Fort Peck, Montana, United States
I spent a night car camping at Medicine Lake, just outside
of the town by that name since camping isn’t allowed within the wildlife
refuge. According to news reports a huge line of severe thunderstorms went through
parts of the region I had just traveled through and my area was under severe
thunderstorm warning. I watched a spectacular lightning show after dark before
going to sleep, but the storm passed to the west of me with only a few
sprinkles where I was. This is relevant mostly for how things unfolded the next
day after I toured the wildlife refuge and headed west.
I have several hiking guides to Montana, one of which that
covers a top 100 routes includes some of the eastern plains for a variety of
landscapes and experiences. I’ve found that some of these are better than
others. The one I targeted for the day
was in the Bitter Creek Wildlife Management Area, located between Glasgow and
the Canadian border, described as a walk on the undulating great plains, both
on and off trail and partly on a faint 4WD road.
The weather forecast was for
partly cloudy conditions with a slight chance of showers. Skies were a beautiful
blue all morning with only a few fair-weather type clouds forming as I drove
toward the trailhead on a gravel road that then turned to dirt and quickly to a
muddy muck. Such roads are rutted but
passable when dry but turn to “gumbo” impassable for even AWD vehicles when
wet. It didn’t take long before the mud
was caked on my tires in a thick layer making me slip and slide.
I got to my destination and started on my walk. It didn’t take long before I must have had a
pound of mud caked to each boot making walking on the trail almost impossible
going. I decided to head back and just do
the walk on the return route on the so-called road, really a track in the
grass. In almost no time the sky had clouded over. Barely 5 minutes later I could
see rain falling from those clouds in the distance. Virga, I thought, that
being rain that falls from clouds but evaporates before hitting the ground. In
another few minutes I realized there was a dark wall of heavy rain falling to
my south, the direction the weather was coming from.
I rushed back to my car and put the pedal to
the metal to get out of these before I’d get stranded in the mud. Sure enough, heavy wind-driven rain caught up
with me a few minutes later making the puddles bigger and the track ever more
of a challenge to navigate out as I lost control with thick mud caked on the
tires. By the time I got back to gravel and pavement, what I still consider my
new car was caked in as much mud as the old pickup trucks you often see in the
rural west.
I decided on a motel room for the night in Glasgow, an old
school one with about the muddiest, puddled parking lot I’ve ever seen, but the
price was right. With just over 3,000 people, Glasgow is the metropolis of
northeastern Montana. The name might suggest a Scottish heritage, but it supposedly
comes from James Hill, the railroad baron who built the Hi-Line Railroad across
northern Montana, spinning a globe and picking the place where his finger
landed to find a name for the new settlement.
Glasgow is big enough to have a microbrewery, The Busted
Knuckle.
And unlike the breweries in Wibaux and Glendive, I was in Glasgow on a
night when it was open. I did the proper
social distancing thing and took my first beer outside to drink. When I went back in for another, some friendly
locals at a table invited me to join them. Hmmmm, I’m not sure how this fits into my plans
for extreme social distancing, but on the other hand there have been no Covid
plague cases in the county or region. It
turned out one of the friendly ladies making beer recommendations for me based
on my preferences was the owner and her husband the brew master.
Fort Peck Dam on the Missouri River is located about 15
miles south of Glasgow and is the largest hydraulically filled dam in the
United States. I’m not really sure what
that means. I might have learned but the interpretive center for visitors at
the facility was still closed. Anyway,
it’s a huge embankment four miles long and 250 feet high constructed during the
New Deal when 11,000 people were employed on the project. The dam creates Fort
Peck Lake, the fifth largest reservoir in the U.
S. which is completely
surrounded by the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge. It looks like a great spot for fishing,
boating and other recreation, even if the dam submerged a huge stretch of the
scenic Missouri River along which Lewis & Clark traveled. The shores of the deeper eastern part of the
lake are mostly barren plains but not far to the west of the dam pine covered
hills descend to the lake shore, which turned out to be a great place for some
rough camping for a night.
My next hike was in the Sand Arroyo Badlands about 25 miles
southeast of Fort Peck dam. This one
turned out much better for me, with the trailhead along the main paved
north-south road and relatively dry ground conditions for pleasant hiking. Not that there was much in the way of real
trails after dropping into the arroyo through a canyon. But my afternoon of
possibly 8 miles of walking was one of complete serenity and isolation among
the colorful formations. I didn’t see
anyone else all day – extreme social distancing.
2025-05-22