Crystals, Wisdom & Polygamy Porter - tales from the road

With the onset of cool mornings & as we are only equiped with light summer sleeping bags we

headed south for warmer weather. We travelled to Missoula to check out Brennans wave, an artificial wave on the Clark Fork river flowing thru the middle of town. This was the first of a number of whitewater enhancements I plan to view in the States as part of the build up to the construction of our waves on the Hawea next year. Unlike NZ with our constant rainfall & lakes to ensure a constant flow of water in our rivers, the western US relies on snow melt to fill the rivers & once that snow is gone by mid to late summer the rivers are at a low flow.

So local kayaking & rafting is seasonal & is in full swing in spring to mid summer & is generally all over by the end of July.

So the Missoula wave was small but good fun on a hot afternoon with a few of the locals.

After a good sluicing we headed to our 2 favourite stores, the first to stock up on books & the other to buy Montana steak, cheapest animal flesh in these parts, to barbeque for dinner.

As part of our routine , we camped, for the night, at a state forest park.

That night we shared the camping area with some economic refugees from Vermont looking for a simpler life in the west. This family were tent camping with a son, dog & a huge macaw parrot. Mmmmm, what is their reality?

We moved south thru the scenic Bitteroot Valley now on the Lewis & Clark historic trail with great interpretative panels on the way, giving our kids (and Mary & I) a great history lesson.

These guys were the first Europeans to cross the Rockies to the Pacific doing so in 1803 - 1804 with the aid of a very able Indian woman Sacachawea.

Among the zoological specimans they sent back to the civilized world was a grizzly bear skin , the grizzly being previously unknown to western science. We crossed over the Lost Trail & Chief Joseph passes into the Beaverhead national forest, stopping at the Big Hole National Monument, a poignantly preserved battlefield site where the US calvary attacked a large band of Nez Pearce indians who had refused to sign a treaty and who fought a number of battles before their war ended. Their leader Cheif Joseph became very well known & I've read posters in the past with his wise prophetic words on the environment.

In these remote Montana mountains we found Wisdom a small farming town in a state of semi-decline surrounded by big ranches. We wandered around town, talked to a cowboy and sent some postcards from the post office manned by a thalidomide clerk. We drove away leaving Wisdom behind. The countryside was not unlike Central Otago and the ranchers were very busy bailing hay. We headed to the Pioneer mountains to Crystal Park to camp and fossick for semi-precious stones, a place our old hobo mate Larry had told us about.

While Mary & the kids scratched around & I talked to an old professor who had just returned from Christchurch working with landcare and a Japanese butterfly project.

With some stones in our possession we headed south into Idaho & onto Utah eventually arriving in Salt Lake City. We randomly picked a freeway offramp, found a laundromat for a long over due cleanup and then a garage to service the van. We phoned our friend Kathy, who was on the Salmon with us & discovered that her place was 2 blocks from the laundry. We had a great time with Kathy for a couple of days, the highlight being attending her debut as bass guitairist in a rock band, Light Vizon, totally enjoying the concert & yaahooing in the front row. No crowd surfing though. Are all band girls called Kathy?

We went to the Saturday morning farmers market, pigging out on the free samples of salsa, jerky, goats cheese, breads, oils, noodles, peaches etc, etc. We listened to a pianist with his bicycle trailered piano and watched incedible hula hoop dancing.

Then we went to the temple and did some Mormonism, including watching another gig, a live radio broadcast of the Mormon Tabernacle choir, who did a couple of fantastic numbers. The film on Joseph Smith was however sugary propaganda and completly non-juicy. We managed to evade the missionaries who were everywhere & ready to pounce on the vulnerable. Meanwhile on the subject of beer, there are many microbreweries in the states we have visited, and one, in Utah makes a brew called Polagamy Porter & their slogan is "Why have only one?" I haven't sampled this one yet, but plan to.

In the afternoon we headed east towards Colorado driving thru dusk into the night & moving closer to a lightening storm which just got bigger & bigger untill we were right on the edge of it with powerfull bolts of lightening from the sky to the ground and going horizontally right across the windscreen, and right above us turning the clouds blue all around us. We turned around and fled back for cover under a petrol station canopy in the last town we had passed thru. The kids were asleep & missed it all. We eventually got going again driving to the Dinosaur National Monument where we drove into another lightening storm as big as the previous one, just before our campsite.

The lightening lit up the whole area and we were relieved to finally park under some trees while the storm raged around us.

This park was fascinating and has a large wall in the visitors center currently being renovated of hundreds of dinosaur bones which had accumulated in a river eddy 65 million years ago. We were not allowed onto the building site & had to be contented with some sauropod bones in the cliff walls, which were very impressive. We chatted to the ranger, a kayaker, who told us about the kayaking in the park.

We were very interested & tried very hard to follow the rules & get a permit, but the office was 30 kms away & no one would answer the phone. So we were forced to do a rebel run.

On the way to the put in we visited some wonderfull indian pictographs. Max, Otie & I did the 14 km run on the Green river, the whitewater was easy and the canyon scenery was spectacular. We snuck out of the park & headed into the night towards Colorado.