’-1400’ deep, and about 1 mile wide at most points. At its deepest point the bottom of the lake is about 350’ below sea level! It is so deep that the lake never freezes. The mountains are up to 10,500’ high surrounding the lake. We took a flight-seeing ride in a Beaver seaplane with a pilot who REALLY gave us a great tour. We flew up the lake and over the mountains to see the glaciers, Mount Ranier and the valleys formed by the creeks running down from the mountains. On the west side of the lake you can drive about 1/4 of the way up the lake to 25 Mile Creek State Park where the road then winds its way inland for a while. Further up the west side we saw a Lutheran Retreat that is about 11 miles up into the mountains from the river and is accessible only by a dirt road from the river. It is an old copper mining camp that was “donated” to the church when it was no longer profitable in 1957. On the east side of the lake you can drive only as far as the unincorporated village of Manson, about 1/5 of the way up the lake. In the late 1800’s a “Native American” named Wapato settled the spit of land that juts into the Lake at its narrowest point. (This is also where the glacier the formed the lake ended as the Ice Age ended and the glaciers retreated.) The state recognized his right to the property when the area was settled and he had the right to lease all of his land with 99 year leases. There is other private property in the area, but most of the land is leased from the Wapato family.

We followed a creek valley down from the mountains and approached Stehekin at the north end of Lake Chalen. With a beautiful landing we taxied up to the dock and had 1 hour to wander around the village and visit the Visitor’s Center. Then we picked up 3 more people to fly back down to Chelan. There is a dam at the south end of Lake Chelan, but it is really not used to dam up the lake. It is only used for flood control and, if there is enough water, to send a powerful stream of water through an underground pipe down to the Columbia River to run a small power generating plant. The authorities are releasing enough water through the dam right now to lower the lake level by about 1 ½ inches each day in order to prepare for the spring snow melt.

We stayed in Chelan on Monday so I could do some sewing projects and Mark could do a few projects on the motorhome.

Tuesday, Sept 25, we left for Twisp and Winthrop. Winthrop is a very small town that has cooperated in making their very small downtown section look like a Western town. It was a fun place to walk around for 10 minutes or so. Since neither Mark nor I are really into shopping, it didn’t take us long to walk the streets! We picked up our mail today.

We went to the local airport to visit the Smokejumper base. This Methow Valley site is the “birthplace of smoke jumping”. In 1939 the Forest Service wanted to find a better way to fight forest fires. Parachuting was NOT well-known at the time. In fact, there was really only one place in the country where it was being done with any kind of regularity and safe record—Eagle Parachute Company of Lancaster, PA. The military didn’t use parachutes; it was not a sport; nobody did it. Congress didn’t like the idea of using parachutes to jump in and fight forest fires, so they searched for the most rugged terrain in the country and settled on the West Cascades in Washington. Parachute jumpers from Lancaster came to Washington and made a series of jumps to show how it could be done and trained some of the forest service workers how to parachute in. In 1940 there was a call for smokejumpers to fight a newly forming fire and one of the original men from Lancaster and one newly trained forest service firefighter jumped from a Stinson airplane to fight the fire. It worked, and a second base was established at Missoula, MT. Additional bases have been added where there is danger from forest fires. There are a TOTAL of abut 400 smokejumpers in the US. They are very proud of themselves and how fit and self-sufficient they are. Their training (according to the smokejumper who gave us the tour) makes the SEAL training look like boot camp.

Today we will leave to drive to Darrington to visit Aunt Betty Bryson and then on to Arlington to visit the rest of the Brysons. Then we will visit the western part of Washington state!

We sure are enjoying this life of travel!!

Photos: http://www.kodakgallery.com/ShareLandingSignin.jsp?Uc=x2eavjj.36flrhof&Uy=dmn16i&Upost_signin=Slideshow.jsp%3Fmode%3Dfromshare&Ux=1

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August 12-20, 2007

Sunday, August 12 - We drove from Belle Fourche directly north into North Dakota then turned east on the Interstate to Bismarck. We parked at a nice KOA just 1 mile off the interstate.

Monday, August 13 – We drove north to Washburn, ND, to visit the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center. It was OK, but not as great as the one we visited in Great Falls, MT! Then we went to the nearby rebuilt Fort Mandan. They have recreated the camp that Lewis and Clark made that first winter with the Indians. Unfortunately, the original site is now under water as are the original Indian villages that they traded with and visited and partied with. But a volunteer takes you to the Fort and gives a nice talk that gives lots of good personal information about the everyday life of the Corps of Discovery during that winter. (If anyone has not read or listened to Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage I can’t recommend it highly enough!)

Tuesday, August 14 – My mail arrived yesterday so this was a work day. Mark took the Jeep to have some warranty work done on it. We went to see the movie Hairspray with John Travolta and, more importantly, Troy Bolton…oops, Zac Eafron. We REALLY enjoyed it. I even laughed out loud!

Wednesday, August 15 – WOW, what a day! We left early to go north again to take a tour of the Falkirk Mine. The photos and Mark’s captions will give a better story, but this is an open pit lignite mine. Lignite is the least efficient of all the kinds of coal but the power plants in this area are all set up to burn lignite to make electricity and synthetic natural gas (I’ll get to that next…). This entire section of the state is rolling hills with some small steep hills and hay fields EVERYWHERE. However, under those beautiful rolling hills lies a seam of lignite coal that dates back 57 million years ago. The original ground level has been worn away by wind, rain, glaciers, etc. so that this 57 million year old layer is now about 100’ or so below the present ground level. Big D-11 Caterpillar bulldozers scrape the top soil and vegetation from the top of the land. This top soil is trucked to a spot where it is stockpiled for later use. (Each pile of topsoil must be marked with the exact location it was taken from so that it can later be returned to the same place.) These bulldozers also make a flat “bench” from which a HUGE crane uses a drag line to dig out about another 90’ of dirt. This is complicated. The drag line digs out the dirt from the area to be “mined” next and uses that same dirt (NOT the topsoil, just the “overburden” dirt that covers the coal seam) to fill in the huge oblong cavity next to it where the coal has just been mined from. The area being worked just moves along the coal seam this way with the land already worked being “reclaimed” as a new mine is dug. (I’ll get back to this later.) The coal seam is really a long bed of coal that is actually a layer that was laid down from the blowing plant life 57 million years ago and compressed and heated for millions of years. It’s more like a layer of sedimentary rock than it is a “seam” of coal in a mountain, but they call it a seam. After the coal seam is exposed, the big “ripper” on the back of that D-11 Cat is lowered into the coal and rips up the coal about 8’ deep in a checkerboard design. Then a big Caterpillar “wheel loader” takes a 40 ton bite of the ripped up coal and loads it into a 160 ton or a 200 ton hopper truck that drives to the tipple and opens the doors in the bottom and unloads the entire load in about 20 seconds. The lignite coal from this mine then goes through 2 crushers and then into a storage tower. The nearby electric generating station has a conveyor belt that runs directly to it from the storage tower so that they can continuously get the coal they need to power the plant. The coal from this mine is high in sulphur and low in sodium and the coal from the mine a little further south is just the opposite. Since the power plant doesn’t want their coal to be high in either, they get coal from both mines and mix them together to get the right composition for burning in their plant. The mine safety is overseen by a special group that is about 10 times as strict as OSHA.

Back to the filling in of the old mining sites. There are SO many regulations for what the land must be like when they are finished mining it. They must have exact topographic measurements for what the land looked like before they started mining it. After they take out about 15’ to 20’ of coal, of course the land will not be exactly the same height as it was. This is kind of OK. The overburden that has been removed is now “fluffed” since the years and years of compaction have been undone. They fill the land back in and grade it with bulldozers with GPS coordinates set in to get all of the hills back in their proper places. Just running these huge machines over the ground compacts it again but not quite as much as it was. Even after taking about the 15’-20’ of coal, the ground is only about 3’ lower overall than it was but with all of the same contours. Drainage is one of the big worries. Every inch of reclaimed land must have the same drainage pattern as it did before it was disturbed. So now they disc it to get it “uncompacted” and ready to be planted again with hay. The local farmers “rent” the land for exactly what the property taxes are on the land and plant the hay. (The mining company is not allowed to make any profit on the farming part of the reclamation project, so they can ONLY rent the land for the cost of the taxes.) The farmers have to keep meticulous records of crop production using GPS to measure yields in each field for years. After the farmers have had at least 10 years where the average of those 10 years is better than the average crops yields of the surrounding farms (3 of those years must be in the most recent 5 years), then the mine can sell the land. Usually, the same farmer who sold the land does NOT buy it back. Usually, when the farmer sells the land to the mine he retires and gets out of farming. SOMETIMES the farmer will just “rent” the land to the mining company but the mining companies do not like to do that. If they don’t own the land they are not allowed to “mix” the top soils from the different sections of land. They have to be sure that Farmer John gets back his same top soil 15 years from now. That is way to much trouble for the mining companies. The areas around the mine are gorgeous! The hay fields are so pretty and the farmers are farming them just like the untouched lands a few miles away.

We were SO lucky with our tour! Mark got to ride in one of the big 160 ton bottom unloading trucks. Another man on our tour got to ride in the same truck while it was being loaded with coal and driven to the tipple and unloaded. Then, since they were having a special luncheon that day, the crane with the huge drag line actually stopped working for the lunch hour. Usually, they have the trainees come up during the lunch hour to get their learning time while the actual crane operators have lunch. So the crane operators told our tour guide to take us up to the crane and let us look around – NOT in it, just around it.

And when we finished the tour it was only NOON time!

Then we had an appointment for a tour of the Great Plains Synfuels Plant. There is only ONE plant in the US that turns lignite coal into synthetic natural gas and a couple of plants in South Africa. We toured the one in the US. I can’t explain the entire process because it is all a secret, but essentially the plant receives lignite coal from the mines AND electricity from the generating station nearby. They use the electricity to power the equipment and the coal to put into the “gasifier” that turns it into synthetic natural gas PLUS a lot of byproducts. These byproducts are just as important as the synthetic natural gas – anhydrous ammonia for fertilizer, naptha to add to gas, xenon gas, krypton gas, carbon dioxide which is piped to Canada and used to make their oil drilling process more efficient, and a few more. The synthetic natural gas is sent about 35 miles in a pipeline to a natural gas pipeline and then is mixed in with the natural gas and sent to homes and businesses from North Dakota to Texas. After the gasification process is complete, synthetic natural gas is virtually identical to natural gas. It is a great idea. Unfortunately, the group that decided to buy the equipment and build the plant in 1984 only ran it for ONE year before they went bankrupt. The price of natural gas dropped so low that they couldn’t make enough money selling the gas to pay for the process. Since the Dept of Energy had guaranteed the loans for the construction of the plant, they stepped in and ran it for 4 years until a buyer could be found. They lost money too. When the price of natural gas started to go up and the plant was set up to efficiently produce the by-products, it became profitable. They don’t give any figures, but they give the impression that they make plenty of money with the process now. VERY interesting.

Thursday, August 16 - We had to have a special order part installed on the Jeep, so we didn’t leave the campground until early afternoon to drive to Medora, ND. Again, beautiful fields of corn and hay. Then the Badlands would just appear. Then beautiful fields of corn and hay again!

We got to Medora in time to see the Medora Musical which has been playing for 42 years. Before the show we went to, surely one-of-a-kind, a “pitch fork fondue”. They put rib eye steaks and NY Strip steaks on the tines of a real pitch fork and then put them in these huge cauldrons of oil and actually fondue them for 4 minutes. There is a buffet dinner and your choice of steak. It was good and fun! Then as the sun set, the Musical began. There are two LONG escalators that go down into the canyon to the seating area. The stage and seating area were renovated about 10-15 years ago to greatly increase the number of seats and add rest rooms and concession stands down at the seating level. The backdrop for the play is an old town that moves off to either side on a track so that you can see the hills behind the set. They use real horses and a stagecoach on stage. There is a loose story behind all of the singing and it was all fun. The weather was agreeable so that helped since it is all done outside.

Friday, August 17 - The entrance to the Theodore Roosevelt National Park is right smack IN downtown Medora. We spent about 3 hours riding around the 37 miles scenic loop that makes the park so easily accessible to everyone. There are plenty of hiking trails, but it’s nice to be able to see the scenery even if you don’t want to take a hike. This is really another area of “Badlands”. They seem to spring up here and there in both South and North Dakota. They were called the “Badlands” because you couldn’t grow anything there and you couldn’t get any food or water if you happened to be lost or stuck there. The photos will give a better story than I can. The basic geology is that the layers of sand, dust, mud, plant life, sand, etc were laid down over millions of years. At some point the lignite coal actually caught fire inside the earth and burned with such intensity that it heated the surrounding rock and turned it into brick-like “scoria”. This rock that had been burned was much harder than the softer sandstone and mudstone so as the other rock was eroded away the harder rock was left. It appears as though all of this rock that was washed and weathered away flowed west and filled in the valleys to make the beautiful fields we passed along the way. In some of the photos you can see the harder layers of rock either on top or in the center of the buttes. Some of it is very picturesque. All of it is interesting.

At 4 PM we went to a one-man play called “Bully” where Teddy Roosevelt talked to us for about 45 minutes of spell-binding acting. He told a lot of stories in the words that Teddy Roosevelt must have used in written letters to friends. It was VERY good.

Saturday, August 18 - We left Medora and headed west into Montana. Again, the fields were just beautiful. Hay is almost all that we saw but, my goodness, did we see a lot of hay. I think in Montana they must not talk about how many people there are per square mile but how many square miles they have per person! We stayed overnight in the Pilot Truck Stop. Noisy, but we are just driving through so it is easier than finding a campground. And they haven’t been any Wal-Marts!!

Sunday, August 19 – We drove Route 2 through the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. When we were driving we did not know we were in the Reservation and Mark and I looked at each other and said how much the fields had changed in just short time. No longer were they beautiful fields full of hay with no weeds in sight. Instead, the fields looked unkempt, full of weeds, not harvested. There were a lot more homes than we saw before, but they were trailers with junk yards in front and on both sides! Then we looked on the map and saw that we had entered the Reservation. I guess we should have known when we passed what looked like an old saloon but had a big sign that said CASINO. I’m not discussing any cause and effect here. Just stating facts.

We drove around the south side of Glacier National Park. They were fighting about 6 fires in the area when we drove through and the smoke obscured any view. We could see that they were mountains but could not see any definition to them. The drive was easy without much twisting or climbing. We arrived at West Glacier (obviously on the west side of Glacier National Park) and parked at the KOA Kampground there.

Monday, August 20 – We left early for a tour on the red bus. In the 1930’s the park got red touring buses with fabric tops that roll back to better view the mountains for taking the tourists through the Park. In 1999, after they had about 1,000,000 miles on them, there were questions about the safety of the buses (as well as the brakes and the steering). The owners turned the buses over to Glacial Park, Inc., and Ford Motor Company then donated about $6,000,000 worth of work and parts to put the 33 frames on new chassis, reinforce the bodies, install gas/propane engines and build a climate controlled garage to store them for the winter. After two seasons being rebuilt, they are now back on the road taking tourists through the park again. You CAN drive your own car, but it looked like most people tour in the red bus. There were also a good number of people riding bikes up the mountain and a few motorcycles. That would not have been a problem except that it was 40 degrees, rainy and the wind was blowing 15-50 mph!! Now remember, we have the top rolled back for better viewing!! IT WAS COLD!! There is only one main road through Glacier National Park although there are a few unimproved roads that go a short way into the park from around the park. The mountains and glacial valleys were very interesting. There are only about 6 glaciers left in the park and if you have seen glaciers in Alaska these are not much of a glacier… Some of the peaks rise up 4000’ above the 1000’ deep glacial valley lakes and are really impressive. Glacier National Park gets about 500” of snow each year. But the drifts cover the road to a depth of about 100’. They have signs about 100’ above the road for the bulldozer drivers to use as a guide when they clear the road in the spring! The Visitor Centers must board up completely since they are COMPLETELY covered with snow. If you fly over one in the winter, you can’t even find it. Once the sun came out everything looked MUCH prettier. The gray clouds didn’t do much for the scenery. The tour we took was a 9 ½ hour trip from the west side of the park to the east side and north a bit and then back to the west side. The driver put the top back over for some of the ride but when it was open it was COLD.

Tuesday we are driving to Libby, MT, to get our mail and spend one night. Wednesday morning we will be driving to Spokane, WA, so we can catch a Southwest flight back to Port Aransas for 10 days or so. Then we will fly to New York to watch Siena while Faith and Leon go to a wedding in Holland. Then we will visit Grandma Etta for a couple of days to hear about her trip to Norway and Holland. THEN we will fly back to Spokane and continue our trip.

Photos: http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=x2eavjj.3a1tpb4f&x=0&y=-6xv7y3
http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=x2eavjj.1irax9vj&x=0&y=yjge8l
http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=x2eavjj.1ns97t0v&x=0&y=7wki78