Thanks to my coming down with a cold, I was pretty well motivated on this morning to go find me some daytime cold medicine.
So I got up while Chris was still sound asleep, and after my customary morning shower I walked across the street to a little grocery store. It was a nice sunny morning, and although it had been uncomfortably warm (for us) when we arrived, the temperature was down in a much more comfortable range thanks to the dry air of western Montana. I found my cold medicine, only to discover that this little store didn’t take credit cards. Don’t laugh; in Alaska practically every business accepts credit cards. Okay, not McDonald’s, but they do have debit-card terminals…
The only option was to write a check on our Alaska credit union account, and the clerk accepted it happily even though it was from so far out of state that we had to travel through a foreign country to get here, and didn’t even ask me for ID. I don’t know whether this was within policy or whether she just spaced — otherwise I’d happily provide the name of the store. Even if she wasn’t supposed to accept an out-of-state check, I do know it’s good for the money.
We paid almost as much for gas in Great Falls as at Sweetgrass — Montana has high gasoline taxes, and the hotel desk clerk told us Great Falls usually has the highest gas prices in the state. Presumably except for border towns like Sweetgrass. I also discovered on this fillup that the Bronco suffers a huge drop in fuel economy (I use the word advisedly) when it accelerates beyond about 70 mph. So thereafter, speed limits notwithstanding, we held our own cruising speed to 70 wherever the law allowed.
We left Great Falls on a highway that bore three different designations: U.S. 87, Montana 200, and Montana 3. Oddly enough, our revised AAA Trip-Tik detoured us off of 87 even though it does go from Great Falls to Billings, which was where we were to catch Interstate 90 to Sheridan. We discovered, though, that the route we took stayed with Route 3 the whole way, so apparently Montana figured out its own alignment for a route to Billings.
On the first leg of this wobbly “W” route to Billings we passed a town called Belt that was sheltered from the winds of the high plains by being down in the ravine of the Belt River. Until we reached the rim of the canyon we had no clue there was a town there. That’ll give you some clue of the terrain in those parts, and the scenery once the highway descended into the ravine. Up on top it looked like rolling prairie sprinkled with mountains in the distance — and a striking butte that I later determined was named — oddly enough — Square Butte. I had suggested to Chris via radio that the country we were driving through looked like a poorly made bed, very wrinkled. She agreed. But the canyons and ravines added interest to the scenery, with naked rock bluffs providing the appropriate signal that we were in cowboy country. As if the grazing cattle on the wide range weren’t signal enough.
A few miles short of Lewistown we turned south on U.S. 191 (also Montana 3) and headed for Harlowton. Along this stretch of road we saw a number of military types with Humvees alongside the highway, and more at a fenced-in location off to the left. My first thought was that this was an ICBM silo, and it may well once have been. Farther along, however, I saw two other fenced-in areas that actually had buildings and even a basketball hoop, and these I am sure are missile siloes. At Great Falls is Malmstrom Air Force Base, apparently established as a control point for such installations scattered across west-central Montana. Farther south at Cheyenne, Wyoming, Francis E. Warren AFB had a similar mission during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Under Bill Clinton there’s no telling whether these installations still have a mission in any way related to national defense, or whether the missiles have now been outfitted to deliver food to mistreated people half the world away in countries that don’t matter to us in the least.
[Comment from Joe Sylvester: Those fenced in military areas with the buildings and basketball hoops were most likely not missile silos, but rather Launch Control Capsules. Where the crews are, just like in “War Games” (which was an excellent rendition of both the LCCs and of the procedures used by the launch crews). The fenced areas without buildings were likely LF’s, launch facilities, the actual silos with the missiles in them. The LCCs and LFs are fairly widely separated, requiring one, or to be “safe” more than one, warhead to take each one out. Wouldn’t want to give the evil empire a two-fer.]
Anyway, we stopped for a moment in Harlowton before turning east again on U.S. 12, and then set out to complete this first portion of our day’s journey by making our way to Billings. Route 3 approaches that city by way of its airport, which is up on top of the rimrock to the north, while Billings itself lies in the valley of the Yellowstone River. The setting is indescribably beautiful, and I could certainly see myself living there except for one thing: the local newspaper’s editors were among those irresponsible media nitwits ghoulishly distorting and exploiting the 1998 murder of a gay Wyoming man to demonize those who outspokenly support mainstream moral values. (Yes, I know I’m suddenly letting my politics show here much more than I have previously in this part of my website, but d@mn it, I’m sick and tired of having mainstream moral values blamed for everything from gay-bashing to the freaking Holocaust!! Even the radical gays admit that hate is not a family value, so why can’t these media nitwits do the same?) Anyway, it goes to show that sometimes the most beautiful places can be made unspeakably ugly by just a handful of really stupid people.
After a stop to fill my gas tank and for each of us to get a sandwich for lunch, we boarded I-90, dodged the I-94 split, and headed for the valley of the Little Bighorn, and Wyoming beyond.
It had been 29 years since my last visit to Wyoming, and my memories of that experience were not positive. It was my parents, my older brother, and me in a 1965 Dodge van, one of those with the slant-six engine in a console compartment between the front seats, headed for Marshalltown, Iowa to visit grandparents I had never met before. On the way from the Salt Lake Valley to Evanston, Wyoming, the van’s radiator began to display problems. It was supposed to take us a few days to get from Sacramento to Marshalltown, but we spent longer than that amount of time just getting across Wyoming — and it wasn’t until we reached Laramie that the van was finally fixed, a matter complicated by the location of the engine and, of course, the radiator. Although, at a tender eight years of age I wasn’t real clear on all this at the time, and I blamed the predicament on Wyoming itself. It wasn’t until many years later that this grudge faded away in the face of a more mature outlook and a better understanding of what had been wrong.
Still, having as we did the highest point of our entire journey coming the next day in the vicinity of Cheyenne (which lies at 6,062 feet above sea level), and remembering a slant-six Dodge of my own a few years back and its radiator problems with going uphill, I was a little bit nervous about this return visit. Never mind that on our return trip to California all those years ago we covered even more Wyoming miles than on the way east, without any trouble at all. I just hadn’t had the Bronco long enough to be entirely sure of its performance on the high plains of southeastern Wyoming.
The slightly less high plains of north-central Wyoming were a little less of a worry. We made it through the Little Bighorn country and into the Cowboy State, and reached Sheridan with no automotive hiccups of any kind.
Unfortunately, there was a lodging hiccup. Our hotel reservation was fouled up, and it could only have been the hotel that did it, not the nationwide reservation system. We wound up with a smoking room instead of non-smoking, and an unannounced pet charge. We were tired and overheated from the long drive, and had been forced to wait while the clerks dealt with somebody else’s apparently unsatisfactory reservation — and then discovered that there was, for all intents and purposes, nothing we could do about the snafu unless we wanted to be banished for an hour while the room was ozoned to eliminate any possible smoke odor.
I, personally, didn’t have all that much of a problem with the smell, but Chris’ eyes burned the whole time we were in the room. The hotel was sprawled across three city blocks and we were forced to cross streets to get to where the pool was (an outdoor pool in our section of the hotel was already closed for the winter), and the nearest thing to a dressing room at the indoor pool was an old sauna that smelled of sweaty socks. Even the hot tub smelled funny. And when we walked to Hardee’s for our dinner, we encountered sullen teenagers behind the counter who happily abandoned their customers in mid-service in order to clock out — clearly a combination of adolescent irresponsibility and poor management; I’ve seen it before. Maybe it’s unfair to judge the entire town because of one bad evening, but we don’t have a good opinion of Sheridan as a whole. That bad evening made the better experience of the following morning seem like a glaring exception to the rule.
If anyone from the Sheridan Chamber of Commerce reads this, they might want to reflect on how you only get one chance to make a first impression. It took years for the whole state of Wyoming to overcome the impression it made on me when I was eight years old…
