Day 9

Custer State Park, South Dakota to Gardiner, Montana

538 miles

12 hours (including several stops)

Today we spent driving again. Our goal was to get from the Black Hills of South Dakota to just north of Yellowstone-possibly to Bozeman, Montana…we really weren’t sure how long it would take…so we made no reservations for camping.

Every time we get on the road again to drive a long distance, it feels like such an adventure! With the crest of each hill there is a little thrill in the pit of my stomach as I wonder what we will see  and what the land will do. This part of the country is so foreign to me-to all of us really-it is such a cool experience.

So, as the pictures will show, the landscape changed drastically today over the 500 miles. We went from the Black Hills-to rolling hills, to vast expanses of rolling fields of sagebrush and grasses, to the foothills of the western mountains, to the rising peaks and cliffs of Yellowstone’s borders. It was an amazing transformation.

While riding at one point through the open land of Montana, I asked Bay what he thought of the landscape. I asked him to describe it to me as if I had never seen it before. In his words, “The land in Montana is really wide. It’s open with only a couple of trees.” He said it well-really wide. That was exactly how it felt.

 Montana-really wide

 Custer National Forest (Rt. 212 runs through this area-we stayed off the highway for a good portion of our trip today). Quite a bit of this forest appeared to have been burned in a forest fire recently.

 Leah and her little animals looking outside together at the scenery.

 more Montana with some mountains appearing in the distance

 When approaching Gallatin National Forest and the Absaroka Mountain Range that borders Yellowstone, we followed the Yellowstone River for many miles. The views were astounding. We look forward to spending several days exploring this area.

  The fire danger here is extremely high-all types of campfires have been prohibited ever since we got west of Kentucky-no charcoal or fire of any type. There are warning signs all over. In fact, we passed some firefighters creating a fire break on the way for a small wildfire in front of someone’s home. Also, an entire face of one mountain here near Yellowstone was on fire and there were helicopters dropping water buckets on it as we drove in. You can just see some of the smoke from that fire over the ridge of the mountain in the above picture.

On the way in, we called a couple of campgrounds that I had researched back at home and written down the information. We found one with an empty spot (there are still LOTS of people here, despite it being shoulder season) and got in about 7:30 pm. We set up and will stay here probably a couple of nights for sure, before moving on to a different campground. This place is called Rocky Mountain RV Park. It truly is an RV park. We are about 10 yards away from neighbors on either side, but the views are great of the surrounding mountains. We were looking forward to some dry camping out here, but right now our water tank situation is preventing that. We hope to fix it so that we can camp somewhere a little more remote.

We ate breakfast, lunch and dinner on the road today. Breakfast for the kids was cereal and Dennis and I had yogurt. Lunch was whatever leftovers or easy mac we could find, plus plenty of snacks throughout the day to keep everyone happy! While we were on Rt. 89 south of Livingston coming into Gardiner, I quickly heated up some taco meat and put together a taco salad, which we pulled over on the side of the road at a pull-over to eat, before getting going again. Better to be fed and happy when setting up camp than hungry and grumpy!

Last thing to mention for today, on our way out of South Dakota, we realized that our route would take us right by Sturgis-home of the big Harley Davidson motorcycle rally. We felt that it would be silly not to just at least drive into the town to see it and stop in at the HD store to get some Sturgis t-shirts. It was a fun little stop, and one of those things that we just couldn’t pass up!