Miles City and then south to the Devil's Tower

Leaving the Charles M Russel wildlife refuge, we headed south to the town of Miles City, located along the Yellowstone River.  We left the back country, where even grocery stores are few and far between and settled into an RV park in a town with a fairly good sampling of big box stores.  Miles City is an urban center for eastern Montana, and we found our RV park almost totally full of semi-permanent residents who were working on an oil and gas pipeline construction project nearby.   But they had a space for us for a few days, and that was all we needed.

We were mostly doing business, taking care of bills, buying stuff up and getting ready for our next outing.  But we did find some very interesting spots to visit in the area.  There was the Charles M Russell Museum, which contained a lot of his art works, a history of his life, and his old studio, still in original condition.  We didn't take pictures there, but the work was fascinating, and the history even more so.

But the best find was the Range Rider Museum in Miles City.  What an enjoyable museum this is!!   It's huge, spread among several sprawling buildings, and it consists entirely of photographs and artifacts from the western history of this part of Montana, lovingly collected by residents and donated.

My favorites were the photographs.  They showed such wonderful faces, and although they for the most part represented people of no great historical significance, they were so genuine and moving.  Both Ivy and I got a great sense of the history of this area from just wandering the museum and seeing all of the period equipment, furniture and photos.  It really transported us back to the period and gave us something of the feeling of living at that age.  The museum was entirely unpretentious, overseen by several  local codgers who took our five dollars and then sat around chewing the fat and paying us no mind while we wandered around.  But the breadth and comprehensiveness of the place was mesmerizing.   

Later in our stay we went to a small local bluegrass festival, held in the fairgrounds building at Miles City.  This was a thoroughly enjoyable evening, featuring a lot of local performers, some of them temporary workers on the pipeline, who put out some serious country western and folk as well as bluegrass.  It reminded both of us of Vashon, where there is so much local talent and the community turns out to support it. 




We moved on to the Devil's Tower National Monument  in Wyoming.  As a dyed-in-the-wool cinema fan, I couldn't pass up the famous symbol from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  Devil's Tower is a small park, and the local public campground had plenty of space with great views and spacious sites.  We settled in for brief visit. This tower is a form of lava extrusion, and is a world class spot for rock climbing.  There are massive columnar cracks extending all the way up the monument, and rock climbers come from far and near to test their skills against it.  We saw a couple of parties working their way up the rock as we toured the paths around the base of the tower.  Ivy and I will not be doing that, but we can applaud those who do.

It was here that we had our first Close Encounter with the noble prairie dog.  This charming little creature is found everywhere in the Great Plains, but this was our first meetup with the little devils.  The park had an extensive prairie dog colony right along the road, and much signage discouraging contact with the critters or feeding them.  But everyone, including us, was taking lots of pictures.  They are an awfully photogenic crew, and they had an enormous crowd of camper  papparazzi popping cameras in their faces.  You'd think it was the Academy Awards.


We both had some nice hikes and birding around the monument.  But the cool nights and the autumn colors reminded us that fall is encroaching, and reinforced our steady march south and east.  So after a couple of nights in this lovely spot, we headed out for the Black Hills of South Dakota, our last real encounter with mountains and altitude for awhile