Day 121 - Many Glacier to Fort Peck

I Think We've Been Here Before

It was drizzling a bit when we got up in the dark this morning. Sunrise is definitely late at Many Glacier. 

We departed our campsite early and gave Nell's one more chance. We had a pleasant waiter this time, but didn't make good choices with the food. We thought that something more simple would be a good idea, so Ellen ordered the oatmeal and I went for a short stack of multi-grain pancakes with bacon. The oatmeal was the consistency of wallpaper paste and the pancakes were uncooked in the middle. At least the bacon was crisp.

After that, we dumped Speedy's tanks and were on our way. We negotiated our way through the potholes back to the main road, but quickly turned onto a back road that was much straighter than 89 and went directly to Browning, where we refueled and headed east on US 2 for the long trek back to New England.

The rain had stopped and we were out of the mountains onto the Northern Montana plains. US 2 is a pretty straight road through open fields and rangeland. It seems fairly flat and even though there were many recently harvested wheat fields, it didn't have the interesting landscape that we saw going through Idaho.

It was a long drive with few breaks, stopping for lunch at a park in Harve. The only big break was just after the town of Malta, where we turned off to visit the Bowdoin National Wildlife Refuge. This consists of a big lake, Bowdoin Lake and several smaller wetland units. It is a waterfowl refuge and they were there in great numbers.

After stopping at the visitor center, we started down the 15 mile tour loop around the lake. We didn't get past the first boat ramp before the spotting scope came out to survey the ducks. There were not only large numbers of several duck species, but also grebes, many coot, several shorebirds along with snipe and grouse. As we continued down the road we flushed sparrows and meadowlarks and spotted Nothern Harriers and Bald Eagles.

By the time we arrived at the second boat ramp, it was time to turn around, but not before spotting a pair of Long-billed Dowitchers, a Black-bellied Plover, Killdeer and Lesser Yellowlegs. There were also Franklin's and California Gulls. We had spent a couple of hours here and had only driven about a third of the loop...if they only had a campground!

For a campground we had to go a little further, about 80 miles to the Corps of Engineers campground at Fort Peck Lake. We arrived about a half hour before sunset at the Downstream campground. We didn't recognize the way in, but Ellen was sure that we'd been here before. After we got settled and found that we had good mobile Internet access, I looked through past Speedy Journal entries and, sure enough, we stopped here on the way to our first visit to Glacier, stopping, I wrote, for the warm showers. What a memory, that stop was over six years ago in 2011.

On that trip we went from here to Glacier. On this trip it was from Glacier to here. Did we do it for the warm showers. Ask in the morning.