Day 21 - Browning to Great Falls, Montana - 121 Miles

Yesterday we enjoyed one of the sunniest days since we left home. Today, just to show us that we shouldn't count on such gifts, water fell from the sky from the earliest hours of the morning. In fact, it was still raining enthusiastically when we had finished breakfast and were looking to leave camp. It rained so much, that I put off pumping the tanks at the dump station, and just drove away from our lovely camp spot in Browning, Montana hoping that drier weather lay just down the road.

Our chosen two-lane highway today was Route 89, which wanders a little east and a little west as it heads in a southeasterly direction on its way to Great Falls. More importantly, our route promised to take us back in time to the heyday of the dinosaurs and a totally different Montana. Yes, on Route 89 you will find not one, but two dinosaur museums amidst the plowed farm fields, and dusty commerce centers on this eastern side of the Rockies.

Our first stop was the "Two Medicine Dinosaur Center" in Bynum. We were a bit put off at first as the "town" of Bynum seemed to contain no more than a dozen buildings, none of which looked like they keep the rain and snow out, much less host a museum. But as we proceeded further into town, we caught sight of a huge Tyrannosaur, occupying the edge of the parking lot for a sort of nondescript warehouse on the south side of town.

"This must be it," Concetta said as we drew near the huge beast.

And indeed it was. Once we had parked the rig in front of the warehouse, whose front wall also proclaimed that we had found the Two Medicine Dinosaur Center, and walked through the door, one of our most unforgettable museum experiences EVER was about to unfold.

"Hello and welcome," a woman standing behind the museum ticketing counter boomed, a huge smile lighting up her face. "Where are you from?"

I don't think we've ever received such an enthusiastic welcome anywhere in all our travels. It turned out that this particular museum staffer, whose name was Dana, and who hailed from the far off city of Tampa, Florida, just absolutely lived and breathed this particular dinosaur experience. She had started out working on a dig in the nearby hills two years before, and showed so much promise and dedication, that she was later approached to be the field coordinator for the next season. So now, when she needs to escape the muggy heat of Florida's summers, she returns every year to the Montana outback. Winters she goes home to Florida, but anxiously awaits her chance to return for the spring "dig."

When archeological digs are not under way, Dana volunteers to operate the Two Medicine facility. She told us that she was retired, and just needed something exciting to occupy her time. But as we would soon discover, Dana doesn't just occupy her time holding down a chair at the museum gift shop selling tickets and souvenirs. No, the dear lady insisted on conducting us on a personalized tour of the museum, and along with her summer intern, Anthony, related the history of each and every exhibit, artifact display, and diorama in a most animated fashion. By the time we had spent an hour with these two, we felt like we'd known them for years.

The most notable feature of the Two Medicines museum, is that they possess a plaster copy of the largest dinosaur for which a collection of actual fossilized bones have ever been found (photo below). Known as a "Seismosaurus (earth shaker), it was 137 feet long and 23 feet tall at the hip, which as you can see, just towers above Concetta.

The actual incomplete set of fossils were found by a couple of hikers in New Mexico. To quote Wikipedia, "Seismosaurus was named by paleontologist Gillette in 1991. The incomplete set of fossils includes many gastroliths (gizzard stones), vertebrae (parts of the backbone), chevrons from the spine, some ribs, partial pelvis (hip), and some other assorted bones."

This means, of course, that paleontologists built a whole dinosaur using the found fossils to suggest the size of other of the giant creature's components. The comparisons are based on like dinosaurs with known, full-skeleton examples. Very scientific.

While I wasn't overly impressed with the plaster representation of Seismosaurus that towered over everything in the room, I WAS impressed with the real skeletal components that the museum had displayed everywhere else in the room. The museum is so small, that you can often come face-to-face with creatures that existed tens of millions of years ago.

In addition to full skeletons of dinosaurs, there are in situ bone collections that have been allowed to remain in their surrounding concretions just as they were found in the field. Only enough of the original surrounding material has been removed to allow the viewer to see how the bones were arranged in the earth. Very cool!

Once the guided tour had ended, Concetta and I continued to wander the museum not wanting to miss a single diorama, time-line, or explanatory display card. We even took photos of the lab where the Paleo geeks hang out and work on old fossils with things like dental picks. While we were doing this, we got to know the intern, Anthony, a little better. He was a native of Dallas, Texas. After his hitch in the Navy where he spent time at Widby Island near Seattle, Washington, he came to work on his degree at the university in Missoula, Montana. When classes are not in session, he works an internship at the Two Medicines Museum in Bynum, is provided with modest quarters locally, and succeeds in learning much about paleontology. His major is actually geology, so we're not quite sure how he ended up at Two Medicines. But hey, he looked happy and maybe dinosaurs will turn out to be his real interest somewhere down the road.

Once we said adios to Dana and Anthony, Concetta and I headed down Route 89 toward the town of Choteau where we planned to have lunch in some convenient parking lot, then visit our second dinosaur museum of the day. Truth be told, the museum in Choteau turned out to be a sort of historical smorgasbord of different subjects. On display were everything from dinosaurs tens of millions of years old, to the works of western writer, A. B. Gutherie, who is most famous perhaps for crafting the screenplay for the movie, Shane, with Alan Ladd playing the lead. Still, even with all the bewildering variety, the displays were top notch, well thought out, and certainly worth the $2.00 a head admission.

Perhaps the most impressive display, at least for me, was the 620 pound grizzly bear that they had on display in a museum outbuilding. This "big daddy" of the forest was killed in 1991 and, at the time, was determined to be the oldest male wild Grizzly in north America. He was also one of the last grizzlies legally hunted in Montana. I tried to picture this old fellow coming up against Leonardo diCaprio's character in the Revanant, Hugh Glass, and decided that Hugh probably should have been shredded into hamburger bits.

As an aside, it is reported that David Letterman bought a ranch somewhere outside of Choteau and can sometimes be seen in town.

Once we left the museum in Choteau, we made our way down the last 52 miles of Route 89, and finished up at Dick's RV Park in Great Falls. Dick's is a very large camp with ample space between each rig, easy to use utilities, a fairly large laundry facility, and a camp manager who is just as friendly and helpful as you ever see. I didn't get her name, but when I told her we wanted to visit the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center tomorrow, she took the time to draw a map for me so I could get there reasonably easily and avoid the freeway.

The first thing we did when we arrived at Dick's was to gather up the balance of the laundry that we hadn't done two days ago, and make a speedy walk to the laundry center. Once the machine was running we determined that we should get a few more steps on our pedometers, and so took off walking around the camp.

As we walked down one of the rows near our rig, a woman approached us and told us that she had left a present for us of several different kinds of vegetables on our picnic table. We were not sure how she chose us, but we guessed that her rig must lie somewhere near ours. Anyway, we had a nice chat with the lady whose name was Louise, and she told us that she was leaving for England tomorrow and would not need the produce. We thanked her very much and went back to the rig to see that we had potatoes, celery, and carrots to enjoy in the future. Rather ironic, we thought, that the American border patrol had confiscated our veggies, and then comes Louise, a complete stranger, to repatriate some of that loss. Isn't life amazing?

About this time, as we were preparing to go retrieve our finished laundry, the skies opened up again and a veritable Niagara Falls of water descended upon us. It looked to be raining so hard, that we put on rain coats, got out our umbrellas, and shifted into our worst shoes to make the fifty or sixty-yard dash to the laundry room. Even so, our levis got so damp that we had to change into other clothes when we arrived back at the rig.

Still, all things considered, rain or no rain, dinosaurs big or small, vegetables here or there, we had a terrific time today prowling the lesser-used roads in America. As we are constantly saying, just SEEING it all is payment enough for our time. May it ever be so. And when you hit the road to discover whatever is waiting for you down that road less traveled, we wish you exciting destinations and memorable travels from the Davises, the Happy Wanderers.