8-6-06

 Bear Aware!

After I left the river country I made it down to White Sulphur Springs and on over to Martinsdale to check out the Bair family museum. It was closed when I go there but the sign said it was open Wed thru Sun 10 to 5:30. I kept going on over to Lennep and spent the night in the yard of this really nice church. It was open and I went inside and it was really nice in there with two organs and piano as well as a sound system and all. It is so refreshing to find a church open as they always used to be.

The big ranches are so beautiful in this country. It is hay time and they were putting up lots of it everywhere.

I took the little road up north of Lennep and went past the gost town of Castle Town. There were enough signs warning of private property I kept on the road.

It would have been nice to go exploring though.

The road up over the hill was fantastic.

I like it when the road goes out in open country and then  back in the forest.

I made it back over to the Bair museum and I was the first one in the parking lot. More showed up later and I went on a tour with a group of about dozen.

Bair had over 300,000 sheep and loaded out a million and a half pounds of wool one year that took over forty rail cars. He had all the Crow Reservation leased as well as the Ingomar region as well as several other large areas in Montana. He was also into gas and oil, coal, and land development.

This  was  one of the finest spinning wheels I have ever seen

The ranch house that they lived in sometimes. The girls were trained to quality and after the second world war they made 20 trips to Europe and they bought antiques. It is amazing the stuff in this house out in the middle of wide open spaces. Everything in here is top quality and the guide was saying  that  this was king such and such and that was queen so and so’s. these gals high graded Europe as they needed money over there to rebuild their countries and they sold what ever they could to get money. These gals  had the money and spent it on good stuff.

This silver set up is from the 1600’s

This was a Chocolate service. This was before coffee was in vogue.

This belonged to the Queen of Denmark (I think that is right).

Some Queen used to shit in this one.

24 K gold  fixtures and marble counter top. Actually the top was ordered from the local hardware store and they had to order it three times before they got one here that hadn’t gotten broken in shipment.

This was the guides favorite item and it was one of mine too.

It took over an hour to go through it and well worth the trip to see it.  

This  guy has only one leg and the little wheels on this Goldwing come up and down as needed. These guys kept looking at the Yellow dog and thinking that they would like to do the back roads too, but their ladies were not impressed in the least and like pavement.

I headed on down to Ringling and took the road out of there south west to Maudlow. It was a really nice gravel road.

Someone built this cabin too close to the creek.

I came around one corner and almost hit a little bear that was harvesting berries off bushes long the creek and road. I stopped and he took off up the hill and I finally got a photo of him before he rimmed out.

There were bigger bears in the area. As you can see they were eating seeds.

I actually ran up on another bear just a half mile past this pile but buy the time I got my camera out he had baled off into the brush along the creek.

I made it on down to Manhattan and from there on down through Amsterdam and across over to Norris. When I crossed the Madison there were lots of floaters coming in to the access along the highway. The river had a lot of traffic on it and there were tubes and rafts every few hundred yards all along the river. It seems like the women wear smaller  and smaller suits every year. On the radio today I heard the DJ talking about the song.. ‘itsy, bitsy, yellow poka dot bikini’ and he said it was 42 years (?) ago that it came out.

I stopped in Norris and had lunch at the old school house that has been turned into a very nice restaurant. They serve mostly Mexican food and it was very good. I like the ‘Controlled Burn Area’ sign over the kitchen door.

I made it on down to my buddy Dirty Mikes place near Dillon. He is busy building small cabins that he rents out to students and others that want to have horses with them. He has corrals, sheds and working areas for them.

From Dillon I took the road south down Black Tail Creek and eased along the continental Divide to Red Rock. There is a Refuge there that they established in 1934 to save the Trumpeter Swans. They were down to 200 or so and now there are thousands.

From Henerys Lake I headed north through West Yellowstone, Bozeman and on over to Big Timber where I was lucky enough to arrive just as Sam was serving his famous Elk Meat Surprise! It was really good food and I was really lucky to have timed it just right.

I left in the morning and made a run for camp. I did stop at Bob’s and check I on him and what kind of new bikes are in the shop. It was good to be back in camp but things were pretty hot. Someone told me that is was 104 that day. I seem to do the heat well as I guess I learned when I was a kid when I lived in Redding, California and it is usually over a hundred every day in summer.

A map of my route.