Storm Mountain Center

Allison Hall

Main project - team gets it's first look

We're now in our first week of our NOMADS period 13 mission at Storm Mountain Center, Rapid City, SD.  It's actually closer to Rockerville, SD, but all mailing addresses are out of Rapid City.   I you'll recall, we were at the OWL Center in Dubach, LA last year making salsa.  Storm Mountain Center wants a storage building resided to resemble the other buildings & lodges and a small garage door installed to allow easier access.

Smaller lodges & an onsite residence (right)

Unlike the OWL Center in Dubach, this center isn't in the middle of nowhere, but you'd think you were.  It's two miles up a forest service road just north of Rockerville into a small, beautiful valley just on the edge of the Black Hills National Forest.  With minimal staff, this place manages to stay open year-round.  And like the OWL Center, it's open to everyone.  That is unless you want them to remove the crosses located

Mid-week look

throughout the center. Should you do that, you'll kindly be referred to other locations.

It's been hot this week httin' 101 on Wednesday.  So the team is starting an hour earlier than normal & outside work's been limited to mornings.  It's inside work for the remainder of the day.

Original building when center was purchased

So that's it from here. Later, David

More of the original buildings

Grist Lodge main floor fireplace

Grist Lodge lower floor fireplace

View out the Grist Lodge lower floor overlooking an RV site

Back in Buffalo (Wyoming)

Big Horn Mountain Range

...or, back in the best one-horse town in the US.  Take your pick.  Either way we were here about this same time last year preparing for the Escapees Escapade 2011 in Gillette, WY.

We're fine and continuing our trip to Storm Mountain Youth Center at Rapid City, SD for a NOMADS three week mission.  If all goes well, we'll get to Hill City, SD tomorrow.  Then visit the youth center on Saturday to get a look at available sites to place the trailer.  The plan is to move on over on Sunday.

We had a good trip so far with stops at St Regis, MT; Deer Lodge, MT; and Billings, MT.  Unlike last year, we've learned to stock up in Billings - more choices and no sales tax - than stock up here in Buffalo.

We've also started lining up things for the fall.  Current plan is to have the trailer serviced at Sunshine RV in Lake Havasu City, AZ.  Got that locked in for late October, so now it's find a place for a couple of weeks near Lake Havasu so we can hangout there should it take a while to get any parts.  Called a place late this afternoon and got a phone message.  They were on summer hours 8:00 to noon.  I guess it's still hot there! We'll try back in a day or two.  Always something to do.

Rough plans so far are to move over to Hermosa, SD after Storm Mountain to visit some friends from the Hitchhiker Owners Forum & the buffalo roundup at Custer State Park. Actually, that part's pretty well set.  From there it's head south to Rocky Mountain Natl Park, stop at Colorado Springs, CO for another friend visit, head down to Petrified Forest Natl Park, move over to Williams, AZ and visit the Grand Canyon, and then down to Lake Havasu City, AZ.  That should get us to November.  At least that's the plan.  Only issue is that route takes us right through some of the worst of the wildfires this season.  And we don't know just how bad things are at the moment or the conditions at any of the campgrounds we're considering.  And if the Air Force Academy is playing at home while we're there, that could put a monkey wrench into Colorado Springs, too.  Oh, well...  Later, David

PS - in the unlikely event that someone from my high school class reads this, have a great class reunion this weekend!

If you're luck enough to live at the lake, you're lucky enough.

Chimney Rock, Priest Lake, ID

This week we're at Donna's cousin - Thom & Mary's place - near Nordman, ID (Priest Lake). If you recall from last year, we were here and stayed at a RV Park in Coolin, ID.  This year we've moved closer to Thom & Mary and parked at a new RV Park at the Nordman Store.   Nice park, but no cell service unless you're hooked to the local WiFi located at the local bar's front porch.  Thom has added a cell booster at their house, so we bombard them each day and spend a couple of hours just on the internet or making phone calls while they go about their business.

It's been a quiet week.  Not a lot of sight seeing, but we've managed to visit our favorite resorts for breakfast or lunch.  We've made it down to Spokane to visit Thom & Sandy's mom, Dorothy, and enjoyed an evening dinner with Donna's uncle Larry, & aunt Lillian, and cousin Carol.  Another highlight of this week is one of Thom & Mary's granddaughters' birthday on Saturday.  As this is a quiet little place during the week, it'll be a rocking little place when all the relatives (both sides of the granddaughter's family) invade Nordman.  At least when it get too rockin', we can retreat to the trailer.

From here, current plans are to leave Sunday - along with most everyone else - and head to the Storm Mountain Youth Center at Rapid City, SD for our next NOMADS Volunteer period.  While that's a three week stint, we'll stick around anther 10 days or so as several friends with their RVs make it out to Custer, SD for a Hitchhiker Owner's Forum get-together and stay with them for the buffalo (bison?) roundup in late September at Custer State Park.  From there, it's south - at least that's the plan.

Later, David

Crown of the Continent Tour

St Mary Lake looking west

Wednesday was our Crown of the Continent Tour with the traditional Red Bus.  This tour is an all-day tour departing about 8:30 and returning about 6:00 or so in the afternoon.  The buses hold about 17 passengers and draw attention wherever they go.  At one overlook stop, we all piled out of the bus to enjoy the view while everyone at the overlook ran to the bus to get their picture taken with the bus.  Worked perfectly to clear the overlook for us.

Jackson Glacier

As we were on the west side of the park, our tour left from the Apgar Transit Center (think Disney World shuttle bus stop) and took us via the Going-to-the-Sun Road to St. Mary.  From there it was north to Many Glacier Lodge for lunch and a return trip back to Apgar.  While the stops were short, they gave us a good over view of the park and a chance to see the St Mary and Many Glacier areas. 

Many Glacier Lodge

From my perspective the west side of Glacier is more commercial while the east side gives you a better chance to see wildlife.  Part of that "less commercial" on the east side is due to the park lying against the Blackfoot Reservation.  The west side of the park (west of the continental divide) is considered a rain forest while the east side is more of a prairie/plains environment.  More RV parks on west side.  Lodges and campgrounds on the both sides are generally full with

Heaven' Gate

many posting no vacancy signs by mid-morning.  Campgrounds in the park were full, too.

There's no good time for a hard drive failure, but we were able to load most of Tuesday's pictures to Facebook before we lost the computer.  The computer booted up fine, but no software would work Wednesday morning. It died during trouble shooting. 

Bird Woman Falls

So after Wednesday's short hike into the bug infested north side of Lake McDonald, we made a hasty retreat back to the trailer, made a grocery list and a software list of those programs I had downloaded, but had no CD backup, and off shopping we went.  So after hours of loading, downloading, loud threats at the IT industry, and one mid-length online chats with a software retailer, we have most everything running.

We've lost all our contacts, a couple of music albums, confirmed once again that backups are totally useless, and hit the campground WiFi throttle point several times (yes, Verizon wireless network is useless here.)  However, we have all the important stuff and all our pictures.  And the iPod has our missing albums.  We're in business.

If all goes well tomorrow, we move to Nordman, ID to visit Donna's cousins Thom & Mary for just over a week.  While there we plan to get with Larry, Lillian, Carol and others in Spokane.  There's no Verizon coverage of any type in Nordman, so we'll probably be a little quiet while there.   If you don't hear from us, the plan after Nordman is to head back to Rapid City for a NOMADS work project at the Storm Mountain Youth Center.  At least that's the plan.  Later, David

Glacier Natl Park - Mid-visit update

Lake McDonald

Just a mid-visit update as we visit Glacier National park for the first time.  Weather's great with lows in the low 50s and highs in the mid-80s.  Generally sunny with some showers & thunderstorms in the area as I type this.

 We've taken advantage of each day we've been here and hiked each day.  Total mileage is somewhere around 16 miles with the longest hike of 7 miles today as we took a trip through the woods to Johns Lake.

Avalanche Lake

We've found that traveling through the park is easier if you'll work with the free shuttles.  Think getting around Walt Disney World, and you've nailed this system.  Each day we park at the Apgar Transit Center and catch a shuttle.  It takes three buses to get to the east side of the park, but it can easily be done.  And when you do, it's a free ride on the "Going to the Sun" road.

Cascades through a gorge on Avalanche Creek

Tomorrow we take a break from the hikes and take the longest of the Red Bus tours that takes you throughout the park.  Don't expect a lot of time for any hikes, but we're hoping for great photo opportunities.

Well with that sentence, I'll just let the pictures posted here speak for themselves.  Later, David

Hidden Lake

One must work to get to Hidden Lake from Logan Pass

On the trail to Hidden Lake

In the woods south of Avalanche Creek

Johns Lake (near Lake McDonald Lodge)

Bozeman, MT

Hyalite Canyon

Palisades Falls

We've spent the week at Bozeman, MT having some truck maintenance taken care of.  Had to extend an extra day to await some parts.  Truck's better, but we didn't solve the annoying wind noise that's recently developed around the trim underneath the windshield wipers.

We took advantage of the time and visited Gallatin National Forest's Hyalite Canyon and Palisade Falls, Missouri Headwaters State Park, and the town of Three Forks.

Headwaters of the Missouri - that's the Missouri straight ahead

We stayed at the Bozeman KOA.  While the staff was great and worked hard to rearrange some reservations so that our trailer didn't need to be moved while the truck was in for service, it's an old KOA and suffers from some serious low voltage problems.  We found their WiFi  service to be poor.  As for Verizon, this is 4G territory and it might as well be 0G.  This is my fourth try to get this blog out today, and I'm having

"Big Mike" of the Museum of the Rockies

to log off and back on to Verizon each time Blogspot software tries to auto-save this blog post.  Phones work, but the smart phone is useless when you try to use any app that needs to talk via the internet.  Consequently, it's not our stinking 4510L MiFi that's giving us the fit.  Just poor wireless internet service.

It also appears that Montana has decided to revert State Highways 84, 85 and US 191 to dirt roads in order to give you that nostalgic, western feel.

Living History Museum

In reality, the state is trying to widen a very heavily used section of these highways.  Most states would build the additional lanes, move traffic to those lanes and refurbish the old lanes.  Not Montana.  Montana digs everything up and lets all this traffic travel through it.  (BTW, I'm now up to loggin on/off the internet 14 times to get the post to auto-save.)

Couldn't afford it when it was new & can't afford it now.

So as far as the roads are concerned, I guess it's "Welcome to the wild west!"  Anyway, we leave for West Glacier, MT tomorrow for a week.  Later, David

(final count: 23 log on/offs to get this thing to publish - way to go Verizon!!!)