Eastend SK to Glasgow MT

In the morning we took the Frenchman River Valley drive. Seeing more pelicans, magpies, deer, then a large stag with a huge rack of antlers at a distance. It was easy to image trophy hunters chasing that guy! He didn't hang around for a picture.

Lots of sage vegetation, texas gates, cattle, several small herds of bulls, again surprisingly green. The amount of green areas has surprised us, given all the press about how dry it’s been out west.

At one point a sign invited us to take a detour off to a lookout spot named Jones Peak. We weren’t sure about the lane leading up to it:

But once up there it was quite the spot. 

There was some haze in the air, but still nice views of the Frenchman River valley we had toured.

After a bit more breakfast back at the cg, we headed off towards Grasslands Natl Park. I’d been looking forward to seeing this park, and I have to say it was a disappointment. It’s early days for it yet, and may develop into a “real” park sometime in the future. It’s growing slowly, with the Parks dept buying lands as they become available for sale; they’re not expropriating land as has happened in the past, which is good, but it does slow down park development.

Right now the main attraction is several prairie dog colonies.

There’s lots of sage, wildflowers, grasses, hawks – a whole lot of dry hot and dusty  flat highland terrain. We expected to see bison, 

and had expected to camp overnight at an interior cg. When we got to the campground it had no appeal, as it was hotter than we like today and there was no shade at the cg, so we decided to press on, heading south into the US.

We crossed into Montana at 3pm, on #4 at Morgan. The US Customs guy made a joke about our funny (folding) bikes in the back of the van, asking if they had been squashed by the Hulk. Must have been a slow day at this dusty border crossing.

We ran into miles of dusty construction before we got down to hwy 2. 32C at 5:40, and camped in Glasgow MT for the night.

When chatting with the cg hostess later, she recommended we NOT proceed east on hwy 2 as we planned. Apparently there have been incidents in the Williston ND area, lots of unemployed ex-oil workers due to the oil slumps. She told us to turn south on #13 at Wolf Point, then 200S to I94. We decided to do what she said.