Route: Dillon – Grant, MT
Quote of the day from Saya (age 6): A short squall blew in
while we were cycling. After Sho
playfully offered to make a sacrifice to the weather god to stop the wind and
rain, Saya asked, “Wait, is there a god of farts?”
Before leaving Dillon, Sho, Saya and I bought two days’
worth of meals at a Safeway. Salmon,
Idaho, the next town with a place to buy food, is 90 miles away, on the other
side of the Lemhi mountain pass. The
bike trailer was noticeably heavier, thanks to the extra food and gallons of
water I added, making cycling up hills a challenge for me. Meriwether Lewis would have written, “My legs
were much fortiegued from the effort.”
We ate lunch at an abandoned gas station (see pic), but the
rest of our route was picturesque. The
highlight was Clark Canyon Reservoir, a beautiful glistening body of water created
by a dam that didn’t exist when the Corp of Discovery passed through here 208
years ago, nearly to the day. At the
bottom of the lake is the site of Camp Fortunate, where Sacagawea saw her
brother, Cameahwait, for the first time since she had been kidnapped by a Hidatsa
raiding party some five years earlier.
Her brother, Chief of the Shoshone tribe, agreed to provide Lewis &
Clark with horses and a guide over the Continental Divide. The previous month had been one of increasing
desperation for Lewis & Clark, as they discovered that there was no
all-water route to the Pacific Ocean and that the Rocky Mountains were much
more formidable than they had anticipated.
The Lewis & Clark expedition most likely would have failed to reach
the Pacific Ocean were it not for Sacagawea’s help.
After leaving the reservoir, we cycled along a country
highway nearly empty of vehicles. We
soon began to smell smoke and eventually could see a charred and smoldering
hill in the distance to our left. A
brown plume rose from the smoldering fire before being caught by the wind and
blown toward us. I found out later that
it was a forest fire caused by a lightening strike. The fire reminded me of how vulnerable we are
on our heavily laden, slow-moving bicycles, crawling along the base of towering
mountains out here in big sky country.
Sho’s playful pleas to the weather god started to sound like a prudent
precaution.
We decided to spend the night in a small town named Grant
with a promising “restaurant, saloon and hotel” that, sadly, was out of
business. We found a kind woman named
Nancy Taylor working in the local elementary school who allowed us to set up
our tent beside the playground. I
chatted with Nancy for a while. She grew
up in Montana, the descendant of homesteaders, and told me how industrialized
farming has made it nearly impossible for family farms to stay in
business. We talked about the value of
raising children with a sense of belonging to a community and with a connection
to nature. She told me about a moose
calf that showed up at her house one day.
Most likely, it’s mother had been killed. The young moose chose to stay and grew up at
Nancy’s home until, one day, it trotted off into the wilderness.
Snuggled next to one another in our tent behind the
elementary school, Sho, Saya and I fell asleep to the high-pitched calls of
coyotes echoing in the distance.
Here are some pics:
Our lunch spot
Saya loves cucumbers
Is that buffalo real or fake? You decide.
By the beautiful Clark Canyon Reservoir
Nancy Taylor in Grant Elementary School, Montana
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