Time Traveling: Missouri Headwaters State Park

Good morning, my friends. It's so good to be back in Blogville. We're in Billings, Montana, moving on to Miles City, Montana, this morning and then on to North Dakota the next day. So far, the trip is going well. We had a little scare with our refrigerator a few nights back. It started beeping, as it does when the door is left open too long. Without getting into the details, it displayed an error code. Mike watched a couple of YouTube videos and used the magnet from my "needle nanny" to fix it. Good teamwork, no? So far, it's given us no more trouble. We amaze ourselves sometimes.

Okay, so let's back up to Tuesday. We drove about 25 miles from our campground to visit Missouri Headwaters State Park.

This little prairie dog was there to greet us. I'm telling you, if these little guys weren't so quick, I'd grab one up and have a new little pet. They are adorable.

We were in the process of paying our day use fee and trying to get some information about hiking trails. The day use fee was $8, and of course, we didn't have proper cash. We ended up giving them $10. No problem. Here, we left the state of Montana and entered the state of confusion. There were no maps and no mention of hiking trails. We wandered around and finally located one of those newspaper dispensing type machines. It required a quarter, and of course, we had no coins. In the process of trying to figure this out, I was wandering around the parking lot reading the signs. Here's what I learned:

When we exhausted our ideas about getting information, we drove back and forth the short distance through the park looking for something...anything. The park office was closed. We found another one of those newspaper machines, but that one required TWO quarters. We met up with a large group at one of our stops and bummed a quarter from them. Heading back to the original spot, we dropped our quarter into the machine, feeling all empowered and everything. Disappointingly, the quarter fell straight through the machine, opening nothing. We tried it half a dozen times. No joy.

Okay, well, we were undaunted. We drove back to the lot where a sign indicated we could see the headwaters.

There, we found this sign. I'm not much into reading signs. I just take pictures and read them later. This next one was worth a read.

When Lewis and Clark set off on their journey, one of their missions was to find the headwaters of the Missouri River.

This next little sign gives you an idea what you'll be looking at in the pictures that follow.

Looking to my left, we could see where the Jefferson River and the Madison River come together.

Looking to my right, we could see where the Gallatin River flows in.

Straight ahead, there was a swirling eddy, and then the Missouri River flowed away from us bending toward the north.

Here's some information about the Missouri River and why Jefferson wanted to find the headwaters.

It took more than two years for the expedition to find the river's source.

Looking far to the other side, I could see a patch of flowers growing on the bank.

While we were attempting to figure out where the hiking trail was, we came across this little speedster.

I liked this quote from Langston Hughes.

A sign along the road indicated we could reach Fort Rock from this parking lot. You can see it in the image below.

Three hiking trails took off from this point. Two of them indicated we could return to the park entrance by following along, going off in different directions. The third trail was unmarked, but started up a steep embankment. We headed off on the trail you see in the image above, simply because it pointed in the direction of Fort Rock. Along the way, we passed these little morning glory looking flowers. They were about the diameter of a quarter. Too bad they wouldn't work in the information machine.

Also these red berries. They were about the size of a pea. 

We finally gave up on our trail when it didn't seem to be getting us anywhere. We walked back and took the unmarked trail, which got us up the hill and onto the top of Fort Rock. From there, the views were beautiful.

We found this marker indicating direction, longitude, latitude and altitude. Nothing about "attitude," and our frustration was giving us bad ones.

But seeing this view of the Gallatin River improved our outlook significantly. (Did you see what I did there? Outlook?) Here's a pano I took where we stood.

There were some four-sided signs there indicating what one could see looking into the distance. I'll show you what we saw, hopefully, in order. Sign first, picture of the view following.

Okay, and I thought I had a sign describing this next view (to the north), but apparently not. Just know that the Gallatin River flows off in the upper left corner of the image below.

So we never found the hiking trail we were looking for, but we felt as if we'd seen enough to satisfy our curiosity. It was starting to get hot, and so we headed back to our truck. Along the way, we saw this crow high in a tree. He was "cawing" at us for a bit. As we got closer, he started making a sound I've never heard from a crow before. Crows have many vocalizations, but this one was interesting. It made me wonder if there was a nest somewhere close by.

I'm hoping you can hear it in this video below. I didn't upload this one to YouTube, but took it straight from my computer. It's an experiment. If it doesn't work, I might have to come back and fix it after I publish.

Okay, and so that was our visit to the park. We'd hoped to take a five mile hike there, but we saw what we came to see. After that, we got some lunch and headed off into Three Forks, Montana, where I happened to know there was a quilt shop. I'll tell you about that in a separate post.