On today’s journey we finally left Washington, crossed the panhandle of Idaho and into northwestern Montana. No exciting highway patrol stories today, we just had great day passing thru the mountain ranges. It’s absolutely beautiful country up here, it is very sparsely populated, mostly mountains with pastures in the valleys between the ranges. The ranches all have huge stacks of firewood laid up already for winter; I imagine they spend a lot of time snowbound.
The few towns we passed thru all have thriving main streets with mostly individually owned businesses, no Wal-Mart’s up here. A big community here will have maybe 6000 residents, the only industry that we saw today was logging and sawmills.
On our way across Montana we stopped and hiked to a waterfall and then to a swing bridge across the Kootenai River. An unbelievably powerful volume of water was rushing down the canyon. One thing is for sure, if you fell in, there would be no surviving this section of river, the current was very fast, the water is freezing, and the shoreline is rock. The swing bridge was exciting; there is a 5 person at a time limit for good reason. It moves a lot with multiple people walking on it at the same time. We took it all the way over to the far side, talked to some other hikers for a bit and came right back across. We carried the dogs, they were ok on the crossing but I imagine if they were walking while the bridge was swinging they would not have liked it.
We are camped for tonight and tomorrow just outside the west entrance to Glacier National Forest. Tomorrow we are going to drive the jeep across the scenic highway to the sun that crosses the park.
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