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

I'll go with - Specialized Allez Sprint

My ancient Specialized Allez Comp.

Didn't happen, the GP was on a time-sensitive dog mission and could only stop for a moment, plumb forgot with Jim, when I go visit someone I usually don't take photos of them or there place figuring they woulda posted such already. Never occurred to me that I forgot to ask Jim for a photo until your post.

Damn.

Next time.

Pictures I did get, first day at least, were mostly of crappy road conditions and how I really didn't want to get run over.

For example the Hwy 84 bridge over the Missouri going north out of Great Falls, I rode the sidewalk...



Looking back on Great Falls from the top of that hill, heavy traffic but shoulder not bad....



Next hill about a mile along, almost no shoulder, I had to bail onto the grass about once every minute or two when there was traffic in both lanes, especially involving trucks. Got so bad I thought about turning back...



This is what that ten mile stretch of highway looked like from a car, took this from my buddy's SUV on the trip back. 70 - 80 mph traffic, and me, 'spect I was cursed at quite a bit, never did stray across that white fog stripe tho, and lost much time bailing onto the grass when necessary...



This was farm country, during the wheat harvest yet, and when that wide-load pilot vehicle came by ya better pay attention, I was thinking of these things as "cyclist sweepers", designed to sweep the shoulder of unwanted cyclists....



....and in a rare and unanticipated double cycle sweeper event, this other one tried to sneak up on me from behind while I was preoccupied with that first one...

Wheat country can be dang right dangerous at times.

Glad you made it thru safely.

Geno

The terrain was flat and open, hard to capture the sense of space and grandeur with an iphone camera. But it was obviously wheat season.

The summer up there has a fragile feel to it up here, I heard a rancher planning for TWO HUNDRED DAYS OF WINTER. That's not merely 200 days of just cold, but 200 days, six and one half months, of weather so cold a cow needs to be fed to survive.

Naturally only time for one crop a year, and up there it's wheat, and make it or break depends on a narrow window of time to get the crop in.



These things were everywhere, like giant lawn mowers. Some farmers have their own, others contract out, they ain't cheap. Fire is a major concern too, turns out a combine can be a fire-starting fool, and a whole mature wheat crop in the field can be lost as easy as a forest fire, especially given the usual winds out there in the open.





Tailwind all that first day, so once the shoulder got better and the traffic thinned out away from town I made pretty good time. I don't measure distance in miles on these things in miles but in time. Take the distance in miles, divide it by seven, and you'll prob'ly be there in less than that many hours including breaks. I got three chainrings up front (44-32-22) and a nine-speed cassette in back (12-36), a set-up for climbing on a heavily-loaded bike rather than for speed.

I use the original "friction" shifters on the downtube that came with the bike thirty years ago. A friction-shifter doesn't click between numbered-gears, you find the correct gear by feel, moving the shift lever until you get a gear you want. Knowing which chainring you're on up front is easy; there's only three and they are in plain view between your feet. Knowing exactly which of the nine gears you're on in back is a whole different story, hard to see from the saddle and there's nine. All I know for sure is the top gear (12 teeth) and the lowest gear (36 teeth), never sure which of the other seven in between I'm on.

So I look down at the shift levers to judge my approximate speed ergo time to the next landmark. Shift levers in this position mean I'm on the middle range (32 teeth) chainring and about halfway down the nine gears on the cassette on the back wheel, ergo about ten miles per hour.....



OTOH I already know I'm crawling along at 4 or 5 mph when the shift levers are in this position, 22 tooth chainring in front, 36 tooth cog in back, means I'm climbing a hill, like that firggin' long one coming up from the Marias in the Missouri Breaks to that high point where Merriwether Lewis stood to get his bearings just a bit over 213 years ago.

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)

If ya would have asked me where the "Missouri Breaks" were before this trip, I woulda thought "in Missouri", fortunately we had the time to stop in at Fort Benton again on the return trip in a vehicle. Fort Benton today ain't even an hour from Great Falls and they have music festivals and such there, about where L&C were debating whether the Marias or what we now know today was the Missouri all along was the real Gateway to the West.

It was here too, that Lewis and three companions felt "unspeakable satisfaction" when they heard the signal shots of their company on the river below, they had just got done with a 24 hour flight after killing two young Blackfeet men after said Blackfeet had treacherously tried to steal their rifles during a parlay. Dunno whether said Blackfeet considered stealing a capital crime at the time, material objects often changed hands among the Indians, dunno for sure either if it was those two killings sparked the implacable hostility of the Blackfeet, but the Blackfeet would be the trappers' nemesis and the bad boys on the Northern Plains for another thirty years, up until the great smallpox epidemic of 1837/38 absolutely devastated both them and the Mandans, leaving a power vacuum for rival tribes to occupy, those familiar tribal names from the 1870's.

I gotta say the Lewis, Clark and Sacajawea statue on the riverfront in Fort Benton is maybe the most aesthetically pleasing statue I have ever come across (or maybe second after those bare-breasted young women kicking out the filibuster William Walker in downtown San Jose, Costa Rica)....







Here's the river at that point, IIRC the highest point of navigation for a paddle-wheeler, hence the port....



...and the fort, IIRC built in 1840....




....and a minor footnote of history from 1877: The Nez Perce on their bid to escape to Canada passed close to Fort Benton, and a group of fifty "Irish Fenians" from around Fort Benton sallied out to intercept them, bringing a mountain howitzer on a boat. Not sure why they would, but when they DID find the Indians one Irishman was killed and another wounded, the other 48 finding Indian wars to be not as much fun as they had anticipated.

Only made it eleven miles through the Breaks after Fort Benton, I rarely admit to being sick but I was nauseous and light-headed....





Three hours of daylight left when I came to this wide spot on the Marias called Loma.....



...a sign on the restaurant also said "Lodging" and I stumbled across perhaps the nicest $60 motel room in America...





With good cable and free wifi, an los of really hot water

Looks Homey. Great price nowadays.

You were just a stone throw from the Shonkin where Jack Nicholson had an implement business in the movie “Missouri Breaks.”

How big is the actual Fort. Hard to tell from the photo. I assume it would have been pretty small, especially considering when and where it was constructed.
I can’t imagine how tough life was there at that time in the winter.

I’ve read about it and would like to see it if I ever pass through that way again someday.

Great pics birdie,

Geno

Yes they are! Amazing how cellphones these days take really good photos. And it really made following Mike’s trip that much more enjoyable!

Of all the damn things.....we never got any pictures!

I whipped the wife mercilessly for an hour after I realized she never got any pictures at all.




Well, actually....I have a picture...long distance...of Mike's ass and back.

Plus the sleeve he wears on his noggin.



Honest to glob....this is the only picture I have!

B W I am glad you had a fun ride. there is no way I would do that in a truck much less a bike . i enjoyed riding with you on the fire

Big Jim, you didn’t try to offer Mike a horse to ride instead of that ole wore out bike ? 😜 Picts of you and him on a trail ride would have been epic. 🤠

Well hey, thanks folks fer following along, I am aware this might not be the most compelling of travelogues at this point.

Anyways, leaving Loma there was no reason to hurry. Havre (pronounced "Haver") was a flat and easy 62 miles away, whereas Jim's place was significantly further'n that, a bit long for one day. Rolled out about 11 and made that long climb up to Lewis's lookout (this one looking east from there across the road, right near where they have provided a pull-out area to use your cell phones on account of phone coverage sucks in the Breaks)



Halfway point was gonna be Big Sandy, maybe 35 miles. Here about five miles out to the left in that sorta valley 'tween me and the distant Bear Paw Mountains. A sign at Lewis's Lookout had explained that before the last Ice Age the Missouri had run North (to Hudson's Bay ??) but that glacial till had filled the old channel and that the course had been redirected to the south and the Mississippi. Big Sandy laying along the old north river channel.



The final approach to Big Sandy. One thing unusual about Hwy 84 on the Great Falls/Havre stretch at least is that the highway does not run down the main streets of the towns that lay along its length. I thought this was the main drag to Big Sandy coming in, but it weren't. You had to turn right to find the town proper, in this case at the coffee shop/bookshop/book exchange/cultural center.





I stopped to eat in Big Sandy, where I met two Hispanic guys from Texas, up working with a mobile harvesting outfit.

Good stuff here mike. Thanks for the thread, pics and story.

Flat is easy, .long as you ain't riding into an actual gale. The thing to remember about all these photos tho is the quote "TWO HUNDRED DAYS OF WINTER"

Anyways.....

Just like my Google Maps app told me nothing about Fort Benton, so it told me nothing about Box Elder, just eleven miles further along. While Box Elder doesn't apparently lie ON the Rez, it might as well do so, tho I wasn't aware of this until having ridden through it.

The Rocky Boys Rez had been suggested earlier in this thread as a place where a person such as myself might encounter hostile Indians, at least to the point of getting beat up. Indeed, I did pass an apparently notorious bar and grill right at the intersection called "Jingles", and indeed there were some darker-complected individuals in a couple of pickup trucks out front in the parking lot, but having just conversed with a couple of Texas Hispanics over lunch back in Big Sandy I just figured they was just more of the same, honest. (See, at powwows in South Texas the audience generally looks more Indian than the actual Indians). Not having looked at an actual map in several days, I had assumed the Rocky Boys Rez was off somewhere in BFE further east without reflecting upon the fact that I was actually IN BFE at that point.

Had I known I woulda ridden another eleven miles to Box Elder and had the famous "Jingleburger" as per the sign out front (which may have included some of yer own teeth I dunno ).

As it was, in my ignorance, I only took two photos in Box Elder. Being usually both dry and cold, Montana is a great place for classic cars, this one was parked next to some guy's mobile home....




...and then, in the middle of town (blink and you'll miss it) I came across this sign and thought "Hey, small world!" assuming the Agency mentioned was prob'ly some distance away over in the Bear Paw Mountains (in actuality the actual town of Box Elder, just like the town of Big Sandy, prob'ly lies off to the east of the highway).

Also of note in this photo note the dark line running down the horizon to the left of the highway. These were railway flatbed cars, at least fifteen miles of 'em parked along the rail line from north of Big Sandy to and through Box Elder, the kind of cars that each hold two stacked shipping containers straight from China or wherever. Gaps were left in the line to allow for roads and driveways. On the way back my buddy told me that a tunnel on that line did not allow for the passage of stacked shipping containers, relegating that whole stretch of rail to the status of a very long siding.



A bit further along I came across this way-cool billboard , which also shed further light on the probable ethnic composition of the town of Box Elder itself.....



Well damn, and I had just ridden right by.

A ways along though I came across this other building, which I swear from a distance looked like an Evangelical Church, or else that is what it would have been looking like that along a highway in Texas. What threw me is the sign out front which was mostly all white and heavenly-looking and not legible from a distance (strange choice of color scheme, I'll bet its invisible in a blizzard).





Just as I was taking these photos a car left the casino and turned left towards Box Elder, two young college age Indian-looking girls in front, and what looked like someone's high school age little brother riding in back, the driver's side front window was open. They looked to be having a good time in general and seemed to find me amusing. "What's he doin?" said the woman in the front passenger seat in what sounded like an American Indian accent. "He's takin pictures!" replied the driver in that same accent. "I'm from Texas!" I called out. "Here! take a picture of us!" the driver called back. So I did.

Note that there are TWO raised fingers in the photo, in a palm-forward "victory" gesture. Maybe she was the Girls Basketball Coach I dunno.

You shoulda run in there and donated a bit to their slots!