Here's the overview map for my trip. Follow the green lines in their not-so-direct path from Minot to Helena.
I took a redeye to Minot, ND, where my brother's family lives, had a quick lunch, and then drove 3 hours (Kevin said it would take 4... oops!) to Grafton, ND, where I went to high school.
I spent a wonderful afternoon reconnecting with Peggy, who still ranks high on my lists of favorite teachers and accompanists.
We went on a walking tour of Grafton, and she caught me up on some of the many changes. Then I went to my 20th high school reunion, which was fun and surreal.
Lots of people at the reunion had cameras, so I left mine in the car, but see http://classof83.home.comcast.net/photo_album.html if you're curious. The next morning I dropped by our old house. I couldn't believe how big the chokecherry and birch trees we'd planted had grown.
This mighty evergreen started out as a 6 inch seedling that I won in a 6th grade poster contest. A massive hailstorm in the early 1980s almost took it out, along with most of the rooves and siding in town, but that little tree endured.
Now it towers over the house! The house itself I barely recognized--new siding, new colors, new windows, new shingles...
One of the things that I hadn't realized I'd missed about North Dakota until I returned was the clouds. ND has more interesting clouds than we see in the Bay Area.
Skies are a theme you'll pick up in this photo-essay, because I've long tried and failed to convey how different the skies are in different places. In ND, the sky is wide, but low.
The landscape is flat and stretches forever, broken only by shelterbelts (strips of trees between fields meant to reduce wind erosion), but it feels and looks "low" somehow.
I also forgot how stunning a bright yellow field of rapeseed (better known by its more politically correct name, "canola," as in canola oil) can look.
I spent the rest of the weekend in Minot visiting my brother's family. On Sunday we visited a number of Lewis and Clark interpretive sites. At the Knife River Indian Villages museum, my nieces Bronwyn and Madison decided I needed to model the bear robe.
This is a bull boat, which Mandan women made from the hide of one bison and some tree branches. Round and flat, they didn't steer too terribly well. Remember these next time you're frustrated with your boat.
This is the only photo I tried to take inside their recreation of an earth lodge. Read more about these and everything else at http://www.ndlewisandclark.com
My brother Kevin and his wife Jenepher in front of the earth lodge.
And the nieces, working furiously to finish their workbooks so they could become Junior Rangers.
Jen, glad that they were amused...
Kevin, wondering how long they'd stay that way... After a short walk to see fields and fields of round depressions where earthlodges once had stood, we drove to the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center in Washburn, ND. See the same website.
Then we drove to a reconstruction of Ft. Clark, where L&C spent the winter of 1804-05. It was almost closing-time, so we rushed through and I didn't attempt to take any pictures of the fort itself, but the stretch of Missouri where they wintered is still breathtaking.
Here's about a 240-degree panoramic view of the river, to give you more of a sense of it. The real Ft. Clark's location is a matter of some debate, but most experts agree it's probably underwater now, since the Missouri got rearranged quite a bit by time and the Garrison Diversion Project, which you can google for an interesting sidebar on politics and questionable environmental management enterprises.
Bronwyn, Jen, Kevin, and Madison. The girls said their lollipops from the L&C Interpretive Center were amazing, so there's a culinary tip for your visit.
Meanwhile in Montana, my parents were establishing base camps for our canoe trip down the Missouri river's Wild and Scenic section of the Missouri Breaks. This is Mom's picture of Dad and Candy fishing. (All the pictures whose names end in _KSV are Mom's; the rest are mine.)
Looking upstream from Loma Ferry.
Mom and Dad parked the trailer at Loma Ferry (our put-in point), then drove to Judith Landing (our take-out point) and left the truck, then drove the car to Havre to meet my train.
Along the way, they stopped at Fort Chandon, yet another Lewis and Clark site.
North-central Montana looks like this--a combination of valleys, badlands, and sandstone cliffs.
I'd never ridden Amtrak before. It was fun! I had a great chat with a lady from Vancouver in the morning, then had lunch with a trio of New Yorkers who wondered out loud about the economy of the area we were passing through. I asked, "Have you noticed all the farms, cattle ranches, and oil pumps outside the window?"
Here's a closer view of the Missouri Breaks section of the river. We spent Monday night in their trailer at Loma Ferry campground, where we met Frank from Casper, WY, and Steve from Portland, OR. Leave it to Mom to figure out that Frank is married to a high school friend of hers from Glendive, Jill. Anyway, we put in mid-Tuesday morning after organizing all our gear.
Here's an even closer view. Our plan was to put in at river mile 21, the fork of the Marias and Missouri Rivers, and take out at mile 88.5, where Judith Creek enters the Missouri, about halfway across Map 3. The Marias posed the biggest navigational challenge Lewis had yet faced. Which was the Missouri? Both were wide and mighty at the time, but today the Marias is a relative trickle, so it's hard to relate to his confusion. Fortunately he guessed right.
That was an overview of the Bureau of Land Management 1in=1mi river maps we used to keep track of where we were. This is the first section of map 1, which shows most of the 21.5mi we covered on Tuesday.
We put in Tuesday morning after getting all our gear organized and loaded. Here's Mom and Dad working out their tandem paddling act.
As you can see, Mom and Dad's boat was pretty full and was riding low! Fortunately we weren't heading into any whitewater. The cute cargo you see is their black labrador retriever, Candy, who was my tent-mate.
At mile 22.7 we passed a gaging station. The water-depth marker on the right shore is completely out of water, so you can safely conclude that the river was fairly low. It was flowing at about 75% of its mean CFS (cubic feet per second). This is right about where L&C camped on 2 June 1805.
Steve and Frank put in just behind us.
Their boat is riding a lot higher, as a canoe should.
Steve wasted no time getting started fishing, which Candy found interesting.
We finished off Map 1 on Tuesday. The final stretch took us past the site of Lewis and Clark's camp of 1 June 1805, past Virgelle Ferry, and up the bend to Coal Banks Landing, where we camped on 3 July 2003.
At mile 39 we passed under the wires of Virgelle Ferry.
I liked how the trees were reflecting under the wires.
Even wires this low have to be marked so that crop-duster planes don't meet with disaster.
Then again, maybe we were just near a 76 gas station...
Virgelle Ferry is still in active use today, and we actually saw it carrying a truck across as we were approaching.
This was the scene from my seat. I was navigatrix--see the map right in front of me. If these maps look like they got mutilated and dripped upon, it's because they did. Fortunately, they're waterproof.
Most of Tuesday we were paddling past badlands terrain like this.
We made our first camp at mile 41.5, Coal Banks Landing, where a lot of people START their Wild and Scenic trips. Dad was pooped. This is the first of the Sunburn Series.
I guess I was eating or something when Mom took this. Mom and Dad were in the brown tent, and Candy and I shared the yellow Timberlike. Later that night a thunderstorm kicked up ferocious winds that pulled out several of its stakes. I had to pound them all the way into the ground before they'd stay. Unfortunately, I had tarp issues, and half the tent was a puddle by the time the rain stopped--so Candy got up and moved to the dry side of me, and we both stayed mostly dry.
But I've gotten ahead of myself. Steve and Frank made camp next door, and here's Steve searing steaks on his Coleman stove.
They graciously invited us over for the beer they owed me: I had jokingly suggested that I should charge a beer as admission to people who want to watch me assemble and disassemble my PakCanoe folding canoe (see http://www.pakboats.com), and they thought that was fair.
This is the view downriver from camp.
And the view behind us as we got going again Wednesday morning.
Wednesday we traveled across most of Map 2.
Here's the right bank just downriver from camp.
The cows grazing atop the bluff give a sense of scale. You can start to get a sense the Big Sky in this photo, too--see how the sky stretches infinitely upward here?
The green patches on the maps represent clumps of cottonwoods like these. When you only have islands, bends, and contours to go by otherwise, you'd be amazed how important keeping track of the cottonwood groves becomes.
The left bank bluffs were majestic.
Apparently Mom thought so, too.
Dad paddled stern and also had to try to talk Candy out of jumping out of the canoe on a frequent basis.
My PakCanoe handled a little better than their Alumacraft, so sometimes I'd get ahead a ways and then take a nap.
As you might have guessed, I got a nice sunburn on my shins that day.
Mom and I were dueling photographers--I with my Canon PowerShot G1 and she with her PowerShot G2. You'll see some of the advantages of the G2 in later pictures.