2007/06 BC trip - Lake Elwell |
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Tuesday July 24th
We had a steamy night and it soon warmed up even more. We were going to cross Montana on highway 2, which stretches 667 miles from border to border. However, we didn’t get off to a fast start, as we just had to stop and take the walk to Kootenai Falls, a very wide and 
thundering falls that we could visit up close. There was also a swinging suspension footbridge right across the river but Sandie passed on that one. Then, a little further along the road we were stuck in a long wait while construction workers moved a lot of dirt around.
I used to think that the country just to the west of the Rocky Mountains was some of the prettiest in America, but I guess too many people thought the same thing, and the town of Kalispell has grown to a big ugly sprawl along the highway. Beyond there, though, we had a good drive over the Rockies, just to the south of Glacier national park. We noted that the road to Two Medicine Lake is now restricted to vehicles less than 21 feet, and giggled a bit, remembering when we took our fifty foot rig down that road and had to get out on the bends to check that none of the trailer’s wheels were over thin air.
We were now into Montana’s high plains country, with its distant horizons. We camped just south of Chester at Lake Elwell. The gravel road there had become deeply grooved since our last visit, and we met a motorcyclist who’d just crashed and decided it was safer to drive on the wrong side of the road! There are a number of Bureau of Reclamation campgrounds there, and this time we picked one above the Tiber Dam, thinking that we’d get some cooling breeze up there. We didn’t, but we did get a view of flycatchers zooming across the water collecting bugs. The lake, a reservoir actually, was just a lot of water surrounded by dry hills, and not particularly scenic.