On Monday we made it to an old favorite from our previous travels: the Sunrise Campground in Bozeman Montana.
As luck would have it, our friends Herb and Jeanie — whom we met here three years ago — happened to arrive that same day. It was great to catch up with them and made our visit to this campground even better.
On Tuesday, we made use of a free RV site at the city park in Cascade, MT. It rained like crazy shortly after we got there.
…but within a couple hours, it cleared completely.
…and we enjoyed a lovely sunset. (This is a weather pattern we’ve experience for several days now.)
We made it to Glacier National Park on Wednesday and immediately took to the roof to take in the view:
While driving around in the Jeep that afternoon, we saw our first bear (didn’t get to pet him though).
That evening we enjoyed a wonderful hike, serenaded by some Swainson’s Thrushes happily singing away:
Thursday was pretty rainy, so I decided to stay in and make a work day out of it.
The girls took a side trip to the Canadian counterpart to Glacier: Waterton Lakes National Park.
The Prince of Wales Historic Lodge sits majestically on a hilltop in this park. The views from here were reportedly stunning, but this day’s low, rainy clouds impeded their view.
Despite the weather, they enjoyed their stop at the quaint town of Waterton. A highlight of the day occurred as they were leaving the park and spotted more bears:
Friday was beautiful:
We did a morning hike to St Mary and Virginia Falls:
Virginia Falls was in a full roar with the spring melt:
The spray overpowered all who tried to stand in the fall’s presence.
On the way back to the RV, a break in the trees and a break in the clouds revealed some pretty cool scenery (click the photo for a larger view):
By Friday afternoon, we had left the country:
We camped that night is a provincial park outside of Fort Macleod where the camping was super cheap:
This is just a catch-all photo to represent all of the wide open spaces we’ve enjoyed over the last week. The sun shines brighter, the sky seems taller and the grassy hills just seem to roll on forever. It temporarily assuages my anxiety about global overpopulation:
Sometimes the name of a place is all one needs to want to stop (I’m sure the original Blackfoot term had a more poetic ring to it):
This was a very well-done museum at a “buffalo jump” site used by the native peoples for some 6,000 years. I had heard of the hunting technique of chasing a buffalo heard over a cliff, but I was unaware of the intense strategy and teamwork needed to pull it off successfully, and how that determined whether there would be enough food to last the winter.
This is one of two cliffs in the area that were used for the buffalo jumps. (It was a much higher drop-off thousands of years ago.)
I don’t know what this “litres” nonsense is, but they are noticeably more expensive than gallons.
On Saturday night we camped in a casino parking lot in Calgary, Alberta. It was nice leaching off of their wifi, since good internet has been darn near impossible to find in Canada so far.
On Sunday morning we visited Calgary’s Winsport Olympic Park, which was the site of the 1988 Winter Olympics:
There were a handful of activities to do there, but we opted for the “luge” ride:
It started with a ski lift to the top of the hill, followed by us riding our little plastic luges down a 1.8 kilometer winding track.
Here are Nat and Amy doing a final brake check at the top of the hill. It was a lot of fun. We did it twice.
We stopped Sunday night at a provincial park near Canmore, Alberta. Like many of our other campsites, this one has no plugin for power — and we don’t need it. With traveling nearly every day, our batteries get fully recharged and we therefore have all the electricity we need.
We will head west toward Banff in the morning, then the big push north to Alaska!