Wanderung 6

Pursuing Pioneer Pathways from the Potomac to the Pacific

June-August 2004

July 26 - Drive to Malta, Montana

It perhaps was not too surprising that we basically slept the clock around and awakened at 9 a.m., which is several hours later than usual. It was great to get such a good night's sleep, but it put paid to the idea of getting an early departure to continue our way east. We did manage to eat, pack, hook up, and leave Apgar campground by 10:15, which wasn't too bad considering when we woke up. We were really quite sad to leave the park and made plans to definitely come back to the park when we drove up to Alaska, which we intended to do the following summer. For that visit we thought we would start on the Canadian side and then camp on the east side of Glacier National Park and see more of the lakes, trails, and glaciers found there. As we drove east from West Glacier on US 2 we passed the Moccasin Creek boat ramp about 8 miles down the road. That's where we had started our rafting trip the day before, so we waved to it as we went by. I thought next time we visited the park maybe I'd take the "Mutt and Jeff" down the rapids that we had already rafted. If we made it successfully down all nine rapids we would have saved the initial $80 cost of the boat!

The rest of the drive with the trailer down and around the tip of Glacier National Park through the Marias pass was absolutely uneventful. The grades up and across the Continental Divide were quite gradual, really, and I could maintain at least a speed of 45-50 even while towing. That was enough to not block too many people in back of me, and I also pulled off whenever I could find a reasonable space to let the faster drivers pass. The road was familiar from our loop two days back and that seemed to help a lot by being able to anticipate significant curves and grades.

As on our previous drive, the trees disappeared as we entered the Blackfoot Indian Reservation and drove through Browning to the east. Despite being more arid, the land continued to be cultivated for the entire drive to the east that day. The cropland was mostly winter wheat, as far as I could tell, and the land that was too poor for wheat was still good enough for pasture, but there was no stretch of desert such as we encountered further south in our east to west transits. I enjoyed driving Route 2 because I didn't feel badly about driving 60 mph in a 70 zone as the traffic was so light and the road so straight that folks could easily pass me. The road was also very level and I could use cruise control for long periods of time, which made it even more relaxing.

As they say, however, all good things must come to an end, and ours ended with a bang! In fact, for a few moments before the bang I heard a "whap-whap-whap" sound that I first heard when my 1960 Chevy was getting ready to throw the tread off of its steel belted radial tires while I was in the Army in Oklahoma. I dismissed the sound as due to some ripples in the pavement we were passing over at the time, but unfortunately one of the tires on the trailer was in fact throwing its tread, after which it blew out with a bang. I limped the car over to the side, but this was one of those areas where Route 2 has absolutely no paved shoulder of any kind; it just kind of ends at the white stripe on the side. That is fine as long as you're just rolling along, but when you're trying to pull over to change a tire it is extremely discouraging. I limped slowly to the driveway of the next farm and edged over so that the trailer was crossways in their driveway. That at least put my right hand set of trailer wheels on something solid and it was edged over far enough that traffic could ease past me on the highway.

I had just mentioned to Monika while driving along that we should bring a lug wrench with next time because I didn't have one for the trailer wheels, so I was understandably anxious when I got out the Tundra's lug wrench and checked if it would fit the trailer wheel. Again there is Luck and Dumb Luck, and this was a case of Dumb Luck because the Tundra's lug wrench fit perfectly. I also used the Toyota's jack together with the tongue jack to raise the trailer enough that I was able to take off the old tire (what was left of it) and install the spare. The spare was low, but I did have the battery cum air pump unit with us, so I used that to bring the spare up to 45 pounds per square inch. With all of the preparation of chocking the wheels, unhitching the truck, building a pile of wood for the tongue jack and truck jack to sit on, and actually getting the lug nuts off and back on, it took us a full hour before we were once again on our way.

However, since that tire might have overheated due to some combination of overinflation, the 90 degree temperatures and the 60 mph speeds, I held the speeds down to a very sedate 55 mph for the rest of our way to Malta where we stopped to stay for the night. What with the delay and lower speeds we just couldn't make it to the nice Corps of Engineers campground at Fort Peck that I had wanted to camp at. I also rechecked all the other tire pressures and brought them down to exactly 45 psi. As their inflation limit was 50 PSI, that gave the tires a margin of 5 PSI to expand due to the heat of rolling friction, and I sincerely hoped that was enough because I had no more spare tires for the trailer. We made it to Malta without any problem and put up for the night as an RV park beside the road. Unfortunately, it was also right beside the railroad main line; the railroad bridge was 200 feet in back of us and the campground shook whenever a heavily loaded freight train roared by. Sigh. So I faced yet another night of listening to trains rumbling through the trailer as it were, and I thought rather wistfully of the proverbial nice quiet campground that had once again eluded us.

Still, the campground did have free hot showers and electricity and water, so we could at least get clean after dinner and charge up both of the computers while we did our evening chores. I also started charging the several sets of rechargeable AA batteries for the camera that we had used during the days at Glacier Park. During the night we had trains rumbling by about every hour, according to Monika, and a big wind and rain storm came through in the middle of the night. The wind made the overhanging tree limbs scratch against the trailer, a most unpleasant sound similar to someone scraping their fingernails across a blackboard, and the gusts rocking the trailer really made it impossible to sleep during that period.

Copyright 2004 by Robert W. Holt and Elsbeth Monika Holt
Prolog Map Epilog
June 2004
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July 2004
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August 2004
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