Mitchell South Dakota
Beautiful Day today! Yesterday I got caught in some heavy rain through Tennessee. Was actually expecting more. Today it was great weather all the way.
I always get homesick driving through Missouri since I spent the first thirty eight years of my life (minus 4 years in the Navy) there. I like the rock music played in Missouri much better than what is played in Atlanta, especially KSHE in St. Louis and KCMQ in Columbia. It’s funny that I’ve driven I-70 across Missouri more now that I live in Georgia, than when I lived in Missouri. I do it at least once a year going to monoski camp at Snowmass. Back when I still lived in Missouri, I did most of my driving on I-44 (prior to that Highway 66) going to and from Lake of the Ozarks which is where I spent a lot of weekends during summers in the 70’s. I rented a cabin on the Lake and had a ski boat and I would go waterskiiing three weekends a month from May until September. Also, when we would go on canoe float trips we would drive I-44 to the places we would float like the Meramec River, Current River, or the Huzzah Creek among other streams. When I quit going to Lake of the Ozarks a friend of mine and I would go down to Lake Norfork in Southern Missouri and we’d drive I-44 there. He had a ski boat and Norfork was a better place to ski. Lake of the Ozarks has gotten really polluted over the years especially now with the growth it has experienced over the last 20 years. I hardly recognize it anymore.
I want to thank all of you who have warned me about the fires in the Northwest. I’m worried about them as well. I’m hoping they don’t affect the trip. My sister sent me a link to check on whether the Road to the Sun will be open or not. It would suck to drive out and have it closed. That would mean another trip out here.
When I wrote about going on a road trip, Ron in Ohio sent me this photo.
Long ago, my family had a cabin at Table Rock Lake. The L o t Ozarks was a swell place. I’m talking about the late 60’s & thru the 70’s. Bagnell Dam area was a helluva lot of fun but then Silver Dollar City and the Branson BS started to really take off and the crowds grew, and grew. We sold it in about 1978. My Dad & Brother & I bagged a lot of deer there.
Me & my friends floated the same rivers. Our favorite was the Mulberry in NE Ark. remember the James river? Slowest river in the USA.
Rrddbb
Missed the James but also did the Black, the Niangua, and Courtois Creek. You wouldn’t recognize Lake of the Ozarks. There’s a divided highway all the way through it and a bypass of Bagnell Dam. Grand Glaize has two bridges. Condos everywhere. The Marina on the Niangua arm that I put my boat in is now all condos.
Denny: I know you will enjoy your trip over the Going to the Sun Highway. My wife and I grew up in Cut Bank, Montana, just 70 or so miles east of Glacier Park, and we have been over it many times and thoroughly enjoyed it every time. And when you drive down the east side of the pass, you will cross between Upper and Lower St. Mary’s Lakes, then on into Browning, the central point of the Blackfeet Reservation. When you get there, be sure to visit the Plains Indian Museum at the west edge of Browning. That in itself is well worth the time. Try not to be put off by Browning itself, though. It is usually pretty dirty and not too well kept.
I almost forgot, Denny, to brag a bit about Cut Bank. Just a mile or so east of town on Hwy.2, Cut Bank has a great outdoor museum that has an old cable tool drilling rig on display. There are also a number of old farm machines and road building equipment. There is also an old camp house, about 12′ wide and 40″ or so long. A guy I grew up with, Ivan Ives, and his two sisters, Eva and Emma, lived in that house with their parents for a few years, until about 1948 or so when they moved to a slightly larger house, also in Santa Rita, about 5 miles north of Cut Bank. Ivan’s sisters and parents are gone now, but Ivan is living in Virginia, after retiring from the Army Chaplain Corps as a full colonel with some 22 years of service. There is a picture with that camp house with Ivan as a boy of 9 or 10.
Cut Bank is where the first oil wells were drilled in Montana, to a depth of 1000 to 1200 feet, back in the late 1920s, using cable tool rigs like the one in the museum. Compare those wells with the ones in the Bakken Reserve that are being drilled to 15,000 to 20,000 feet today.