June 24 - Great Falls, Montana

We paid the usual price for staying up late the night before by sleeping in quite late. Still, we had breakfast and got over to the Great Falls library to answer our email by about 10:30. Writing to our friends and relatives took over an hour, so we didn't finally start on the Volksmarch until noon. If you come this way and want to walk the Volksmarch here, I would recommend parking on the side streets just to the north of the library as they have a 3 hour limit and no meters. The Perkins Restaurant where we obtained the start box and walking directions definitely did not have enough parking to leave our car there a couple of hours, so we looked along the route for an alternative sport to park. Since the walk route passed right by the library, we thought we would park our vehicle there and start the walk from that point, which is what we did.

The first leg of the Great Falls Volksmarch was a straight shot west past the library to a nice park with several interesting features. Some beautiful stain glass pieces were swaying in the wind near a historic log cabin, and they were a very unusual and attractive form of outdoor sculpture. We also looped around a very pretty (and well stocked!) duck pond. There were some kind of big, tall-necked swans who were honking in a bass voice, and I think they were trumpeter swans, but I'm not sure (somehow "klaxon swans", altho accurate, didn't seem like quite the right descriptive phrase).

From the park we walked thru a tunnel underpass to the other side of an old railroad bed and then joined a hiker-biker path on the old rail right of way down along the Missouri River. The river is flowing north and east at this point, somewhat disconcerting to those of us from the Midwest where it always flows south and east. The path afforded some nice views up and down the river on this part of the walk, except for an oil refinery across the river that was rather less than scenic.

Our walking route paralleled Riverside Drive for about 3 miles, ending up at the Black Eagle Dam and Falls. Actually, we later found out the hiker-biker trail goes on another few miles to the Rainbow Falls and even farther, so if you bring your bicycles you might want to try out the rest of that riverside trail. The Black Eagle Falls had a reasonable amount of water pouring over them, which was not true of all the falls on the Missouri, and it looked quite impressive.

The return route from the Black Eagle Falls was a jog in toward town and then a section through an industrial district (interesting but not scenic) before we turned south for about a mile into the city. Turning right, we walked straight west another mile thru city neighborhoods. We enjoyed seeing the houses of the central city on this segment; they ranged from modest to quite elegant and expensive. The walk finish up by going past a very pretty county courthouse and back to the Perkins restaurant and the library where we had left the truck.

All in all, we felt this was a very pleasant walk along the river and thru the nice neighborhoods except for the two-block stretch in the industrial district. I felt that the hiker-biker trail plus the bike routes in the city could easily be turned into a very scenic and historic 25 kilometer Voksbike event, and I rather hoped the club would do that.

Skipping Perkins because I tend to overeat there, we drove to a Wendy's on the south side of town for lunch. There another one of these odd western experiences occurred--the proprietor came by while we were finishing up our lunch and said, "Would you like another soft drink?" I was startled by this as it is definitely not Standard Operating Procedure for fast food places back eastbut I stammered out a "yes" and she hustled off to refill our coke and bring it back. I thought that was above and beyond the call of duty, especially as we were doing our normal cheapskate routine of drinking from two straws in one coke. She could have just as well said something like, "Can't you people even afford to each buy your own drink?", but no, she was nice and accommodating about it. This kind of thing happened repeatedly on the western side of our trip and I had to wonder if it was some leftover of the frontier culture that was cropping up.

However, the commercial strip where we had lunch gave a very different impression of Great Falls than the city center or the riverfront area that we had just walked thru. Across the street from Wendy's was a "loan for car title" business, and I think I saw two more of those on the strip. Each block of the two or three mile strip seemed to have its own casino, casino + bar, casino + lounge, or casino + bar + lounge. Right off the Air Force base was the 24-hour massage parlor that was featuring specials on "shampoo massages", which I must admit sounded like fun. Of course, maybe like mud wrestling it only seems like fun until you actually try to do it and then it's probably a mess, but that is pure speculation. I did try stamping on wine grapes in a barrel with bare feet once--like they used to do in Italy--and that was about as messy as you might expect. Now my mother said that when she went wading in the creek as a girl on the farm she enjoyed the feeling of mud squishing up between her toes, but being a city boy I found the feeling of grapes squishing up between my toes to be weird to say the least. Now shampoo squishing up between my toes, that might be OK depending on exactly who was doing the squishing.

Where was I? Ah yes, after lunch we drove out of town to the north and east to the Great Falls of the Missouri that Lewis found on their epic journey. For Lewis way back then, finding the falls was the only bright spot on what had been a very grueling, not to say dangerous, day. He had been chased by a grizzly bear, had a stand off with three bison blocking his path, and was later attacked by some kind of large cat like a puma or mountain lion, so it must have ranked right up there in the World's All Time Top Ten list of Very Bad Days!

A dam has been built just above the falls and you can kind of imagine how it might have looked to Lewis with a lot more water in it, but at this time the water had been reduced to a veritable trickle. Don't get me wrong, the Great Trickle of the Missouri is still quite pretty and definitely worth a visit, just don't expect a real waterfall. I enjoyed a sign saying that if you heard 8 short blasts of a whistle you should leave the area immediately and get to higher ground. I expect that signal would mean the dam is breaking, and you bet your boots you would want to leave pronto! But if that ever happened, good luck getting to your car and driving up the little twisty two lane driveway in time to avoid a wall of water crashing downstream-it could jolly well end up as one of your own personal Top Ten Very Bad Days!

We also stopped by Rainbow Falls, another one of the set of five falls discovered by Lewis, and again you could see what a magnificent sight it must have been before the dam was built. A 30-foot high shelf of rock extends absolutely evenly across the entire width of the Missouri River at that point, and with a lot of imagination I could visualize a uniform sheet of water falling over it onto the rocks below. Now, alas, there is just the trickle allowed thru by the dam owners, so only two little corners of it have any water falling. Not enough to create any kind of rainbow, unfortunately, but again worth seeing if nothing else for historic interest.

Since it was near supper time, we drove back along the commercial strip to take the most direct route back to our campground, stopping off to fill up the truck on the way. After our light supper of sandwiches we discussed our future itinerary, trying to decide whether we really want to turn back east for the EAA fly in at Oshkosh or visit Washington and Oregon while we are this far west. As Monika remarked, it took us quite a while just to get the trailer to Great Falls.

That evening Monika processed pictures on Daddy while I caught up with the journal on Baby. Monika composed another set of four wildlife pictures from Teddy Roosevelt National Park to use as letter paper, so I struggled with the ink cartridges in the printer for a while before we got it to print correctly. She used the picture of the bison that walked next to our trailer in the campground, the wild stallion guarding his herd, a coyote hunting for a prairie dog and a prairie dog watching out for coyotes to make the montage and I think it turned out great. I got a chance to read while we were printing the pictures, but by when we were done it was time for us to turn in for the night.