Well, we're waaaay behind in our blog entries as we've already visited 12 places and are on our 13th one right now. So, instead of many individual entries, we're going to combine them into one only. Enjoy the photos!
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| Our trip so far....starting with Washington out west, all the way to Wisconsin |
WASHINGTON: The Dry Lake Falls were created by massive floods around 10,000 years ago. These cliffs are 400 feet tall and over 3.5 miles wide! The flood waters that came over the cliffs here were over 400 higher than you see here! This cliff area started 20 miles downstream and, as the water carved out the rock, it gradually moved upstream to where it is located today.
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| Dry Lake Falls. Notice the yellow circle? There are three cars there...for scale. |
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| Kootenai Falls. This is our favorite place to visit in Libby. We usually spend a few hours enjoying the rushing water while having some lunch. |
Glacier National Park, east side. We came here to do one thing only....go kayaking in the glacier lakes....so we did!
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| This lake was surrounded on all sides with mountains this size. Fantastic! |
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| Katie seems unimpressed by the spectacular scenery. |
HAVRE, MONTANA: First off, Havre is pronounced like "Have Her". We stayed one night only but the horses in the field in front of our RV like to come over to get some attention. Other than that, we just hung around the park and relaxed.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT NATIONAL PARK, NORTH UNIT: The large spherical boulders found here are called concretions. They are usually round but can be any shape. Concretions are formed within rocks by deposits of mineral around a core.
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| Gotta little close, don't you think? |
CUSTER STATE PARK: We saw a Fourth of July parade in Custer City, did a little kayaking, hiking and just poking around.
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| Look how calm the lake is. Very peaceful. |
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| Parade started off with all the children. Love small town parades! |
UNION PACIFIC GOLDEN SPIKE TOWER: This is the largest railyard in the country! Over 100 tracks going east and west ! Someday, I'll do a blog entry just about the workings of this place. Amazing! YOu can go here to view a live view of the yard in operation:
https://goldenspiketower.com/bailey-yard/live-cam/
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| This is only the east bound traffic. |
Just some of the facts: Every 24 hours, Bailey Yard handles 10,000 railroad cars. Of those, 3,000 are sorted daily in the yard’s eastward and Golden Spike Tower overlooking Bailey Yard’s westward yards, nicknamed “hump” yards. Using a mound cresting 34 feet for eastbound trains and 20.1 feet for those heading west, these two hump yards allow four cars a minute to roll gently into any of 114 “bowl” tracks where they become part of trains headed for dozens of destinations. Together, these two yards have 18 receiving and 16 departure tracks.
Train operations and repair shops at Bailey Yard are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The fueling and service center processes more than 9,000 locomotives each month, using technology like overhead cranes and elevated work bays to maintain fluid operations.
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| This is the Golden Spike Tower where you can go to the 8th floor to view the entire railyard. |
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| One last image of an aerial view of all the rail tracks. |
Okay, that's it for now...hope you enjoyed all of this. It goes without saying that, each of these stops, could be a story in and of itself. But, rather than bore you to pieces with thousands of photos and text, we thought it would be best to summarize. Let us know your thoughts and we'll see you next time as we head down to see our boy in Atlanta with stops at Nashville, Shiloh, Savanah, Charleston and the largest dollhouse museum in the country!
kim/steve/katie
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| You'll have to ask about Steve's "hat". |
