I picked through over 200 photos taken on our trip to Montana to put this little travelogue together. They are just a small sample of some of the things we saw on the trip.
We left Laramie at about 5:30 in the morning, just at sunrise.
This interestingly weathered hill is in Cokeville, WY – one of the few scenic areas in the early part of the trip.
Just over the border into Idaho was this lovely valley ringed with mountains.
This a view in Missoula. The town is absolutely beautiful.
The Clark Fork River runs through the middle of downtown Missoula, no doubt responsible for a lot of the confusing layout of the city! There are two other rivers flowing through the town, and water recreation is very popular – rafting, canoeing, kayaking and tubing. If you look carefully, you can see a kayaker just to the left of the little island in the picture.
A Missoula sunset, to go with my Laramie sunrise
Another Montana landscape
The object you see in the photo is the smelter stack from the Anaconda copper mine, in south west Montana. It is over 500 feet tall and can be seen for miles. It is even marked on maps! My husband said it reminded him of something out of Lord of the Rings!
This was taken looking south towards Yellowstone National Park, near Bozeman and Livingstone, MT. It was a very scenic drive and I wish we had had the time to turn south there and drive though the park. However, it would have added a day onto our trip, which we didn’t feel like we could do. Not far from here, the Yellowstone River flows down out of the park, and parallels Interstate Highway 90 through southern Montana. It was really neat to think of Lewis and Clark going up that river, exploring, and to know that they were going to see such wonderful things ahead in what is now the park!
This is in Thermopolis, WY, at the hot mineral springs. Thermopolis is about 150 miles east and south of Yellowstone in central Wyoming. The springs are actually a state park, given to the state of Wyoming by Chief Washakie of the Shoshone Indian tribe. It was a special place for the Native Americans, and as a state park, it is available for everyone to use. Apparently it is the largest mineral hot springs in the U.S. What you see in the photo is where some of the hot springs have overflowed into the Big Horn River. The nifty formations are made by the dissolved lime and calcium in the water leaving minute deposits behind – it is the same way stalagtites and stalagmites are formed in limestone caves. The color is formed by different types of algae in the water. 27 different minerals make up the water and unfortunately, one of them is sulpher, so the whole area smells faintly of old eggs. The water is wonderful to soak in, though. It is cooled in several pools until it is cool enough for humans to soak in. Pat and I went to the State Bath House, where it is free to soak, but there are pools with slides and so forth, too, if you want to pay. Thermopolis is one of those places where people went to “take the cure” or “take the waters” as the mineral baths were thought to be theraputic. It felt really nice after a day in the car!
This is the Big Horn River at Thermopolis, looking north from the hot springs. The landscape is typical of that part of Wyoming.
For those of you who have ever wondered, this is what the middle of nowhere looks like, with sagebrush. It is very typical of central and southern Wyoming, except for those areas where mountains rise up. A lot of our trip was through land like this.
Most of these photos were taken out of the car window with Pat telling me to stop leaning out the window, which of course I denied doing even while I was doing it. It was a long hot trip, but a great deal of fun and we hope to be able to go back to Montana later this summer to see some of the things we didn’t have time for, like the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, where they have a fantastic dinosaur collection.
