Day 4 - 6 June 2009

The weather forecast was right - it snowed during the night and on and off again during the day. Even the lower elevations got some snow. We had about three inches of wet snow on our camper. Although the outside temperature was not extremely low, it was nice to have a toilet in the RV which eliminated the obligatory walk to the facility provided by the park. In reference to the four kids from Vermont, there was no bear alert during the night, but some of them ended up sleeping in the car, probably because of the wet snow.

We left the park where we came in (there was no other way out because the pass over the Continental Divide was closed due to snow) and drove to another park entrance, this one at St. Mary - a small gathering of gas station, supermarket, gift shop, and motel. Luckily I decided to fill the tank there because the gas stations in that part of Montana are rare.

We bought a few groceries and proceeded into the park. There was nothing there but scenery. The full extent of the scenery was denied us because the low clouds obscured the mountain peaks. We did see some gorgeous sites under the clouds such as “Goose Island,” don’t ask me how it got the name. It is a little island on one end of St. Mary’s lake - just picturesque, I guess.

We left the park again to go down the winding road to “Two Medicine.” At that entrance to the park there isn’t even a collection of houses to qualify as a village but a sizeable log building housing the “Cattle Baron Supper Club.” It was before noon and there were several pickup trucks parked outside. Maybe the owners of the trucks were getting an early start on supper or were still working on their dessert from the night before. I would have liked to see what it looked like inside, but due the shape that the observed pick up trucks were in, no telling what the “Cattle Barons” looked like.

Two Medicine was another scenic dead-end drive at the end of which is a small gift shop. Most interesting about all that was that when we got out of our camper at the gift shop, a woman approached us and asked how we liked our RV (a small RV called “Pleasure-Way”). We told her that we liked the “Roadtrek” we had once before better. She was comparing Roadtreks and Pleasure-Ways, because she wanted to buy one or the other and wanted someone’s opinion other than a salesman’s. In the course of the conversation it turned out that she was a retired Air Force nurse (the sticker on her windshield identified her as a colonel) and that she knew someone I had once known in the Air Force - small world.

After that we left Two Medicine and drove through part of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation toward Great Falls. It was quite obvious when we were in the reservation. There were no fences and no fields, just open prairie. There were widely scattered rectangular dwellings, usually in disrepair, with a number of rusting vehicles scattered around the buildings. The one small town we passed through was equally as bad, causing me to remark that this part of Montana looks better in the winter when everything is covered with several feet of snow.

Once out of the reservation we had a nice respite in a little café in the town of Choteau where we had coffee and pie in front of a blazing iron stove which was very welcome because of the chilly temperatures outside.

We arrived at the Malmstrom Air Force Base (AFB) Campground, where we were greeted cordially by a fellow Air Force retiree and hooked up our camper. After a wonderful meal cooked by my friend and some TV (one channel) we retired for the night - in our sleeping bags. This ended day four.