Saturday: Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota

On Friday, after seeing the battlefield, we had lunch at the Little Big Horn Trading Post. Poppa had something called "fry bread", which is better than it sounds, especially after drizzling some honey on it. Poppa had read about it in Tony Hillerman novels and wanted to try it.

When we came out of the trading post, Poppa saw a strange looking cloud in the distance. It was puffy and white, like a lot of pretty clouds, but it seemed to reach to the ground. He decided to get a closer look. We drove about 25 miles east on RT 212. The cloud didn't change much and was still pretty far off, so we turned around and headed back to the campground. We were still thinking about how strange it looked. When we got back, Nana turned on the news and found out that the cloud was the Ash Creek wildfire, about 35 miles from where we had turned around. There was already a fire called the Dahl Fire that was burning north of the campground when we arrived, one of the worst ever in Montana. Colorado has it's worst wildfire ever.

This is an interesting article about the people who fight wildfires.

You might consider signing this petition.

Yesterday we drove from Hardin, Montana to Custer, South Dakota. The wind had blown the smoke from the Ash Creek fire all the way down to I-90, and it made our eyes burn.

We stopped at a Walmart in Sheridan, Wyoming to get Nana's glasses fixed. The nice lady there used to live in Weirton, West Virginia.

We saw a lot of signs that said "Road closed ahead when lights are flashing. Return to ...", where "..." was whatever town we had just gone through. There were also gates that came down over the road, like at a railroad crossing. The gates had their own signs, promising jail time and a $750 fine to violators. Poppa says either they get a lot of snow here, or the local Chambers of Commerce have cooked up a good way to get travelers to spend more time in these little towns.

As we drove across Wyoming, we saw another strange looking cloud. We made a little detour to see The devil's Tower National Monument:





Then we watched the cloud as we drove down RT 585 and RT 85. As we got to Newcastle, we took these pictures:










A lot of people were stopped by the roadside watching it. It was probably 20 miles west of us, in the Thunder Basin National Grasslands. We haven't seen anything about it on the news.

Time to go explore South Dakota!

Posted from Nana's iPad