Saturday, October 19, 2013

Your Calendar isn’t broke!

But here I am, firing up the old blog hardly 20 hours from the last post!  I know it has been more like 20 days between posts of late.  Once again, it was temping to lay over for a day, but the road beckoned once again, and soon we were on the move further south, through Hamilton Montana, and headed for the pass.

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Once again, there was nothing to see.

Nothing but scenery, that is.  Enough that my camera never got much rest along the way.

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After a rather a late start (due to all that blogging), it was not a very long day on the road.

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It was a long climb up to the Lost Trail Pass however, but the big GM took it all in stride and didn’t even break a sweat.  The summit, is about 7000’, and there was plentiful evidence of past deposits of sn…  sno… – white stuff.PA189031PA189032

The upper runs of the ski area at the summit were already looking white.

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Once we glided down into the valleys of Idaho once again, it was time to start looking for a camp spot.  There were lots of options.  Jennifer’s Pizza & RV Park looked tempting, but they could have added ‘wild game processing’ to the sign as I saw a couple of elk being dressed out there as it passed by.

There were several other riverside National Forest type campground along the way, but most had no warning signs of their imminent arrival, and several were missed as a result.  Not so for Morgan Bar campground, a BLM site a couple miles off the highway.

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Turning a blind eye to the remaining scenery, we turned off and found ourselves here for the night.  On the banks of the Salmon River.  In the tracks of some guy named Lewis Clark, apparently Smile.

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This kind of camping doesn’t come cheap however.  They were charging $5. a night, so I had to dig into my laundry coin supply to make the payment.  Luckily, I still have a clean T-shirt, somewhere.

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I spoke to the staff at the previous NF campground just prior to leaving, and asked if the present ‘free’ status was related to the govt shutdown.  They said ‘no’, it was just that there was no longer water supplied or garbage pickup!

I wish Parks Canada would listen.  They would never dream of keeping a campground open – if they weren’t making money off it.  Nice to see that attitude doesn’t prevail down here.  (Well, perhaps in Congress or the Senate!)

Luckily this is not a political blog – can’t imagine the comments I’d get if it was!

Sorry gotta saddle up now and git us a bit further down the trail.  Got a hockey game and football match to watch tonight.  Catch ya later!

1 comment:

  1. To right about Parks Canada. Sad to drive through the parks after Sept long weekend past lines of trailers and campers and a majority of the campgrounds in the outlying areas gated and locked! Our tax dollars not at work Duane

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