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Published: September 16th 2007
Obfuscator writes: We woke up comfortably on our hillside perch in TRNP - North. Snug as a bug and so forth. As usual, we needed to dry some of our gear. This is partly just an issue of morning dew, and partly an issue of condensation from our own breath on the interior. The moral of that story is basically that Gortex keeps moisture off you quite well, but it also retains some on the inside as well. Anyway, while we did that, we had some delicious shakes from the MRE’s, and then set off to explore some of the surrounding terrain that we had been unable to see in the dark last night. More or less immediately below our site was a nice little moonscape that we explored for a while. We also experimented with a Viking chess game on a chessboard to which we didn’t really have rules. We quickly learned that we needed rules.
Once our gear was dried out, we finished our hike back to the car. There, we spent some time throwing out garbage and repacking various items to make them fit better. After that, we climbed the cannonball compaction thing, and took some pictures
Obfuscator in the moonscape
Strange what you can be next to all night without noticing 'till morning.from the top. It was tall, but nowhere near as tall as our monster butte of the day before. After that, back to the Visitor’s Center to let them know we weren’t dead and to get a quick shave. We decided that since we really didn’t have much else planned for the day, we should check out the scenic route through the North Unit. It was a nice drive. We discovered that much to our surprise, there are actually two very distinct breeds of North American Bison: First, there are the grunting, snorting, angry types that you see when you’re offroading. Second, there are the friendly road bison. We encountered one of the latter as we approached a scenic overlook, standing more or less on the shoulder of the road. We pulled off, and went to great lengths to sneak up on him, so we could get nice close ups, thinking this was a real rarity. It was only when we continued the drive and found not one, but two herds of road bison that we realized how many of them there actually are. We got lots of pictures of them. Lots. Bison. Lots of bison.
Eventually we got
enough of them to move off the road, and we left TRNP North. On our way south to 94, we finally snapped a picture of a sign that we had seen several times - “Now Leaving Blah Blah Blah National Grasslands - Land of Many Uses.” This got us wondering how they came up with that exact slogan. “Welcome to the Little Missouri National Grasslands, the land of . . . . Ummm…. Grass? Well, we can do all sorts of things with grass!”
On a series of side notes, it was nice to find that gas prices went down once we got out of ND. All through ND they were $3.14 - $3.32 (Apparently the land of many uses is also the land of gouging everyone stupid on gas), and it got down below $3.00 in Montana. I-94 crosses the Yellowstone River an awful lot. There’s a few towns between Medora and Billings that look like they’re going to be just little blips from the map, but actually look pretty sizable from the highway. Every town in Montana seems to have dinosaur bones and museums. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to stop in any of these towns or museums
bunny in the bush
OR IS IT A JACKALOPE? or examine these bones, becausee we had a timetable to reach Billings. Montana countryside is very pretty though, and well worth the drive through,
We got to Billings, and eventually found a Walmart, which solved our problem of not being able to use wireless, and restocked on various other items. After that, we drove around and found a motel with wireless, and spent a few hours uploading stuff for you fine folks!
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