May 23rd - Livingston, Montana

We made it to Livingston around 1:30 this afternoon. Our overnight stay at the rest area was uneventful. Montana is stunningly beautiful.

Threre are LOTS of photos below, maybe half of the ones I took. Sadly they don't come close to showing the actual graneur of the area.

We think the "clouds" in the photo are actually snow falling at the higher elevations.

 I think the mountain in the background is Warren Peak, elev 10,463. The "flat" area where we took the photo is at elevation 4,750.

 The blue in the sky is beyond description.

 We passed this truck up around elevation 6,000, it was empty. I wonder what type of engine managed to pull that loaded trailer up the grade.

 The two photos below are of Granite Peak. It is the highest point in Montana at elevation 12,799.

 Lunch in Livingston. It was the best Mexican food we have had since leaving Indiana.

 Livingston is a very interesting community. We spent a good deal of time walking around. The downtown area is full of stores. The actual downtown shopping area is several blocks long and several blocks wide.

At the campground. We are parked about 100' from the edge of the Yellowstone River. I don't know how deep it is, the water is cloudy enough that you can't see the bottom. It is running so fast that if you fell in you would have a tough time getting out.

Looking away from the river.

This evening I went for a walk along the path that extends from Livingston to a little over a mile beyond the campground, total length about 5 miles. (I only walked a little over a mile to the end and then back.) Below is looking toward the river from the path. The lilacs are just starting to bloom here. They don't yet smell as good as the ones in Twin Rocks did. Everything along here, south of downtown, is in a valley that ranges from one-half to three-quarters of a mile in width.

  The sun had set in the "valley" but looking down the valley it was still shining on the mountain when I started my walk.

 By the time I got back the clouds were turning red. Stunning!

We went uphill and downhill a lot today as we drove along the I-90. Noteable high points, they were miles apart, were 5,400 (we drove through snow flurries when crossing this one); the Continental Divide at elev 6,393 & the last high spot was elev 5,300. All the "low spots" were around elevation 4,300. For trucks with gross vehicle weights over 12,000# the speed limit downhill from the Continental Divide was 25 mph for miles, because it was so steep. I think we have already descended grades as steep as this one, it was 6 miles of 6% grade.

At the rest area it only got down into the low 40's last night. In Livingston the high for the day was 58. The low tonight is supposed to be 35. Tomorrow there is a 40% chance of thunderstroms and the high/low is forecast to be 52/33. Then it gets colder. 46/30 on Friday and 46/29 on Saturday. For Friday "accumulations" of snow are possible. The campground, and Livingston, is at elevation 4,500'.

Daily average temps for this time of year are highs in the highs 60's and lows in the low 40's. We just managed to hit a cold spell. The average winter high temperatures are actually higher here in December through March that they are in Coldwater, Michigan where I grew up. The average lows for those months are about the same. It is also quite dry here during the winter. They actually get about 9" less annual snowfall than Coldwater. My guess is that here the snowfall is spread out over maybe 6 months while Coldwater gets all of theirs in a little over 4 months.

Tommorrow the plan is to venture down to Yellowstone National Park. It is about 60 miles to the edge of the park.

Goodnight to all. May God bless you and yours.

May 22nd - Somewhere East of Missoula

We are spending the night at a rest area about 60 miles east of Missoula, MT. The plan is to drive to Livingston, MT tomorrow and spend a few days there.

We drove about 450 miles today. 50 miles of it was a "scenic side trip" of 25 miles along the Columbia River then a "U" turn and 25 miles back. The navigator, that would be me, was not paying attention and we made a wrong turn. The scenery was so great that I forgot to pay attention to where we actually were. Livingston is only about 190 miles from here so tomorrow's drive will be much shorter.

One of the interesting items from my time at the museum yesterday. Ben Rosencrance, born Christmas day 1844 bought in Luzerne County PA. After fighting in the Civil War he moved west. In 1878 he bought a stock ranch near today’s Richland, Washington. In 1888 Ben and Mary, and their four children, homesteaded 1,700 acres on the north side of the Yakima river.

One of Mary’s stories was about how she rode in many roundups. She said that in the last roundup, when the Big Bend area was opened to settlement, there were 500 cowboys and over 2,000 horses. They spent four or five months “in the saddle” and rounded up the last great band of horses in Washington. After settlers started pouring in to try their hand at farming the Rosencrances also became farmers, since there was no more open range. They didn’t like farming and in 1904 they sold out but there was no information on what became of them. I did a little searching on the Internet and found that at ages 90 and 88 Ben and Mary were still riding horses. Ben lived to be 95 and Mary lived to be 92.

A photo of the Washington countryside north of the Hanford nuclear site. I think the river is the Yakima river.

Getting close to Spokane today. Finally some trees again.

Lake Coeur d’Alene is a natural lake that is 25 miles long and 1 to 3 miles wide. I-90 follows the north shore of the lake. It is HUGE.

We filled up with fuel just after crossing into Idaho, $4.109/gallon at a Flying J. Price wasn't bad but I think 92.3 gallons is the most I've ever put in at one time ($379.41, now that is a fill up). Fuel economy has dropped to 7.7 mpg with all the uphill grades.

I think we were at the highest elevation I have ever been at today. Lookout Pass is at elevation 4,725 when you cross from Idaho into Montana. Earlier, while in Idaho, we were up around elevation 3,100 before descending back down to around elevation 2,200.

Looking east from the rest area. The sky was a beautiful blue with clouds ranging from white to dark and foreboding.

 Looking back west from the rest area.

The forecast for tonight is rain and temperatures in the mid 30's. We may need an extra blanket. We could turn on the furnace but Kathy doesn't like to listen to it. The return air grill is in the bedroom and it is kind of noisy.

Northwestern Washington, northern Idaho and what we have seen of Montana is beautiful. I can see why the Spokane, WA area is listed so high lists of great places to live. You wouldn't believe how clean it is along the Interstates, even going through the city of Spokane.

Time to close and see if I can get this sent using my cell phone. We don't have a great signal but I think it is good enough to sent this relatively small file.

Good night to all and may God bless you and yours.

May 21st - CREHST

Today I went to the Columbia River Exhibition of History, Science & Technology (CREHST). Visiting it was the reason we came to Richland.

I pulled into the parking lot and I thought, "This is going to be a joke.", when I saw the little building. After spending over two hours inside I found out that it was anything but a joke. The "docents" (the people who lead tours) who were manning the place were a couple of older gentlemen who could hardly restrain themselves from telling stories about the area. They had both worked at the Hanford Site.

I had never heard of the Hanford Site before coming to Washington. It was kind of the western version of Oak Ridge in Tennessee. Oak Ridge worked on enriching uranium while Hanford worked on converting uranium into weapons grade plutonium.

It made the plutonium for the first nuclear bomb the US ever exploded, at the White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico. It also made the plutonium used in "Fat Man", the nuclear bomb that was exploded over Nagasaki, Japan in 1945. Oak Ridge provided the enriched uranium that was used in "Little Boy", the bomb that had been dropped on Hiroshima a few days earlier.

The story here is that in early 1943 the federal government told local residents that it was buying their land and that they had 30 days to be gone, whether they wanted to sell or not. The government took control of over 600 square miles. Construction of the first nuclear reactor started in August 1943 and was completed in September 1944. The first batch of plutonium was delivered to the labs in Los Alamos in February 1945. Two more reactors came online in Dec 1944 and Feb 1945.

This area had been a sparsely populated farming area. The federal government brought in 50,000 workers to build these facilities in this short time. No one knew the goal of the project, and they were told not to ask about what someone else was doing. I watched a video of interviews of some of the men who came out here to work. One of the men came, with his family, from Denver. His reason for coming was because the government was offering great wages. He had never even seen a lathe but that was his first job here. He was trained taught to use it and did so for several months before he was transferred to another location and trained for another job.

I had not planned on going out to the Hanford Site. Almost everything there has now been decommissioned and is being demolished. The guys at the museum talked me into driving around the site. It turned out to be a loop that was a little over 100 miles long. I got to see more pretty scenery, but nothing worth the 100 mile drive.

Not everything at the museum was about Hanford. It was quite interesting to read about some of the people who homesteaded in this area.

Kathy stayed home today. As difficult as it might be to believe, she didn't think she would find the museum interesting <grin>.

Tomorrow we head for Montana. Good night to all and may God bless you and yours.

May 20th - To Richland

Today we moved to Richland, Washington. It was about a 70 mile drive. I want to go to a museum here. I plan on going to the museum tomorrow and we will probably move on Tuesday.

Yesterday I mentioned the rail cars that have been turned into shops. The "backside" of a line of railroad cars.

 The "front side" of the same cars.

I forgot to mention an interesting thing  happened on our way "over the mountain" last Friday. We drove through a swarm of bees with the motorhome. We had at least 50 of them on the windshield.

On this side of the mountains there is a LOT of irrigation. Driving along and seeing pasture fields being irrigated is difficult to get used to. In some places cattle are an adjacent field, in others they are in the field that is being irrigated.

Below are some photos that I took when we got close to Richland. The water in the photo below is the Yakima river. The photos don't come close to showing the green irrigated land down in the valley on the other side of the river.

 This is the other side of the road.

We are staying in an older campground. The spaces are tight and we barely fit. We are completely inside our space but our awning covers most of the adjacent space. The campground only has 30 amp outlets at the RV sites. That typically isn't a problem even though our RV is set up for two "legs" of 50 amps each. When we are on 30 amps we just don't use the electric element in the water heater and we are careful not to turn on two heavy electrical users at the same time. I tell you all this because when I plugged into the outlet the instrumentation on our RV showed an error message and it would not allow a connection to occur. I extended the cable to the max and drug it under the RV to try the adjacent electrical plug. Still got the error message. I did some testing and the plug appeared to be functioning properly. I finally tracked the problem down to our "converter" pig tail that allows us to connect our 50 amp plug into a 30 amp outlet. I had previously noted that the converter was suffering from hard use (it was obvious that it had gotten really hot at some earlier time). I cleaned the prongs on it and managed to make a connection. I will need to replace the converter ASAP.

Good night to all and may God bless you and yours. 

May 19th - Mt Ranier

This morning I went to Walmart to get a prescription refilled. On the way back I snapped the photos below. It is quite interesting how people level off an area on the side of a hill and build houses. The spots you see, half way up the hillside, are homes.

 The white hump in the center of the photo below is Mt. Ranier. It is about 70 miles from where I took the photo.

We decided to go take a closer look at Mt Ranier today. That required retracing about 70 miles of what we drove yesterday, but we figured it was worth it because the scenery is breathtaking. We stopped along the road and I took a photo of the road ahead. The "line" across the photo is the road as it goes across the face of the "mountainside".

 This is a photo of the the slope over the side of the guard rail. Note the pattern of the pine trees near the top of the photo.

 The photo below is also over the side of the guardrail but shows what is above the previous photo. You can match them with the pine trees.

 This is back down the road. Again the "scar" across the slope is the road.

 This is looking back, just over the guard rail. The light spot, a little above the center of the photo, is a lake.

This photo is looking up the hillside.

 We stopped further down the road and Kathy took this photo of Mt. Ranier. We were still about 25 miles from it.

 Just a photo of the beautiful scenery.

 We did photo taking exchanges with another couple who were at the Scenic Outlook. We used their camera and took photos of them and they used our phone and took a photo of us.

 This is Dog Lake. It is still mostly covered with ice and snow.

 Up next to the shore, where the ice had melted, I took this photo looking down at the lake bottom. The water appeared to be 15-18" deep.

 This was a pretty waterfall that we saw from another scenic outlook. I walked along the edge of the cliff, there was guardrail, for maybe a quarter mile and could never see the bottom of the waterfall.

 At the end of the quarter mile I could look down and see the stream that carried the water from the waterfall. Yes, it was a LONG way down.

 From the same point that I took the photo above I took the one below. The white "bar" on the face of the hillside is actually a semi driving down the road.

 When I drove through this tunnel yesterday in the RV it was SCARY! It was plenty large enough to get through but as soon as we entered the tunnel it was so dark that I could not see. Park of the reason is because there is no lighting in the tunnel. I think it is doubly bad because it is so bright outside the tunnel that my eyes couldn't react to the dark tunnel quick enough. Fortunately the tunnel is short and you can "aim" for the outlet while hoping that you are staying on your side of the road but not so far over that you will scrape the side.

 We stopped for lunch at Rose's. We had a good lunch here.

Back to the main reason for the drive, seeing Mt. Ranier up close. After a 65 mile drive, back along the way we came yesterday, we turned off on another highway to go to the mountain. After 5 miles up that road was closed. We aren't sure why. We knew that one of the passes in the area was still closed, because of snow. That information was posted at several places we had been. We had seen nothing that even gave us a clue that we could not get to the base of the mountain. We aren't sure if it was because the snow was still to deep to clear or, more likely, the parks people just didn't want to open the area until more people were around to use the road. It was still a good trip.

There were a couple of side benefits to the trip. First, it seemed like our CR-V was again getting great mileage. I reset things on the way up to the pass. We drove over through the pass and partway down the back side. When we got back to the point were I reset things, so we went equally up hill and down hill, we had travelled 54 miles. According to the fuel economy instrumentation we had averaged 29.4 mpg. The other benefit was to learn about the grades on the east side of the pass. I had tried to find some information on the grades leading up to the pass. I could find nothing. When going downhill today there were signs posting the grades. The grade for 12 of the first 14 miles down from the past was 6%. The other two miles were not quite that steep. For those of you who are familiar with the Monteagle grades near Chatanooga, TN they are 4-6%.

It the evening we drove around Yakima a little. If I remember tomorrow I will post a couple of photos of an area of the downtown where "storefronts" have been built on the sides of railroad box cars. The area was, of course, next to the main railroad line that still goes through the downtown. Down at the end of the area there was a day care center in a converted rail passenger car.

Good night to all and may God bless you and yours.