We bought a little slice of riverfront property in Montana. Well, we didn’t exactly buy it outright, we just bought the rights to it for a few days but while it lasted, it was ours and we enjoyed it thoroughly. We didn’t plan this particular stop, but the first RV park we stopped at, in Billings, was full even at the outrageous prices it was charging. Al called a couple of other RV parks and was stunned at the prices they too were quoting. Even though he didn’t really want to drive much further because it had been a day with gusty crosswinds, when the lady at the Spring Creek RV Park and Trout Ranch in Big Timber said she had room and quoted a price substantially less than the other parks, he asked her to save us a place. When we drove into the park, it was love at first sight. Unlike most other parks, this one had the RV sites scattered around the edges of the property with trout ponds in the middle. It was only $4 more a night for a site along the river and Al agreed with no hesitation. The best choice he made all day.



This is the view upstream from our RV site.












Sitting and listening to the birds and the river and staring at the burbling water ten feet from our toes is the most relaxing activity imaginable. For the first complete day we never even left the site except to go to the office to sign up for more nights before someone bought our twenty-foot slice of riverfront out from under us. We watched fly fishermen floating down the river in rafts (catch and release only—do you think the fish have any fun?) and boys floating down the river in inner tubes, all without even wanting to leave our chairs.

















This is the view across the trout ponds at sunrise.

















One day we finally roused ourselves from the hypnotic trance induced by the rushing waters and went to Yellowstone. We'd both been there before and figured it hadn't changed too much, but what the heck, it was in the neighborhood and we'd probably kick ourselves if we didn't do it. Of course as soon as we got into the park, Al started grumbling about the crowds and the lines of ants filing up the trail or boardwalk to the roadside attraction. I have to admit it was a lot of driving through tree-lined corridors without much of a view because most of the park is on this high plateau. I did make him take the drive along the north rim of the "Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone". At the lower falls overlook we benefited from "the wisdom of the crowd" by seeing this osprey nest complete with two chicks high on a hoodoo above the river. We would have never seen it if we had been the only ones around as it was pretty far away as you can tell by the way that the telephoto on my poor little point-and-shoot was barely able to focus in on the chicks. The falls were nice too.





















The big deal that sets Yellowstone apart is the thermal activity. We avoided the major spots like the Hot Springs and Old Faithful, but right along the road was this little hot springs bubbling away. If you look closely at the left side of the photo
you can see the whiff of steam it let off every few seconds.













I was determined to see some wild life and was forever imagining moose and heffalumps in the distance, which Al pooh-poohed constantly. Once I said that I saw a bison lying down, but he insisted it was just a pile of wood. Well, it looked just like this guy who was a little closer to the road.
















Another example of the wisdom of the crowd is shown in the next image. If you look really really hard, there are a bunch of dots just this side of the river. These are a bunch of bison, a large herd in fact, something we probably wouldn't have noticed except that other people were stopped along the road and we tried to figure out what they were looking at.













One of the coolest things about the day was the flowers. Most of Yellowstone is at an elevation of say 7000 feet plus, and so July is prime wildflower season. The flowers were absolutely spectacular. The higher we went, the better the flowers. We had entered the park via the north entrance and exited via the north-east entrance and then drove over Beartooth Pass which goes up to over 10,000 feet, which meant that the flowers were the best of all up there. So were the views of the surrounding mountains. There was no way I could capture the mountains adequately with my camera and everyone knows what Montana mountains look like anyway--just look at any travel ad. I concentrated on the nearer-to-hand flowers but even here my photos only capture a tiny bit of the flavor of the meadows and roadsides--imagine whole hillside covered with these flowers and you'll start to get an idea of why we both were oohing and aahing along the entire drive. Who needs heffalumps when you have alpine flowers in their prime?