Cool sandstone at the Fresno Dam boat launch
Fresno Reservoir boat launch
Buffalo Jump
Pit stop at this weird abandoned diner on the side of the highway.
DAY 16 : July 22/22 Shelby to Landusky, MT
With all the late nights, we have shifted our wake up times to around 9am. This doesn’t make for very good early morning drives, but it’s okay! Had a quick breakfast of yummy zucchini loaf, and then did some packing up. Jonathan took the small trainer kite out and showed the kids how to fly the kite in the ball diamond. The wind was good and kids had fun.
Dumped at the convenient Sani-station at the exit of the campground, and we were on our way again at 11:45am after a leisurely morning. On the record was 104080km. It was white knuckle driving along Hwy 2 because of the high winds. Every time a semi would pass, it would require nerves of steel to keep the rig straight. Luckily traffic was very spaced out along this secondary highway. We passed very small towns every 6 miles (which we soon learned was because when the railway was originally built, the steam trains required water every 6 miles!).
Jonathan spotted a very cute teeny red and white diner called the Sugar Shack, and we pulled over up ahead and did a U-turn to go check it out. It was a GREAT little stop in the middle of what seemed like nowhere! The little town of Rudyard was charming. The diner was on the side of the highway and we pulled up, played some tetherball on the playground beside it, and then stepped into a itty bitty 50’s style diner barely room for 8 red vinyl stools at the bar and the grill and shake machines behind it. There was a lovely woman and a high school freshman working, and a friendly little family of 3 enjoying a burger. It was so small it felt like you could reach over the counter and make yourself the shake! We enjoyed some fries, onion rings, grilled cheese sandwiches and the kids and chicken strips. Ollie and Meems ordered a lime flavoured old fashioned milkshake which was DELICIOUS. Good diner food, and great company, we thoroughly enjoyed this little stop. We were told about the town museum which we had seen a sign for, and decided to drive the 2 minutes down the road into “town”, more like a little community of houses, and check it out. Glad we did!
Pulled up out front of a white building/shed structure with a sign on it that read “Rudyard Dept Museum / Dinosaur Hall”. A knock on the door and we met Grace and her little old fluffy dog, Tessa, and she unlocked the dinosaur hall for us to check it out. Grace knew all about everything in there… amazing fossils of a Gryptosaurus they called the Sore Head Dinosaur that were found locally. AKA duck billed dinosaurs. The town sign said, “Home of 596 nice people and one Sore head). The little museum was a one room shed basically and filled with fossils and castings and information and was founded by Jack Horner and Makela. (Jack Horner was a consultant for Jurassic Park movies). Grace has lots of cool stories to tell about the Dinos and local interests this is also where we learned about the towns being 6 miles apart! She showed us how to tell a fossil from a stone by the absorption of a fossil… if you lick your finger and stick it to a fossil, the fossil will stick to your finger, but a stone doesn’t absorb things and won’t stick. She let the kids choose a fossil from a box of loose fossil bits to take home. Our visit to the museum was free, and we signed the guest book because they get funding by the number of visitors they have come through. We also left a small donation.
After a full and interesting tour of the Dinosaur Hall, she let us into several other cool museum buildings crammed with historical stuff. A room with all kinds of turn of the century and into the 1940’s memorabilia, as well as an original little old school house, a homesteader shack, a blacksmith’s shop, a barn filled with tractors and a cool old lamp collection. The kids loved choosing cool rocks from the gravel between the buildings with Grace’s encouragement. She said that all this gravel was local and around 30-40% of it was fossil fragments.
At 3:30pm we were back on Hwy 2 headed east and only 40 min later we decided to pull off at the Fresno Dam and check it out. It dams up the Milk River and we drove across the dam where you could see water on one side and green rolling ranch land on the other. The kids liked seeing the narrow spillway with water gushing out. We drove back across (it’s just a small bridge and stretch of road) and saw signs for Jaycee beach. Drove down to what was a boat launch, and parked to check out the cool sedimentary rock along the shoreline cliff, and all the rocks and the wavy shore. Beautiful sights after miles and miles and miles of the Great Plains!
4:40pm we set off for Havre, the next bigger town, and the landscape started to roll a bit more. The towns now had huge grain elevators right at the side of the highway between the road and the railway tracks. We drove through Havre, aiming for Chinook, which looked rough and so we carried on towards Zurich. Within an hour, Amelia was peckish, and we pulled over just on the outskirts of Zurich at this random abandoned building on the side of the highway. The SPA BAR on the sign. It was a weird old diner with garbage inside. Jonathan made a smoothie and snacks while I snapped a photo of the rig in situ. Ollie had pulled out the map and had a look at it to see where we’d been and where we were headed. He noticed the symbol on the legend for the ghost towns that I had highlighted and set to work looking for them on the map itself. Turns out there’s TWO ghost towns several miles south of Harlem, the next town.
With a new route picked to detour south through the Fort Belknap Indian Reserve, we hopped back in our seats and when we reached Harlem a few miles past Zurich, we turned right onto Hwy 66 into the reserve and were destined for the ghost town/campground hoping there would be space. There was a small cluster of homes at the entrance to the reserve lands, and then it just opened up into beautiful rolling grasslands as far as the eye could see. We could see the undulating ribbon of the one lane highway ahead of us until the horizon. As we drove, the landscaped changed into the grassy green foothills of the “Little Rocky Mountains” with more and more trees dotting the landscape.
It wasn’t until 7pm that we turned left onto a gravel road that should lead us to Landusky where the campground and ghost town should be. I had to jump out and snap a pic of the rig in the middle of nowhere. Pretty cool scenery. Fingers crossed there was actually somewhere to stay!
7:30pm we found the Montana Gulch Campground for $8USD / night. Thickly forested rough gravel single road into the trees and we finally found the campsites. Super cool looking trees, and beautiful wildflowers. We pulled and and attempted to level on the uneven ground. Ollie was very pleased to find that the site had an aluminium picnic table perfect for PING PONG (thanks to the Fluevogs for the travel net!). A quick rally of ping pong, then Jonathan and the kids biked around the campsite to deposit our payment envelope in the box, and see if they could find out anything about the nearby ghost town so we could check it out tomorrow morning.
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