Interlopers

Visiting pronghorn enjoy a tasty dinner of freshly-mown hay near Billings, Montana:

Interlopers

If there’s one thing I’ve learned while driving around in the Rockies, it’s to keep my camera with a long lens handy. I took this from the side of the highway on our way home from a long road trip last summer — could have used a bit more “reach,” but 200mm was just about enough for these guys.

Jammer

One of the original red tour buses at Glacier National Park in Montana:

Jammer

These sweet machines were built by the White Motor Company between 1936 and 1938 — and rebuilt in 2000 by Ford. Now they run on propane (93 percent cleaner running than the original engines) and have automatic transmissions, but the originals had somewhat finicky manual transmissions — thus the nickname, courtesy of the driver’s need to “jam” the transmission into gear.

Milkweed

On the way home from our trip to Glacier N.P. and the Canadian Rockies, it so happened that we spent a night in Great Falls, Montana. Before we left the next morning, we stopped off to check out the Lewis & Clark National Historic Trail Interpretive Center — great displays, lots of hands-on stuff for the little one to play with. Oh, and all the landscape plants around the building are historically accurate — just what the Lewis & Clark expedition would have encountered on their way through.

Milkweed

Like these milkweed blossoms.

Technicolor greenery

On our recent Rocky Mtn. road trip, we spent one night in Great Falls, Montana — just to break up the long drive home. I don’t know about you, but I never would have expected to find a scene like this in Great Falls:

Technicolor greenery

This casino’s parking lot display is lined up along the side of the interstate that cuts through town, in the middle of a cluster of cheap hotels. Big hit with the interstate trucking crowd.

Technicolor greenery, redux

Sun on a cloudy day

Seen in front of the lodge in East Glacier, Montana:

Sun on a cloudy day

On our Glacier National Park trip, we drove out to East Glacier to check out the storied lodge there — and were fortunate enough to actually have sporadic sunlight for our visit.

OK, we had sporadic rain too. And sporadic 40 mph gusts of wind…

But with such good scenery, we were happy to deal with the occasional annoying weather.

Last chance to see…

As I mentioned in an earlier post, we recently returned from a family road trip to Glacier National Park (and some parks in the Canadian Rocky Mountains to boot!). 12 days, 4,000 miles of driving, a bit short of 1,000 pictures taken — a worthwhile if occasionally tiring trip.

the_drive.png

Our motivation for the road trip was pretty simple — we wanted our daughter to see Glacier N.P. at least once while it still actually has glaciers. OK, and it doesn’t hurt that this year marks the 100th anniversary of the park.

Last chance to see

While the weather wasn’t any too helpful, the scenery didn’t disappoint (although the remaining glaciers did keep playing hide-and-seek with us, courtesy of some pretty stiff cloud-cover).

Looking down valley

Sad to say, the glaciers have seen better days. The park had 150 glaciers back in 1850 — now it’s down to 26, all of which are expected to be gone by 2020.

If you want to see all this for yourself, it’s time to hit the road!