Dear travel diary
I’d like this to become a separate, daily addition to the blog, but I’m not sure yet how to make that happen. So here’s a random entry off by itself.
Travel day from Fort Peck Downstream CG to
Edgewater Inn and RV Park in Malta.
Drove through Saco, MT, which apparently is where Chet Huntley, the NBC News anchor who teamed with David Brinkley back when we were kids. He wasn’t born there but the elementary school is named for him. His parents were of Scots extraction, which makes sense because Saco was not far west from Glasgow, MT.
Also on the road from Glasgow to Malta, we met a pretty blue Rpod heading east. We waved, and I’m pretty sure they saw us and waved back.
Also saw a dust devil out in a field. After a wetter than usual start to summer, the area seems to be returning to normal, which is pretty dry.
As we got closer to Malta, we began seeing gabions, the fancy term for wire baskets filled with rocks. Often these were at the corner of a field. There also was at least one pile of rocks in the middle of a field.
In England, farmers built low stone walls to clear the fields. Is this something similar? Also wondering if some of these are “erratics,” meaning rocks carried great distances by glaciers and then dumped on the ground as the ice receded. There is a famous one in Alberta, the Okotoks Erratic, that we hope to visit in Canada.
One final note: Lake Bowdoin, east of Malta, has dried up to almost nothing. I found an article from spring that said these glacial lakes are shallow and that wildlife actually benefits from the cycles of dry and wet. Still, it’s disconcerting to see a vast expanse of dry white land where there once was a lake.
Two Sheeps to the Wind 