May 29 Montana, National Bison Range, Flathead Lake

Wednesday, May 29   Slow ride…

We headed north on I-93, onto the Flathead Indian Reservation. Beautiful green pastures and valleys.  Many of the signs were in English and the native Indian language, like this one describing a grassy overpass for animals.

Greg had seen a sign for the National Bison Range, so we decided to take a look.  After several miles of wondering where we were going we came to the range, which is a huge animal preserve in natural surroundings, which ranged from low prairie to high mountainous prairie with some woodlands.






We drove the 19 miles and saw many animals and wildflowers, including antelope, deer, elk, bison, pheasant and other birds including the everpresent magpie.

Continued north and stopped for lunch at the Glacier Perks Café along Flathead Lake in a small town (this one qualified as small) called Lakeside.  Besides great Wi-Fi, they also had a wonderful mushroom & wild rice soup.  I sat outside and used the Wi-Fi for a while after lunch, and another Roadtreker  whom we will see in Canada stopped to say hello.  Cell signal and Wi-Fi have been difficult to find.

From here, headed north to Columbia Falls and ran into another Roadtrekking couple from North Carolina that we will meet more formally later.  We stopped at an Antique shop to browse and stretch, and asked the owner if he knew of a good place to camp that wasn’t expensive (as several we had phoned were high).  He gave us directions “Up the North Fork”, which as we discovered, is a road that parallels the North Fork of the Flathead River.

His 10 miles turned out to be closer to 20 and part of the way was gravel road, but the campsite was a delightful National Campground called Big Creek.  We were one of 3 campers so had a spot just beside the river .  Greg gathered some wood and we had a nice campfire. These are photos from our campsite.

How wonderful to have brisk fresh air and the music of the river to sleep by!  

Sunrise this morning was 4:34 and sunset at 9:49.   We’ve been rising early, so were ready for sleep by 9:30.  I  was reading a bit and happened to notice movement out my window.  I got up and searched the woods surrounding us for a few minutes through the main windshield, then glanced out a side window and was nearly eye-to-eye with a lovely blacktail doe.   A few others joined her in the dusk, munching greenery and then moving on.