Of Water and Oil

The Water part first:

An addendum to yesterday: We crossed the Mississippi River in Minnesota. This time it was THE Mississippi River. Unlike crossing it downstream at a big city like St. Louis or Memphis, where you cross on a high bridge over a large wide river, in Minnesota it is just an ordinary road-level bridge over a fairly small stream. US Rt. 2 passes over the river near its headwaters.

It rained all night during our stay at the Devil's Lake Walmart and continued fitfully as we continued west. It's not as if this part of North Dakota needed it, given the floods of last few months. The water is still high alongside the road and we passed several large lakes that were not on our maps. Farm buildings with water up to the second story gave away the fact that they were not lakes at all. In some places the water was within a couple of feet of the highway and there were spots where the railroad tracks running parallel to the road seemed to be floating across a lake.

We stopped in Rugby, ND, for breakfast at the Coffee Cottage Cafe. The coffee was nothing special, but our English Muffins with eggs, bacon and cheese were quite tasty. They also had some really good-looking homemade pies. Unfortunately, it was a bit too early for pie.

The real reason for the stop was that the crossroads at Rugby sit at the geographical center of North America. So we had to take the requisite photo of Speedy by the monument. Then we continued west along Route 2 in the rain, snug in Speedy, as a couple of rather soggy looking motorcycle tourers rode by.

We rode on towards Minot, passing over the Mouse River, the one that recently flooded Minot. We were well downstream of the city, but the river, where we crossed it, was still quite high, flooding the land around the road. It was still only a foot or two below the bridge as we crossed it. When we got to Minot, the damage the flood did was still pretty obvious, but the river is now well below its banks.

The rain had petered out by this time as we headed on to Western North Dakota. There is definitely an oil boom happening in the northwestern corner of the state. Somewhere around Stanley, wells started appearing. They became more numerous, and this was just along the highway. Most of them looked brand new. We saw hundreds of wells, dozens of drill rigs and a constant stream of heavy tank trucks and big gravel carriers. For most of the drive along US 2, we had seen very few trucks, but now they were constant.

Towns like Ray and Williston are basically oil supply towns with lots of big metal buildings going up along the road, next to the prefab worker housing--clusters of barracks-like flat-roofed buildings with euphemistic names like "Tioga Lodge".

They know how to have their fun, too. We stopped in the town of Ray to watch a mud volleyball tournament, the next Olympic sport without doubt. If, for some reason, you can't picture it--we have pictures.

After Williston, we detoured to see the Confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers, a historic site along the Lewis and Clark Trail, with a stop at the Fort Union Trading Post, a National Historic Site. This is a re-creation of the fort as only the foundations were left as of the 1980s. At this point we finally arrived in Montana, where we drove through the Fort Peck Indian Reservation to the Corps of Engineers campground at Fort Peck Lake, a spot chosen for the availability of warm showers. The sun is setting in a clear sky, the cicadas are buzzing and we are clean.

Photos