Coeur d'Alene

We stopped here going both ways - Saturday, the 6th, and Monday, the 15th.  The main motivation in both directions was coffee, although on the way out we ended up having the most amazing grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner (I can't recall if we ever got coffee). On the return trip, I picked up coffee at Calypsos (Java on Sherman has been our regular stop on previous trips but I wanted to try something new), before going down to the lake to check out the beach (the only beach of the trip, as far as I can remember).

We were home by dinner time.  Now I get to start planning the road trip back to Minnesota next June for graduation.

Pompey's Pillar

This is the first time we've driven this section of I-94 east of Billings (perhaps since I was a kid), despite the large number of trips we've done through this part of the world. Somehow, we've just wound up on other routes. So this was the first time we've visited Pompey's Pillar.

Pompey's Pillar is one of the many singular rock formations across the west that Lewis and Clark chose to scribble their names on - not that they were the first or the last to do so. In this case, Clark noted the aboriginal markings and then proceeded to sign his full name next to them (on July 25, 1806).  The Pillar is located along the Yellowstone River and is named after Sacajawea's son, who traveled with them.

The Pillar is significant in another way. According to Google Maps, it is 854 miles from our home in Seattle. And it is also 854 miles from Northfield MN.  So it precisely marks the halfway point between D's home and his school, at least if you follow the I-94 option.  A little more than 12 hours on each side -- if you drive like a madman.

North Dakota

For the second year in a row, we've had to drop D at Carleton on a Friday and be back in Seattle for work on Tuesday morning. For the second year in a row, we spent Friday night at the Marquette in Minneapolis, then hightailed it back in three days from there. Last year, we made it to Missoula on US 12, largely avoiding the Interstate. But this year, we took I-94/I-90 the whole way to Seattle.

We spent Saturday night in Dickinson. As we drove into town, M was texting with D about some issues with scheduling his GREs. Ironically, I took my GREs in Dickinson way back in 1982, while living in the apartment on Prairie Avenue. The apartment is still there (we drove past), although the Schlumberger shop has long since moved.

These pictures are from several different spots along I-94.  The Continental Divide sign is between Valley City and Jamestown in eastern ND and marks the divide between Hudson's Bay and the Mississippi.  The others are from a rest area near Glen Ullin, from the Geese in Flight sculpture marking the "Enchanted Highway," and the badlands in Teddy Roosevelt National Park.

You can tell this trip that I've been experimenting more with the panorama format on the iPhone.

Northfield

We're back again, for the fourth September in row, dropping D off for his senior year. (I guess we actually came through a year earlier, too). We just spent one night. Long enough to help him find his stuff from June and move it across campus into his new dorm room. We arrived late afternoon on Thursday and M and I headed out towards Minneapolis after lunch on Friday.

My sore foot and the gray weather sort of discouraged me from my normal early morning walk along the river, and so I have few good pictures this time around.

Northfield/Carleton
July 2010
September 2011
September 2012
September 2013

Sioux Falls

It's so easy to generalize the Great Plains or the Midwest into monolithic landscapes - horizontal, two-dimensional landscapes. And there is some validity to that, but what's neat to me is that this is exactly what makes their hills and their valleys and their forests and their waterfalls so interesting.

Geologically, it's also easy for me to forget that bedrock, sometimes very old bedrock, can be exposed in these areas - not just covered in a blanket of glacial silt or tilled corn fields.

Driving from Seattle to Boston on I-90, you might never stop to think that there really are falls in Sioux Falls (and you would certainly never see them), but that's why it is important to get off the highway now and then.

During the last ice age, the Big Sioux River got rerouted by the glaciers and then it eroded down to bedrock - in this case the incredibly resistant Sioux Quartzite - and the modern falls were formed. Just like along the fall line of the Atlantic Seaboard, waterfalls were navigation barriers and power sources, so cities were built.

The Sioux Quartzite is roughly two billion years old (half the age of the earth and long before any kind of life we would recognize). And two billion year-old ripples are still preserved on its eroded surface.

Badlands

Despite the bleak weather, we drove the loop through the Badlands. It's still a neat landscape, even if the colors and the relief are a bit muted by the gray backdrop and the lack of shadows. My first memory of a trip through here - when I was a kid - was of an electrical storm. And every time I come back, that's what I'm hoping for.

We didn't stop at Wall Drug. D enjoyed his first visit, when he was very young, but since then he's sort of resented the stop - something about touristy and stupid (Wall Drug 2011). So we had to forego the free ice water and the chance to perch our child on a the back of a dinosaur (or was it a jackalope?), but I could rest easy knowing that I had a "Wall Drug" bumper sticker above the map above my desk at home - right next to "Sea Lion Caves" and "This Car Climbed Mt. Washington."

Black Hills

The Black Hills were misnamed for this trip - they would better have been called the gray hills. The cold damp overtook us and stuck around for our drive into and through South Dakota.  The walls of Spearfish Canyon were barely visible and the colorful rocks not quite so colorful.

We stayed in the old Town Hall in Lead, which was cool.  We would have had a nice view of the old Homestake Pit (gold mine) across the street, but the clouds were too thick to see the other side.  We ate in the old round house and then went down to Deadwood so M and D could gamble (they play different games and different stakes - we will embarrass neither by saying more).

Folks were a bit nervous about the forecast of snow, having been completely buried by the early season blizzard last year. Fortunately, this time they only got a few inches, whereas last year they got several feet.

Little Big Horn

There's not a whole lot of anything but grassland (and Billings) between Red Lodge and Belle Fourche, but US 212 through southeast Montana was uncharted territory, at least by us, so we took the road less traveled.

There were no shortage of battles between Native Americans and 19th Century U.S. soldiers. Some are better memorialized than others. Some were real battles, some were small fights and skirmishes, and some were brutal and lopsided massacres. Some mystery still remains about the details, but the bottom line is that Custer lost this one.  But it also represented one of the last, brief victories for the tribes and despite their success here, is as much reminder of that ultimate loss as that of the US Cavalry.

I think I'm just intrigued by the geography of historical events and the notion of standing in the same landscape, in the same footsteps, as these earlier people.

Missouri Headwaters

No river begins in a single place - any more than any of us has a single ancestor.  The Missouri River begins on the sides of hundreds of mountains, in small springs, in rocky lakes - a map of which would define the river's enormous watershed. But the river named the Missouri begins in this one special place just north of Three Forks, Montana, where the Gallatin, Madison, and Jefferson Rivers come together.

From here it flows roughly 2300 miles to where it reaches the Mississippi just north of modern St. Louis. And from there it flows roughly 1200 miles to the Gulf of Mexico (finding river distances, or at least consistent ones, is more difficult than you might imagine). That means this spot is 3500 miles from the Gulf of Mexico.

There are only three other rivers in the world (The Nile, The Amazon, and the Yangtze) where you can stand on a riverbank farther from the ocean than this. And it's possible to follow the Jefferson River upstream from here another 300 miles to a small spring (Brower's) in the Centennial Mountains west of Yellowstone.

We stayed in Bozeman the previous night, but I drove back to the headwaters early the next morning and scrambled up to Lewis Rock (Lewis made observations from here when he and Clark visited on July 27, 1805).  This provided an incredible overlook of the confluence.

The three forks of the Missouri arrive here meandering across the broad alluvial valley to the south, but then squeeze together and exit through a narrow gap in these limestone cliffs that mark the northern edge of the basin.

I also posted from Three Forks a few years ago (Three Forks 2010).

..

Camas Prairie

Had I written a tour guide for the first day and a half of our trip, it would have talked a lot about the repeated flushing of Lake Missoula down the Clark Fork Valley and out across the scablands of eastern Washington to the Columbia (a long time ago). We traveled U.S. 2 across Washington, across Moses Coulee and past Dry Falls. Last night we stayed in Thompson Falls atop an enormous gravel terrace that dates to the floods. And this morning I detoured up past Rainbow Lake (scoured and plucked by the floods) and back to the Clark Fork across Camas Prairie.

Camas Prairie is best appreciated early in the morning or late in the afternoon, since the low light and shadowing would accentuate the fields of giant ripples left when the plug was pulled on Lake Missoula and the water north of here flooded southward across this valley.  The ripples are hundreds of feet apart, indicating very deep, very fast water.

Unfortunately, we didn't get here until midday and the sun was too high in the sky, so this photo doesn't really do justice to the ripples. But with a little imagination, you can not only see the ripples on the broad valley floor, but you can also see the old lake shorelines on the hills in the background (you've got to look carefully on the expanded image).

My companions are willing and cooperative travelers, but aren't terribly interested in the geologic stories (they don't even believe them), they don't seem to appreciate geographic trivia the way I do, and I think they ignore most of my historical anecdotes. Maybe I should probably focus more on the distribution of cell towers in the American west and factors influencing the life of lithium batteries.

Thompson Falls

We're off on another road trip to Minnesota, for the fourth and final time. Sort of. I'll probably drive back again next June to help pack up D's stuff. And I'm sure we'll do this trip again - but not with the same destination.

Every year it gets harder to find a new and different route and this trip certainly repeats some old territory, but we'll also fill in a few more gaps on the map.

We had every night of the trip reserved in advance - which is always a trade-off between certainty and spontaneity. Our first night was in Thompson Falls, Montana.

I got up early and drove up the Clark Fork ten miles or so to watch the sun spill over the hills and into the valley. Then came back to the falls, just below our motel, where I wandered across to the falls. Water levels are low so there wasn't a lot of excitement and the dam sort of diminishes the splendor of the falls anyway, but still a beautiful morning.

We had breakfast at Minnie's, then headed off to Missoula via a route that let me ponder the big Lake Missoula floods.