2005/06 Alaska Trip - Road West - Makoshika |
|||||
Friday June 24th
The area west of the park is National Grasslands with few towns so we had a scenic drive in the morning, ending with a short section along the Yellowstone River to Glendive. We were headed for some more Badlands, this time at Makoshika state park. We’d stopped there once in the 1990s, and back then it had seemed very run down, just a party place for Glendive’s teenagers, but the facilities were upgraded about ten years ago. The park’s still hard 
to find though as the entrance is on a side street in Glendive’s suburbs. The upgrade was well done, with a new visitor centre and dinosaur and geology displays, and a good campground, empty when we arrived. We couldn’t even find the area we’d been to on the previous trip, so the roads must have been rerouted too.
 |
Montana (Makoshika, near Glendive) |
|---|
Makoshika has typical Badlands plants and scenery, with the addition of large stands of yucca in full flower, and some really fantastic rock shapes: an army of gnomes and goblins in a 
toadstool forest. We drove the roads and hiked the trails, and then had a go at the “unimproved roads”. These 
turned out to be jeep trails. These trails are very steep and they melt and flow in the rain, and develop holes, great cracks, and slumps. We gave up on the trails after a few miles as we were eventually going to run out of luck.
 |
Makoshika (3.58) |  |
|---|
The main roads though are paved with local gravels, probably from the Yellowstone River, and they turned out to be a good source of agates for Sandie. Unfortunately the local water also turned out to come from the river, well laced with sulphur and grit. We refilled our tanks anyway as even bad water is better than none. We cooked outside that evening in a blast furnace wind.