Quick Notes from a Road Trip West: Miles and miles and miles and miles...

North out of Butte MT, driving the little Prius up the steep, steep grade of I-15, we catch a glimpse of the enormous copper mine that skirts Butte's northern edge.  The land flattens into the familiar high prairie ranch land we've see so much of already, then dips into the valley from which little Helena governs this huge state. North of Helena we come to the Gates of the Mountains, named by Lewis OR Clark (I can't remember which). I look for a memorial to the Mann Gulch fire that occurred in the area in1949, taking the lives of about a dozen young smoke jumpers, and subject of Norman MacLean's Young Men and Fire, but it and they seem forgotten on this busy Montana highway in 2013.  We visit the Lewis AND Clark Interpretive Center in Great Falls, but didn't have time to see the falls themselves, great as they surely are.  (It is almost impossible to imagine how the Corps of Discovery made that journey and learned so much from it.) Then we pass through farmland that makes me think of Iowa-without the cornfields though. Then back to grassland as we head west into the foothills of the Rockies.

You cover a lot of ground fast when you can legally drive 75 mph on the Interstates, 70 on many two-lane roads, and when miles of one-lane construction driving only makes you slow to 65. I ask myself why we can't do that back east, and then realize there's almost no traffic out here compared to New Jersey, just to pick a random example.

Tonight we are ensconced in a lodge just south of Glacier. What vistas of these magnificent mountains we had as we approached them from the east! Now looking forward to two days of seeing this majestic park. Even my cold won't keep me from enjoying it...but don't call me Lewis OR Clark. I'm nowhere near that brave or persistent, even in safe adventures like the one we are now on.