Great Road Trip of 2017.....Part Seventeen/Day Fourteen

Part One of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE
Part Two of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE
Part Three of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE
Part Four of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE
Part Five of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE
Part Six of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE
Part Seven of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE
Part Eight of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE
Part Nine of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE
Part Ten of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE
Part Eleven of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE
Part Twelve of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE
Part Thirteen of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE  

Part Fourteen of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE  

Part Fifteen of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE 
Part Sixteen of the Great Western Road Trip is HERE

We rose early and headed out but first Kim and Joel wanted to stop off at their alma mater, the University of Montana.

I took a photo of them with the "Grand Griz" statue.

Hubs with the statue.

The Fall Season at the university hadn't commenced yet but the school was gearing up for students to move onto campus as evidenced by this electronic recycling dumpster next to one of the dorm builldings.

Kim and Joel happened by a professor while heading back to the car and spent a bit of time talking to this fellow.  I had no clue who he was so I snapped some photos of the campus grounds. lol

Back on the road and heading to Lolo, Montana.

I believe this was the Bitteroot River.....

Before we climbed the elevation.  The air was heavy with wildfire smoke that Summer.

And we stopped up on the Lolo Summit.

The trip by modern vehicles along the Lolo Trail takes quite a bit less time than it took Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery back in 1805.  The Corp and their area guides, among them a Shoshone native called Toby, took 11 days to cover 200 miles in the Bitterroot Mountains on their westward journey.

Now there is a nifty little Visitor's Center with some information and a gift shop.

A Smokey the Bear ornament.  They could have used Smokey that Summer to prevent forest fires. lol

Some activities for kids in the Visitor Center.

Mugs and Lolo Pass branded bags of coffee for sale.

After 11 days of frostbite, malnutrition and dehydration, Meriwether Lewis wrote in his journal upon climbing down the Bitterroots onto the Weippe Prairie......

". . . the pleasure I now felt in having tryumphed over the rockey Mountains and decending once more to a level and fertile country where there was every rational hope of finding a comfortable subsistence for myself and party can be more readily conceived than expressed, nor was the flattering prospect of the final success of the expedition less pleasing . . .”

And of course, Captain Meriwether Lewis is my 12th cousin 7 x removed.  I posed with the well known drawing of Lewis and Clark but pointed in the opposite direction just because. ;-)  Well they did end up going back East at some point later so I am not wrong.

Outside the Center was  some flat flagstones around the base of a supporting timber for the building and people had left rocks on them.

And this poor little grasshopper had gotten trod upon on the sidewalk there....

On another base was this rather large rock someone had left with words decoupaged upon it.

I flipped it on it's side and saw more words.  This was back when geo-caching was big and so was leaving rocks in interesting places for people to discovery.  I told Kim that Lorraine must have been here. lol

Back on the road and down the mountains and we were crossing over into Idaho on Route 12.

Lots of forest here.....

                                                        

And view back at the Bitterroots amidst the smokey haze....

Then we came to a wonderfully scenic part of the road.....

And when they said "Winding" boy, they weren't kidding!!

We had the West Fork of the Lolo Creek on our right as the road followed the riverbank.....

It was just a lovely drive at this point.....

But yes, the road was VERY winding.

We stopped at a cafè along this road in the middle of nowhere for some lunch.  It was a scorching hot day and I don't recall them having a/c in the restaurant and we were the only people dining there.  They did have ceiling fans going so that helped but it was too hot to eat.

Then it was back on the road and more lovely scenery.

After this part of the drive we stopped at "The Heart of the Monster".  This is the ancestral birthplace of the Nez Pierce Tribe.

There were so information boards.

There is the Heart of the Monster in the distance.  Everyone but me took a walk over to it. 

 I was melting in the heat so I used the porta-potty wandering around the informational boards then sat in the car out of the sun.

Some phonetic Nez Pierce language pronunciations which I attempted while I waited for everyone to walk back.  I discovered that I am NOT a linguist. lolz

And a short time after we got back on the road, we were pulling into Lewiston Idaho.

Anybody want a motor home?  They had lots of them outside of town for sale at a dealership.

A little bit of traffic in town.

Oh boy, another Lewis and Clark sign.  Kim said it drove her nuts, growing up around all this Lewis and Clark history as they are mentioned constantly and business use them in their business names, etc..

You can't get away from Lewis and Clark.  In fact, the town of Lewiston is named for my ancestral cousin and across the Snake River from Lewiston is the town of Clarkston Washington, named for Lewis' cohort, William Clark.

Maybe an interesting aside here.....I worked at the Virginia Opera Company with a woman who told me she was related to William Clark.  This was when I was in my 20's, long before I did any genealogy and found I was related to Meriwether Lewis.  We were cousins and didn't know it at the time.

On the way to Kim's house, passing by a Zip's gas station.  I just looked now and that business is shutdown.  It was interesting, the convenience store building looked like a Swiss hunting lodge and they sold ready made food too besides the usual gas station convenience store stuff.  I guess the Lewiston-Moscow corridor didn't grow as much as the owners had hoped to keep them profitable.

We pulled into Kim and Joel's driveway late that afternoon.  We met Kim's mother and the dog and cat and then I crashed into the bed after climbing the stairway with no railing! from the basement.  It was still danged hot is about all I can remember of that evening and the a/c wasn't very strong. lol

But we had finally made it to our westward destination.

Yay.

Sluggy