One of the first rules of journalism is “Don’t bury the lead”. I saw a herd of bison today in Theodore Roosevelt National Park! I also saw wild horses and prairie dogs. Film at 11:00.

Now back to our usual narrative. Theodore Roosevelt was a sickly child who willed himself to be strong and a vigorous outdoorsman. In 1883, he ventured west to Dakota Territory and built a cabin. Then tragedy struck him on Valentine’s Day 1884, when his mother died and his wife Alice died while giving birth to their daughter, on the same day in the same house. A despondent Roosevelt left his infant daughter in the care of his sister and went back to North Dakota to hunt, ranch and regain his humanity. It worked for Teddy. He came back East, remarried, became New York City’s police commissioner, Assistant Secretary to the Navy, Rough Rider hero, Governor of New York, Vice-president and then upon the assassination of McKinley, Teddy became the youngest president. And, as a result of his time in the area I visited today, he along with John Muir (pictured together below) was most responsible for the National Park system we have today.

The park has grasslands, rolling hills and all kinds of colorful cliffs and rock formations. This whole area of the country is called the “Badlands”, because it’s hard to maneuver throuacross it.

I stopped at several outlooks and did a few hikes up and down. Then I saw the bison, quietly grazing while all of us were snapping pictures. 150 years ago there were tens of millions of bison roaming the West. For centuries, the native peoples hunted bison, using every part of the body and maintaining the bison population by just taking what they needed. In just a generation, the American settlers virtually brought bison to extinction, mainly using only their hides. Fortunately, bison have made a comeback in the wild, especially in the park named after the Conservation President.

I had one other visit today, the Hettiger Dakota Butte Museum of local history and lifestyles. What I found the most interesting was a one room schoolhouse in the back yard that had a teachanage, a one room apartment behind a door to the front of the classroom where the teacher (almost always a single woman) lived.

Today’s song is “The Theodore Roosevelt Song” by Elastic Needle Room.

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There are some names that are so familiar to us that it seems odd to think that they are actual places and events. Today, I was at Little Big Horn, the site of Custer’s last stand

Here’s the historical background. By 1876 the only land in the continent not controlled by the US government was the area of the Black Hills of South Dakota and eastern Montana occupied by what we called the Sioux Indians (actually the Lakota and Cheyenne tribes). Then gold was discovered in the Black Hills and of course the US had to have it. Their offer to purchase the land was declined so it was decided to fight for it.

The 7th Cavalry led by George Custer split forces and tried to attack the village. But the Indians were forewarned and prevailed in a two day battle, with massive casualties on both sides. This was really the Indians last stand against forced migration into reservations. It reminded me of the Warsaw ghetto revolt in 1943. There was little hope the Indians would win the war but they resolved to go down fighting.

What’s left to see today are eerily quiet ridges and hills, cemeteries and memorials to the victims of both sides.

My next stop was Pompeys Pillar, a 150 foot high sandstone rock formation we can climb that has Native American petroglyphs and a signature on the wall by William Clark, the only actual physical evidence of the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery expedition. On the way back from Fort Clapsop in Oregon, the group split up, with Lewis exploring the Missouri and Marias rivers while Clark led a canoe trip on the Yellowstone River, passing by Pompeys Pillar, a popular Indian trading area. The two groups met up later at the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers and made their triumphal return to St. Louis.

My final stop of the day was a hike among caves and buttes at Makoshika State Park in Glendive.

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Today’s song is “Valley of the Little Big Horn” by Jack Gladstone, the Montana troubadour.

When I was checking for a possible Yom Hashoah program to attend last night, I learned that a congregation was formed in Helena in the 1890’s – the only one then between St. Paul and Portland – but the congregation disbanded and the building was sold. I looked for it this morning and sure enough it is the parish house of the cathedral I photographed yesterday. Look at the picture – Ignore the cross on top and it kind of looks like an old synagogue.

I crossed the Missouri River this morning, not too far from its headwaters in the mountains. Lewis and Clark sailed up the Missouri out of St. Louis and hoped it would take them

all the way to the Pacific Ocean. They found out otherwise in present-day Montana and then their fun and contacts with the native peoples really began.

Another variety of activities today. I went to the Museum of the Rockies on the campus of Montana State University in Bozeman. It has historical sections on Montana and a big exhibit on dinosaurs – all of whose remains were found in the state.

The Moss Mansion was built by a Missouri transplant who started many businesses and public utilities and was the prime mover in the growth of Billings, by far the largest city in Montana with 100,000 people. The most notable feature of the home was completely different styles in each of the large first floor rooms.

I visited the Yellowstone Art Museum, featuring western paintings and a separate building called the Visible Vault, where you see how they receive, preserve and store all the art not on display in the museum.

I had seen petroglyphs (drawings carved into rocks) at Capitol Reef National Park in Utah. Today I viewed pictographs (drawings painted on stone surfaces) in a cave in a state park outside Billings.

The song of the day is “Wild Montana Skies”, by Emmylou Harris and John Denver, who already sang to us from West Virginia and Colorado.

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A quick aside about “casinos”. I have visited on my trip Atlantic City and Las Vegas, the only two cities where gambling was legal during a good bit of our lifetimes. Now of course we have reparations to Native Americans like Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun and all the states that have legalized it – even Massachusetts. But when I arrived in Montana, every third building on main streets had “Casino” on their sign – gentlemen’ clubs, restaurants, liquor stores, gas stations. When my Howard Johnson (!) motel last night also listed it on its sign, I asked the desk clerk. He said that it’s the keino type games we have in bars, that all “casinos” in the state have to offer the exact same games and the only places you can play roulette, craps etc. Are the real casinos on Indian reservations.

After my singular focus on Glacier NP Wednesday, yesterday I had a variety of activities in the greater Helena area. I went to a mining museum with a “Ghost Town Hall of Fame” on the wall – this added to my appreciation of how the search for gold, silver, copper and all kinds of other valuable minerals led to the growth of the West. Another key factor was raising cattle to feed the country – I went on a tour of the Grant-Kohrs Ranch, one of the largest in the mountain states. I crossed the Continental Divide on a mountain pass leading into Helena – see pictures. The State Capitol building had a lot of Western art, including a large painting in the house chamber of Lewis and Clark meeting a tribe in current-day Montana. The Montana Historical Society museum around the corner had good exhibits about the original residents and the American settlers in the land known as the Big Sky. I ended the day hiking up near the tree line in Helena National Forest.

Today’s song is “Meet me in Montana” by Dan Seals and Marie Osmond.

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A large percentage of the park is still closed, with the massive amount of winter snow being cleared from the roads and trails. But I don’t care – I was at Glacier National Park today and have enough photographs and memories to last me quite some time. One of the things to which I was most looking forward on this trip was taking pictures on the side of and hiking off of probably the best named thoroughfare in America: Going-to-the-Sun Road (and the sun came out a bit today, in my honor).

It was a four hour drive from Coeur d’Alene and I saw plenty of great scenery to whet my appetite (see the last three pictures below). The visitor center is only open on weekends now but a friendly ranger told me what roads and trails are open and I got to most of them.

The Sperry Chalet trail goes several miles from the Lake McDonald Lodge. I decided to walk 15 minutes up the quickly ascending trail and was rewarded by a clearing at the top of the hill with a great view of the forest and the lake below (the second row of photos). I bought a Glacier NP T-shirt at the Apgar Village general store and compared notes with the clerk who has been on a road trip similar to mine. Then I did a stroll from the village that followed the ox-bow (meandering) of McDonald Creek. In short, I was alternating taking pictures and hiking and enjoying every minute, in mostly comfortable 50 degrees.

I found a 2004 song by a Montana folk singer David Walburn called “Going to the Sun” that tells the story about how and when the road was built. Enjoy!

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I got lucky this morning. You may remember that early in my trip I took a tour of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the three secret cities built by the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bombs. One of the other cities was Hanford in southeastern Washington. I knew they didn’t have tours on Monday or Tuesday, but the Visitor Center opens at the early hour of 7:00 AM, so I went there this morning and saw the film and exhibits there.

Then off to Pullman, the home of Washington State University, where my nephew Trevor graduated a few years ago. I visited the art museum, peeked into the football stadium and saw Trevor’s freshman dorm.

Then Spokane, the big city in Eastern Washington. I went to the Northwest Museum of Art and Culture, with interesting exhibits on modern glass design (featuring Dale Chihuly), and the only painter in the world whose canvases are all set out above the Arctic Circle in Canada. There was also a tour of a mansion that was the original museum on the site before being restored back to the gilded age.

I travelled to a public park with a conservatory, a Japanese garden and a rose garden (not yet in bloom on the last day of April). I concluded my tour of Spokane walking around Gonzaga University, where they are patiently awaiting a college basketball national championsip.

I arrived at my stop for the night in Coeur d’Alene Idaho just in time to hike up Tubbs Hill for sunset over the lake.

The song of the day is “What’s Your Name” by Lynyrd Skynyrd, a very #MeToo inappropriate song about a seduction in (Boise) Idaho.

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Heading east from Seattle and crossing the Cascade mountains brought me into the valley of the Columbia River, one of the longest and most important rivers in the country.

First, I took a tour of the Grand Coulee Dam, much larger than the Hoover Dam and in fact the second most massive in the world (after Three Gorges Dam up the Yangtze River in China). It was built for the same reasons as the Hoover Dam – controlling floods, a steady flow of water for irrigation, the largest hydroelectric plant in North America and recreation in the reservoirs. Two of its main accomplishments have been: making the surrounding Clark County the county with the largest source of potatoes in the country (don’t worry, Idaho is the largest state); and providing the electricity needed down the way at the Hanford Manhattan Project site to produce plutonium for the second atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki.

Then there was Sun Lakes-Dry Falls State Park. I hiked along a branch of the Columbia River on the Park Lake Trail. But the fascinating part is the long high rock canyons on both sides of a dry open area and traces of Ice Age waterfalls that would be by far the highest in the world. A film and exhibit in the visitor center told the story of geologist J Harlen Bretz, who theorized in the 1920’s that these “dry falls” were caused by a massive flood in Montana during the ice age that produced large lakes and high canyon walls. Then the water rushed out to eventually empty into the Pacific, leaving behind canyons without water. His theory was scoffed at for decades but then finally in 1965 Bretz was vindicated by aerial photos of large ridges on Montana hillsides that can result only from large floods.

I have two songs Woody Guthrie wrote during the time of the dam’s construction – “Grand Coulee Dam” and “Roll On’ Columbia”.

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I arrived in Seattle today to spend time with Roy, Maria, Andrew and Trevor and visit a couple of places neither I nor Roy had seen before. Success all around.

I arrived at their home around 10:30 and we caught up for a while. Maria and Trevor decided to stay home and Roy and I headed into town.

First we went to Gas Works, where a big grassy park, a playground and a hilly mound with great panoramic views of the Emerald city have been created out of an area that once was home to the city gas company and all its machinery. Then we went to a well-designed Holocaust Museum that featured a film and individual interviews with survivors from the Pacific Northwest. No

We took a break for some piroshki (Russian pastry) at Pikes Market and ate it in the beautiful sunshine by the water where the Alaskan viaduct (replaced by a Big Dig-like tunnel) used to be.

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Then we visited the Nordic Museum with exhibits on the history and culture of the five Scandinavian nations. Next we saw Andrew at a local coffee shop (not Starbucks) before he was getting ready to spend a couple days with his girlfriend where I had just been, in Seaside and Cannon Beaxh. Then we went back to the house for pizza and salad with Maria and Trevor.

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Tomorrow I start heading east for the rest of the trip. The Seattle song of the day is “Smells like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana. ,

As you know, I am an elaborate planner (e.g., this trip). But I have learned from experience that sometimes the best experiences are unplanned. As a case in point, my first stop today was not on my itinerary – I happened to learn about it yesterday flipping pages in my Oregon AAA travel book.

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Fort Clatsop was the winter home of the Lewis and Clark expedition after they reached their goal of the Pacific Ocean and before they returned triumphantly to St. Louis and President Jefferson in September 1806. There is a full replica of the fort and a hiking trail to the actual landing spot of their dugouts and Indian canoes. But my favorite part was the film in the visitor center. It showed how this journey of the “Corps of Discovery” was one of the most important events in US history. Although the US had just acquired the Mississippi valley in the Louisiana Purchase, the whole Rocky Mountain area and the Pacific Northwest were virtually unexplored and up for grabs between the British and the Americans. The film ended at Fort Clapsop, with the group just halfway through their entire journey but confident they had overcome most of the unknown. This also applies to my own Lewis and Clark expedition.

Next I climbed to the top of the Astoria column (a big lighthouse without the light) for great views of the entire area around the mouth of the Columbia River, the border between Oregon and my next stop, Washington.

The Hoh Valley is a North American rain forest in Olympic National Park. The more interesting of the two hiking trails is named Hall of Mosses, which are draped on the lush trees as a result of that famous Northwest rainfall.

My last stop, also part of the national park, was Lake Crescent. I saw deer foraging in a forest of many kinds of trees, in various stages of growth, maturity and death. And there were great views of the sun slowly setting over the mountains, the forests and the glacier lake.

Today’s song is Jimi Hendrix’s version of “All Along the Watchtower”, as I went up a tower and then traveled all along the Olympic Peninsula.

It was a day of water in central and northwestern Oregon. First I stopped at the picturesque Detroit reservoir. Then I hiked at Silver Springs State Park around 7 waterfalls, two of which you could walk behind in cave-like enclosures.

Then I had a tour of the state capitol building in Salem, where I learned that early settlers voted 52 to 50 to join the United States rather than England. Nearby was the Hallie Ford Art Museum, featuring large installations by honors art students at Willamette University.

Finally I made it back to the rocky Pacific for the wonder of Haystack Rock just off Cannon Beach. It is the third largest free-standing rock in the world (look how small the people on the beach appear) and is the perfect backdrop for views up and down the coast and before and after sunset.

The song of the day is the official state tune, “Oregon, my Oregon”.

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