Today we began our wanderings to Canada. We will have stops in Kalispell, MT and West Glacier, MT then into Canada.

This morning we were talking to our neighbor and found out that last night we had a bear in the campground. Happy we aren't in a tent. Life is getting a bit too exciting.

We left this morning with a foggy, gloomy day. Heading for Anaconda, MT as a stopover. Just about 200 miles. Glad we decided on a short day, the weather turned on us 50 miles from the campground and we had high winds and rain, not great driving conditions.

On the road to Anaconda, great scenery

This casino in Anaconda had wonderful murals on its walls

Our daughter called as we were setting up in the campground. I had asked her to send me a package that had arrived at her house after we left. Gave her the address for West Glacier, MT. Only has one post office so package can't go astray. She told me here PO said the address wasn't valid. I explained it was going to the PO is West Glacier and the address was correct. He said Okay then. Now I am in a minor panic as I am having prescriptions sent there also and Express Scripts had to override the address to get their system to accept it.

Now in mild panic mode, I spent the next hour trying to reach the West Glacier PO. Finally reached them and was told the problem was that I put a street address on the package, just address packages to General Delivery, West Glacier, MT 59366. She assured me the package would get to West Glacier fine. Panic over with.

I then went to place an Amazon order and had decided I would have it delivered to an Amazon Locker in Kalispell. I discovered there were no Amazon Lockers in Kalispell. With my new found knowledge from the PO, I decided to force Amazon to use the PO. It can be done!!!  If you don't put a street address on your order it must go via USPS. UPS won't accept a package without a street address. One of these rare occasions the PO does something to help the customer. I change the address on my order to General Delivery in West Glacier and Amazon accepted the address. I learned something new on how to beat the system!!! No more calling campgrounds to see if they will hold my package for me or jumping through other hoops. I am back in control(I hope).

A few days later:

My optimism about package delivery using General Delivery fell apart. Amazon still turned over the packages over to UPS, UPS tried to deliver them and couldn't. A few phone calls later and I had them waiting for me at the UPS Service Center.

I then called Amazon to see how I could force a package to go through USPS. I talked to a supervisor and he modified my account to request USPS first and UPS second(Amazon always needs 2 delivery services). I will test this when we get to Alaska. 

Yesterday we stayed in camp for the day. Time for a day off and get caught up on odds and ends. I went to town with the laundry early and saw a tenter that was going to have a rude awakening when they woke up. An Elk decided to go to sleep right on the vestibule of their tent. The tent had a slight lean forward.

Today we went moose hunting but no luck in finding a moose. People told us of a moose earlier in the morning but we were running late, others had seen a grizzly, again too late. We don;t have the equipement to see the distances the spotting scopes are seeing so it is our loss. We tried.



We went to town to get gas for the car and eat lunch out. Gas no problem, town had very few restaurants open. We finally found one and it was good. On thing we have noticed where we have been is most restaurants use fresh potatoes for the french fries.  A bit different.

We went back to camp and a few hour later a Bison roup came through. 4 Bison nd 4 babies!!! We could have just stayed in camp and found all the animals we wanted.

The Bison do create a problem

Looks like we have a dead deer, the bears will tak care of it

Tomorrow we leave heading for Kalispell, MT and Glacier National Park. We will stay in Kalispell until Sunday to stock up, make phone calls, go shopping for food and a few extra parts we want for the trip. The on to West Glacier and wait for mail. The Going to the Sun Road is closed in Glacier due to construction on the road. Won't be open until the end of June.

Today we set out early again primarily looking for moose. We kept getting side tracked by animals on or near the road. Luckily the traffic jams were minor since there aren't many tourists about

I mentioned previously that our campground has a resident Elk heard. Tonight we didn't see many Elk but a heard of bison came through with a baby. The bison were heading for a campsite about 2 away from us where a guy was sitting out with his dog. He saw where the bison were heading and quickly went inside. Smart move, these bison are very big.

We didn't do any of the geysers or waterfalls so I will post some from our previous visits to Yellowstone when I get a chance. This trip was about animals.

Today was a clear day so we packed our lunches and left at 7 AM, a good early morning start and headed for the Lamar Valley in Yellowstone. This is supposed to be where the animals hang out in the spring before all the tourists show up.

We hit the jackpot, we saw hundreds of Bison, several babies and we think a newborn. You can always tell when something unique has been spotted. Just look for all the photographers with these huge lenses. We stopped several times and asked what they were viewing(many spotting scopes). We were well rewarded. I saw a group of people down a dirt road and went to see what was going on. There was a wolf den with babies, we could see it through a spotting scope(nice person offered) and I took the picture but I doubt if any of the pictures will show anything other than maybe a blurry blob if I am lucky. Next big group we stopped at there were 2 Grizzlies, mama and a 2-year-old eating a Bison that had died. We hung around for a while but the bears had eaten and were taking a nap.

A Big Proble leaving the Campground

And of course, where there is one, there are many

The scenery was wonderful, spectacular.

A Bit of Snow

And here are the animals:

The Road is their Path, we just share

Several of the roads are still closed in Yellowstone. We stopped at the information center and asked when they would be open and were told opening in a couple of weeks. We also asked where we could find Moose and Sheep. Tomorrow we will go look for those. This is just like looking for the Big Five in Africa.

Thursday May 2

We have been in travel mode for a few days and it has been interesting. After finally getting our mail in Provo, Utah we looked at the schedule and decided we were running out of time. The other problem we have been having is many of the drives, vistas, waterfalls we wanted to visit were still snowed in. This surprised us until we found out that the snow amount this year was almost double the normal. Most of the roads would normally have been clear by now, oh well, that is how it goes.

One of our goals is to try to stay off the Interstates as much as possible so out came the mapping programs. We wandered our way north, our first stop was Bear Lake State Park. As we approached the park the snow started coming down, we pulled in and found a spot. Never saw another human that night or the next morning. We stopped and paid the iron ranger for our night, we had a great space, right on the lake with electricity. 

The next morning, the sun was shining and the lake was beautiful. Of we went, heading for our next campground in Idaho. After that, we just had a 100 miles to get to our campground in Yellowstone. Did we pick a winner! We had a view of the Tetons from this campground and were very happy.

Pictures After the Snow and Down the Road

 

he next morning, the sun was shining and the lake was beautiful. Of we went, heading for our next campground in Idaho. After that, we just had a 100 miles to get to our campground in Yellowstone. Did we pick a winner! We had a view of the Tetons from this campground and were very happy. 

View from out Campsite, click to enlarge

 

On Thursday, we drove on to Yellowstone. Within a few miles we saw a small heard of buffalo right on the river, with babies. We saw them a little late had to just pull off on the shoulder and take a few pictures. Next was major construction, with warnings of a possible delay of 30 minutes. Can’t do anything about that. 

Here are some pictures on our way to the campground. Highlight was seeing th Bison and a baby.

As you can tell the roads were very busy!

Our first animals, with a baby!

 

We pulled into the campground, the first sign we saw was no longer than 30’, we are 36’. We could see a few of the campsites and didn’t see any problem. There were 2 rangers just leaving the office and they told us and the guy in front of us that they were getting ready to open another section of the campground to follow them. Only about 25% of the sites were occupied but I guess they were getting ready to spring. 
 

We gladly did that since I had read that sites 42-48 were the best sites with a view and hoped we would find them. We also wanted to make sure our windows looked out at the view rather than into the hill. We lucked out and those sites were in the just opened section. We have a great view of the valley. As usual, typical national park, no electricity, water spigots every few sites and dark, very dark at night. No electricity, no lights.

Also no phone or internet service, another national park norm.

We drove over to pay our campsite fee and run up to the general store to get some bread. On the way over we saw 6-8 Elk in the campground, there are Elk, Bison and bear  normally in this area of the park and we were wondering why we hadn’t seen any. We learned a long time ago to always pack our lunch since there are few services.

I found out that up the hill I had internet, when we got back to camp I moved some of my equipment around to be on the hill side of the MH and had minimal internet. Not exactly robust.

Late afternoon today a herd of around 40-50 Elk came through the campground. Awesome!!

Herd of Elk in the Evening, maybe 100' away

Viedo of Elk herd

Aross the Road from us

In front of us

Tomorrow our plans are to start early and head out to what is normally a very good place to see animals. Hope we are not disappointed!!

We asked that our mail be delivered to Provo, UT and had planned to stay at the Elks Lodge in Provo. We called the Lodge and found out they were having a convention. Did some scrambling and found a city campground in Spanish For, UT. Barebones, asphalt parking lot type campground but it would work out fine.

We were surprised about the Salt Lake City area. There are mountains all around and the area is quite beautiful.

The View from our Campground

A Very Nasty Thunderstorm

We were a bit lonely for a day or 2

We have been waiting for our mail and having nasty, windy, rainy weather. The mail was scheduled to be in on Saturday but didn't show up. Finally arrived on Monday. In the meantime, we did things around the MH, just like a house. Sunday is our usual laundry day and this became a challenge. Several laundromats were closed on Sunday. This caught us by surprise.

Provo Area

Since we were delayed in Utah a few days we decided to change our plans and go to Yellowstone for a few days and then head into Canada. This is a good time to visit Yellowstone, not all the roads are open and there are a lot of animals wandering around. Going to be cold but that is OK for us. After our visit to Yellowstone, we will head directly to Canada. We still have a lot of miles to cover.

Besides working around the MH and doing our "to do" items I have been working on the details of our trip to Alaska. There is a book, called Mileposts, that documents, in excruciating detail(uses 10ths of miles) the main(mostly all) the roads leading to Alaska and in Alaska. Every turnout, side road, etc. are documented. Took me a while to come up with a system using different color highlighters to mark what we should be interested in. We are hoping to cover 100-150 miles a day when driving the Alaska Highway from Dawson Creek but that may be optimistic. There will be weather delays, construction delays and numerous random stops.

Today our plans were to visit the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, a 3700 no-kill facility plus an additional 17000 acres rented from the BLM. We were amazed as to how popular the sanctuary was and how well kept, obviously well funded. The sanctuary pretty much accepts all companion animals(pets) and their motto is "Save them all: We were planning to take a tour(2 hours long) but all tours were fully booked. For the middle of the week in April, this was quite surprising as Kanab is not exactly close to anything big. We will put the Best Friends and the PipeSpring NM back onto our bucket list.

About Best Friends:

Best Friends was founded in 1984 and provides for about 1700 animals on a daily basis. This is a well maintained, immaculate facility. It is the largest animal sanctuary in the US and a world-leader in the no-kill movement for the last 30 years.

You could easily spend an entire day at the Sanctuary. From taking the tour, doing a few hikes, lunch(buffet $5) and just enjoying the views.

I was curious about the history of Best Friends but could find little information on who created the sanctuary and how Kanab was selected.

The Sanctuary also has 2 pet cemetaries, one for their animals and one for the public. Both are well maintained and we spoke to a few of the volunteers.

If you are in the area, do some planning and schedule a tour and visit.

View from the Visitor Center

Memorial for Pets

Many wind chimes, all in the Key of D, wonderful!!

Rock formations that look like pudding

The views are phenomenal

After Best Friends, we drove to Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park. This sounded interesting but we discovered that it was primarily an ATV type park, not even a visitor center. We gave the park a pass.

The Dunes(better ones in park) aren't even coral!!

Curious things found on the road:


From Page to Kanab the person who put tar in the cracks must have been a frustrated artist. On the road for miles, drawn with the tar were "pictures". States, birds, animals, buildings, etc.

The restaurant by Pipe Spring is good. Don't order a full order of fries, a 1 qt. container overflowing is considered a full order.

Driving from Kanab to Joseph, UT(where we are now) we passed Caboose Village. 7 cabooses that have been made into rooms to rent for the night!

We are in the town of Joseph, there are no restaurants, not even fast food!! Tomorrow we will be in the Salt Lake City area, waiting for mail.

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