Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire On the road again.

I believe this could be called a "prairie pothole"; a small body of water occupying a depression on the prairie. I had always read from Ducks Unlimited how important these potholes are to waterfowl. Its true, they were packed, on this one along the road I counted more than 100 half-grown ducklings. If there were any adult males present they musta been in eclipse plumage, I was looking at hens and their broods, they looked to be a mix of gadwall and shoveller.



The Missouri Breaks around Fort Benton came as a complete surprise, one of those hidden canyons on the Plains, coming from the South on 84 you don't see them at all until you're right up on them and the ground suddenly opens up.





Used to be we all used paper maps to get around, and those paper maps communicated varying degrees of information. Nowadays most of us use things like the Google Maps app on our phones which communicate no additional information at all other than route and distance (and topography profile of the route if you're using the bicycle option). So it was going in I had no idea of the significance of Fort Benton as an embarkation point of the Rocky Mountain fur trade, the place where you could ride a boat up and float your furs back down on water all the way to St Louis and beyond. I dunno how many kazillion times I've seen the movie "Jeremiah Johnson" over the decades, but it would appear that Fort Benton is the river post intended to be depicted at the beginning of the movie ("Head due west as the sun sets, turn left at the Rocky Mountains.").

But, first time through I didn't know any of that, Fort Benton was merely a point on the map, I was 45 miles out of Great Falls, storm cells were closing in, and it was time to get something to eat and take a break. Ain't a big town by any means but I only got as far as the first convenience store before heading out two hours later after it stopped raining..



It was the dog statue on the climb back out to the highway out that tipped me off. Shep, buried up there on a point above what at one time was the train station.



Googling up that dog that evening opened up links to Fort Benton as a whole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shep_(American_dog)