Monday, April 20, 2020
Hello everyone. Bobby Schmittou, here, and welcome back to Bobs Rocky Mountain Blog. I hope you have had time to read my first two articles, as well as viewed the photos pertaining to trips to Glacier, Yellowstone and the Grand Teton National Parks, in what I have always referred to as “God’s Country.” Starting this week I will continue to tell of my travels over a three-week period beginning September 17, 2020. I will take you to the southern part of Wyoming on my two-day trip to the Snowy Range of Wyoming. Then, my brother and I will show you our findings from the Rocky Mountain Front range of mountains in north central Montana. This is a range of mountains that runs, for about 200 miles from Canada down through the eastern border of Glacier National Park and then another 100 miles further south. Doug and I were reconnoitering fall foliage locations for our trip, later that week, with our good friend Becky, who flew in from Nashville, Tennessee to visit us. She was the first of our friends from back home that came to visit us.
We were going to take Becky to Glacier National Park and then travel south and visit Yellowstone National Park and Grand Teton National Park. Unfortunately a freak early winter storm dumped four feet (yes that was FOUR FEET) of snow along the path we would have taken to Glacier. Needless to say, we had to rearrange our itinerary. Glacier was out of the question. As it turned out, we couldn’t go to Yellowstone or Grand Teton either. We had to adjust everything pretty much on the fly.
We still had a good visit with Becky, but we shortened everything down to a series of day-trips, starting first with a ride up the Beartooth Highway (as far as we could go). The upper portion, going into Wyoming had already been closed for the winter due to snow pack. Then we took a drive around the Crazy Mountains, although the weather was not good. We were not deluged with heavy snow, but cloud cover pretty much socked in around and on top of the Crazies, so we didn’t get a good view of them. Becky was able, however, to see a truly rare sight. The white buffalo (bison) was out in its pasture, along the road to Harlowton and she was able to see it. On Saturday, the 28th of September, we took a drive down to Cody, Wyoming and visited the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. This is a huge museum, actually five different museums inside one complex; comprising of The Draper Natural History Museum, Whitney Western Art Museum, Plains Indian Museum, The New Cody Firearms Museum and the famous Buffalo Bill Museum. While Doug and Becky spent much of their afternoon perusing the Plains Indian Museum, I ventured over to the New Cody Firearms Museum. I believe there are over 10,000 firearms dating all the way back to some of the earliest known weapons, such as flintlock rifles, and up to modern weapons like the M-16 rifle and M-60 medium machine gun used by American soldiers in the Vietnam War and still being used when I served in the United States army during the later part of the 1980s. Some of the more famous guns were the ones used by Ben, Hoss and Little Joe Cartwright in the television series Bonanza. There was even a replica of the M-2 .50 caliber machine gun that came to fame during World War II and is still being used by our armed forces today. You can pull the trigger, just like old-time soldiers and feel the recoil as they would have.
The final two days of travel, with Becky, saw us visit the famed Battle of the Little Big Horn National Battlefield, on Sunday, and then the Jim Gatchell Museum in Buffalo, Wyoming the following day. The weather was not good during Becky’s entire trip, so we made the most of our time. Hopefully, the next time she can make it to Montana, the weather will be much better.
Becky left on Wednesday, October 2, and Doug and I finished our “mountaineering” as I like to refer it, by a planned trip to the Wind River and Big Horn mountain ranges in Wyoming. Although I had visited the Big Horns on more than one occasion, I had never seen the Wind River mountains except at an extreme distance in our 2004 vacation with our friend Gerald and his sons. This was a new treat for me, and one that turned out to be very good. Although the Wind River mountains had been predicted to get a very liberal dose of the snow that socked in Glacier the week before, they really didn’t get hit too bad, so driving was not a problem. The fall foliage was pretty good in some places, not so good in others. It’s always a hit-or-miss thing in trying to predict from one year to another when the best viewing time will be. Still, I was able to get some pretty good photos on this trip. What might have been the best, however, was our venture inside the Museum of the Mountain Man in Pinedale, Wyoming. That was the best $10 I spent during all of last year. I heartily recommend it to anyone that is a student of western history. From there we spent the next two days crossing and recrossing the Big Horn Mountains. I was able to get a fairly decent picture of a moose. Doug pointed it out to me, or I would have missed that opportunity. Although I had seen a moose before, it was never at a good location for photo ops. Although there was snow at the upper elevations of the highways traversing the Big Horns, it did not pose any hindrance to our driving. Doug and I returned to our home in Billings on Monday, the 7th of October. And, with few exceptions, we pretty much stayed in for the rest of the year, and as it has turned out this year, too, as a result of the pandemic.
I am looking forward to sharing with you, my outlooks, speculations and photos from these journeys throughout the Rocky Mountains. May God be with you, during this time of adversity. I’ll see you on the flip-side.
