Montana Territorial Prison

Montana Territorial Prison guard tower

I went to Yellowstone National Park for the first time when I was eight years old. We made a loop journey from Portland, traveling through southern Idaho on our way to America's most loved park. We came back through western Montana. There was no Interstate 90 back then, and we drove right down the main street of Deer Lodge, Montana.

It was a frightening experience. The road took us right by the Montana State Prison, complete with convicts hanging out the barred cell block windows screaming obscenities at people driving or walking on the street below. I remember we stopped to eat lunch at a restaurant across the street from the prison. I was too frightened to eat anything because I was afraid the prisoners would get out and kill us.

It would be more than 50 years before I got up the courage to drive through Deer Lodge again. Thankfully, the construction of I-90 bypassing the town meant I didn't have to go through this ordeal again whenever I headed east.



When we went to Yellowstone last September, my husband and I detoured into Deer Lodge specifically to tour the old prison, now called the Montana Territorial Prison Museum. The prison is still as imposing as ever, a stone fortress sitting in the middle of a small Montana town. Only now instead of convicts, the prison is full of tourists wanting a glimpse of Montana's lawless past.

You can read more about the prison here.

Scenic drive over Lolo Pass

Scenic river drive through Lolo Pass

Highway 12 is one heckuva pretty highway where it crosses northcentral Idaho, linking Montana with Washington.

It follows the route that Lewis and Clark took on their journey to the Pacific Ocean in 1805. Seventy-five years, Chief Joseph would use this as an escape route as he led his band of Nez Perce to almost the Canadian border where he surrendering, uttering his "I will fight no more forever" speech.

The highway opened in 1960. I was still in high school when my family drove over it on a trip back from Yellowstone National Park. I remember getting very carsick because the road was so twisted and windy -- it has 67 curves in one stretch, a fact I learned when I was researching an article on the highway for Suite101.com.

When I lived in Connell, north of where I live now, I liked to do getaway weekends to Missoula and sometimes drove Lolo Pass  one way, making a circle by going on Interstate 90 the other way..

My husband and I most recently drove the highway just before this last Labor Day as we took off for our trip to Yellowstone. We spent one night camped along the Clearwater River; well, I wouldn't call where we stayed a campground, as it was a sloping turnout with a porta-pottie. But it was late and we were tired. As it turned out, if we would have driven another mile or so, we could have stayed at a real campground.

Lolo Pass is a favorite ride for motorcyclists because of its curves. And I can sure see why!

The route goes through two national forests alongside the Lochsa and Clearwater rivers. The route is considered one of the most scenic in the United States. You'll get no argument from me about this.

What's your favorite scenic highway? Please leave a comment below.

Why I like autumn

Juice doesn't get much fresher than this!

In autumn, the days start getting cooler, green leaves change to brilliant oranges, reds and yellows, and apples are harvested in the Yakima Valley.

Ah, yes, the apple harvest. What I like best about this is apple juice, fresh right out of the press. Wow! It doesn't get much better than this!

Washington apples are the best and are sold the world over. I've seen Washington apples from the Okanogan Valley sold in London, and red delicious from Wenatchee sold in Beijing, even though apples are grown extensively in China. But you can buy Chinese apples any place; finding Washington apples is a bit harder, not to mention more expensive. I found them at a fruit stand outside a major hospital where imported fruits, loose and in gift baskets, were sold.

Yesterday, we made our annual trip up to Tieton where we spent the day making apple juice. My husband's cousin has a couple of dozen apple trees -- Fujis, red and golden delicious, Granny Smith and so on, all of which go into the juice we make.

Yesterday about 30 people, ranging from toddlers to octogenarians, turned out to make juice, starting with picking the apples and ending with washing off the filled jugs. Everyone shows up with their jugs to hold the gallons of juice we make with the cousin's apple press. We made almost 200 gallons of juice in just a few hours. Each bottle tastes differently, depending on which type of apple dominated in that pressing. But it's all delicious. In return for helping the cousins make apple juice for their freezer, we get to have all the juice we want. Today our freezer is crammed with juice. Altogether, we made almost 200 gallons of juice yesterday, and also brought home a bushel box of Fuji apples.

With the days getting chillier, a cup of hot spiced cider will certainly come in handy.

What's your favorite thing about fall?

Historic Yellowstone



Hauling freight to Yellowstone in the early days.



The Yellowstone Historic Center museum was one of our stops on our recent trip to Yellowstone. I'd visited it on earlier trips to West Yellowstone, and was eager to do so again. The museum is housed in the old Union Pacific railroad depot, so many of its exhibits relate to that era. It also has a couple of old vehicles that were used to transport early visitors through the park. If you like to ride snowmobiles, you'll enjoy looking at early snowmobiles on the museum's front porch.



I took in a couple of the movies the museum shows regularly throughout the day. One was the one about the 1959 Hebgen earthquake which created a lake when a mountain came tumbling down. I remember driving by the site a year or two after the earthquake happened, when the devastation was still new. There's a visitor center there now, but it was closed for the season when we stopped there on this trip.



This movie talks about the volcanic and seismic activity taking place at Yellowstone today. Scientists said hundreds of earthquakes happen there every day, and that another one of the magnitude of Hebgen is going to happen, but nobody knows when. I never felt any earthquakes during the week we were in Yellowstone, but I know from my days in Alaska, where earthquakes are a common occurrence, a person two feet away from you will feel the earth shake while you may not feel anything.



We also enjoyed the movie on the train Montanans put together for the state's 1964 centennial celebration. It was a pretty cool event, with more than two dozen train cars crossing the country to the New York World's Fair. The movie also included interviews with many of the people involved in the project.

You can read more about the museum here.



The fine print

The Federal Trade Commission requires me to tell you that I received a complimentary ticket to the museum, in case the $4 (senior rate) ticket would influence what I wrote about it. It didn't. I've been to the museum before and I'll go again.

Where the buffalo roam

We saw lots of buffalo on our recent trip to Yellowstone National Park. We saw them all, from herds roaming the meadows to the huge hairy beasts walking on the roads. But my favorite buffalo were those roaming the streets of West Yellowstone, Montana.

These were colorful animals, ones you could walk right up to and touch, and they wouldn't charge you. Of course, they weren't real, but rather made from fiberglass which had been painted with scenes depicting Yellowstone (park and city) and Native Americans.

Once there were 37 painted buffalo on the streets, but they were auctioned off to raise money for community and economic development in West Yellowstone. Today, only 11 painted buffalo remain. They can be found mostly on Yellowstone Avenue, the street that ends at the entrance to the park.

I was really quite intrigued with the uniqueness of this project. I wish more towns like West Yellowstone, Joseph in northeastern Oregon with its magnificent bronze statues  and Toppenish in central Washington with its Old West murals, would do outdoor art displays like this. Or maybe they have, and I just don't know about them.

What's your favorite city outdoor art project?

In search of grizzlies

Grizzlies at the Discovery Center



We went to Yellowstone National Park at the wrong time of the year to see grizzlies. The park service tells me they're more easily seen in early spring or late fall when they're at lower elevations.

In all my trips to Yellowstone I've only seen bears twice. The first time was on my first trip back when I was eight years old. I came out of a restroom at Fishing Bridge to see a black bear running by; I immediately went back into the bathroom. The second time was on a trip in the mid 1980s when I had to use binoculars to watch a grizzly running up a distant hill.

But this time I figured out a way to see grizzly bears: Visit the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center at West Yellowstone. The center had six bears and eight wolves in residence the day we were there. The center has a marvelous exhibit on bears which tells everything you wanted to know about bears but were afraid to ask. You can read an article I wrote about the center here.

After touring the center, we headed off to the Yellowstone movie at the IMAX theatre nearby. There were a couple of scenes with a six-story high grizzly growling at you. Now that was frightening! I much preferred the real-life grizzlies which look fat and sassy and live behind high wire fences at the center.

The fine print

The Federal Trade Commission requires that I tell you that our visits to the center and IMAX were complimentary. Even if they hadn't been, I still would have visited them and wrote the same thing. These were two cool experiences.

Camping at Yellowstone

An elk  passes by our scooters.

We recently returned from a 10-day camping trip to Yellowstone National Park in which we spent six nights inside the park. We stayed three nights at Mammoth Hot Springs campground, where we had elk trooping through our campsite almost every night, then moved down to Madison campground for another three nights. No elk, but RVs were parked so close together, an elk couldn't possibly squeeze between them.



Although I've been to Yellowstone previously, this was by far the best visit. Probably because we hauled our motor scooters over there, and rode daily. While we were at Mammoth, we rode the north loop one day. It was uphill all the way to Canyon, and our scooters just gulped up the gas at $3.99 a gallon.



Plans for riding in the park were almost derailed the day we moved down to Madison. We checked into our campsite, and decided to take an afternoon ride down to Old Faithful, even though we would be stopping there the day we rode the park's south loop. About halfway there, I pulled over to let some cars go by -- I was doing the 45 mph speed limit, but it apparently wasn't fast enough for them.  Just as I was slowing down at the pull-out, the rear tire went flat. I thought for sure my scooter riding was done in the park.



My husband rode back to camp, and brought the van and motorcycle trailer back to rescue us. We went into West Yellowstone where we had the good fortune to be referred to Centennial Auto Repair. They located a tube for the tire in a town 40 miles away, and made a special trip there to get it for me. We went back to camp and my husband took the wheel off my scooter. We dropped it off at Centennial the next morning, then took off for the appointments I had for my writing assignments about Yellowstone. We picked up the tire on our way out of town, after being pleasantly surprised at the very reasonable bill Centennial presented for everything they did for us. So many times, businesses will try to gouge tourists in difficulty because they know they'll never see them again. If you have car problems while you're visiting Yellowstone, I would definitely recommend taking them to Centennial.



While we were in the park, we say many, many motorcycles on the roads. I found it very surprising no motorcycle shops were to be found in West Yellowstone.  I can't be the only rider who had problems. (I also had a couple of mechanical problems, but my husband, a retired motorcycle mechanic, was able to handle them.