Columbia Falls MT

 We arrived yesterday at an RV park in Columbia Falls. Today, we explored some around the area. Driving into Glacier National Park is a problem. It now requires an online ticket to go through the gate, plus your regular gate fee or a national park pass. They are limiting the number of vehicles in the park. There are 375 tickets tickets available online every morning for the next day. I tried this morning at exactly 8:00 am but all tickets were taken within 20 seconds. It looks like we have to compete with thousands of people just to enter the park. Then there is the smoke from the numerous forest fires west and south of this area. There are no fires here at this time. Visibility of the mountains is very poor. The mountains here are the new western Smokey Mountains. This may not be a great visit. 

Hungry Horse Dam is located near the park entrance. This is a large dam with constructed starting in 1948. The Hungry Horse Reservoir is 30 miles long, south of Glacier NP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungry_Horse_Dam

Hungry Horse Reservoir

The dam is 564 feet high. It generates electric power
at the building below the dam.

Battle of Little Big Horn

Seventy miles north of Sheridan WY is the memorial for Battle of Little Big Horn (Custer's Last Stand) in Montana. We could not stop with the motorhome towing the Jeep so we drove there in the Jeep this afternoon. This memorial is operated by the National Park Service.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Little_Bighorn

The site includes a National Cemetery.

Custer's Last Stand at the top of this hill.

Markers are installed that indicate where soldiers had fell.

About 40 horses are buried at the memorial site.

This memorial is at the end of a five mile road. Other soldiers were backup for Custer but they did not provide help. They had their own battle here. This entire battlefield area is on a ridge.
https://www.nps.gov/libi/learn/historyculture/reno-benteen-defense-site.htm

Sheridan WY Big Horn Mountains

 We are in Sheridan Wyoming for a few days then heading north on I-90 on Friday. Unknown to us, there is a world champion rodeo in Sheridan this week. We do not plan to go due to huge crowds and apparently all tickets are sold out. Yesterday, we drove through the Big Horn Mountains. By road, we were at 9200 feet elevation at the highest point. The height of the mountain peaks is still higher.

 

Greybull is on the west side of the mountains.
Our round trip was over 200 miles.

We did not take this side trip, it was 32 miles into the mountains on a dirt road.

Going east into the mountains on our return to Sheridan.

East side before descending the mountains. Sheridan is 25 miles to the right.

Devils Tower and a Close Encounter

Almost everyone has seen Devils Tower on TV or other video. We are staying near the base of it in a KOA campground. There is quite a crowd here and more cars coming in all day. The single National Park Service entry point has traffic backed up for maybe a mile. They need a second lane to move more cars through.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devils_Tower

If you were born by 1970, you may have seen the famous Steven Spielberg movie call Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Alien spacecraft were flying round and people were doing crazy things. We saw it shortly after it hit the drive in movies in 1978. You can still see it on the internet. It was a great movie and part of it was filmed right here at Devils Tower since it was the focus of the movie. The campground shows the movie every night about dark next to the KOA building. We watched it last night. The campground and building were not here then, just the small NPS park entry building. I can see in the movie just about where we are located in the campground. The campground was started later with money from the use of the property. Here is more info and a link to the movie's short video.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_Encounters_of_the_Third_Kind

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4PYI6TzqYk

There is a 2.5 mile path all the way around the rock ora 1.2 mile path
on the west side by the visitor center.

People climb the rock, not me. There were a few climbing
today but it was hard to see them from the ground.

Indian prayer cloths are found in several areas.
https://www.nps.gov/deto/learn/historyculture/sacredsite.htm

The short path, we made it to here for a better look at the rock.

The sides look like tubes of rock.

The field below the tower is full of  prairie dogs.

Watch the movie, I won't tell you what is happening here.

Aliens from the big ship.

Watch the movie! Amazon, Netflix and other sources are available.

Vore Buffalo Jump

 We are staying at Devils Tower in Wyoming. More on that tomorrow.

This "buffalo jump" is just inside Wyoming along I-90. The Indians drove buffalo to this sink hole and herded the buffalo to jump. They were injured and then destroyed for food and other parts of the animal. Sounds like a bad way to treat the animals but the Indians could not easily kill a buffalo. They did this to survive the cold winters which took a lot of meat for the tribes. Archaeologists have found twenty two layers of bones. Each layer was covered by shifting soil, making layers after each buffalo "roundup". Here is a history of the jump.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vore_Buffalo_Jump

This building was installed over the excavation area to protect it.

Walkway down to the building.

This is an active archaeology dig.

Twenty two layers of bones and artifacts.
They have only reached seven layers so far.

We drove to Sundance WY, about twelve miles into Wyoming.
Not much happening there. Harry Longabaugh, known as the Sundance Kid, who served his first jail time in this frontier town.

Belle Fourche SD

 Today was our last stop in South Dakota. Belle Fourche claims to be the  

Geographic Center of the 50 U.S. states 

so we drove there to see what it was all about. The official marker is a few miles north of town in a farmer's field so they collected funds for this marker and a great museum in downtown Belle Fourche.

We had lunch at the Aladdin Cafe, Aladdin Wyoming, just across the state line.

Big Bad Wolf

The museum has a lot of old saddles on display.

An old bank vault, never saw one of these before.

AN old printing press from an early newspaper.

An Edison phonograph player.