Fort McCloud

After two trips – both evening & morning up the road and back without seeing the “guaranteed goats & grizzlies” we checked out of our Radium campground early and headed on to Ft. McCloud.  Along the way we stopped at an interpretive center on the spot where a side of the mountain gave way in 1902 and covered a mining town. 

The name of the town was Frank – so it is called the Frank Slide.  It turns out they were getting a little too carried away with how much coal they were digging out underground and not leaving enough to support the mountain above.  The crazy thing is most of the people escaped because it did not slide directly onto the main part of town and 17 men even dug their way out to safety who were in the mine at the time of the slide.  And the even crazier thing is they just repaired what they needed to and went right back to mining – leaving the area buried that was under the rock.  Think of what Siegfried & Jensen could have done with that today!  (Hope some of you are not offended by lawyer jokes!)

That night after setting up the trailer Dad was just itching to take some pictures but we were out of the wildlife areas of our trip so we drove out onto the prairie and saw lots of wind turbines for energy.  The sky sure is beautiful in the wide open spaces.

As we were heading back to the trailer Dad could not resist a couple of beautiful sunset shots.

The next morning we went to Head Smashed in Buffalo Jump Interpretive Center.  Very interesting to see all of the guides and people working here were First Nation members as Indians are called in Canada.  This was a very well done museum with a movie about how a buffalo jump works as well as a movie about the excavation and discovery of artifacts at this site.  The buffalo jumps were used before the times when Indians had horses.  They were called the dog days because the only animals used to help transport things from camp to camp for the Indians were dogs. 

A young man is selected to be the buffalo runner and puts the tanned skin of a buffalo calf on his head and body and then leads the herd leader mother buffalo down this “funnel” of rock piles with tree branches the Indians have placed there to block the buffalo from running away from the edge.  Other Indians stand between the rock piles with wolf skins on them to scare the buffalos into continuing to run toward the cliff where the whole herd jumps off to their death. 

The Indians would camp here and process the animals, using the meat and hide and practically every bit of every part of the buffalo for eating and sewing clothes and other useful items.  It was all very interesting.

Then we went to the Royal Canadian Mountie Museum from when Fort McCloud was first settled.  They had a mounted horse riding group of high school students that rode the horses in several different formations to music. 

It is interesting Ft. McCloud has just recently been awarded the bid for the new training center for current Mounties when it is a historic Mountie post.  

It was really hot – finally over 90 degrees - and I had found a brochure at the museum with a list of quilt shops.  There was one in a town about 25 miles away so we decided to head over there rather than sit in the hot trailer.  We had driven lots more miles than that looking for animals to photograph so we headed out on the first shopping adventure of the trip.  I have such a good natured husband!  Steve brought his book and waited in a chair in the store while I browsed and found a couple of fun things.  We then saw another restaurant we had never heard of “Montana Steakhouse” so decided to give it a try.  It was a chain in Canada and had lots of BBQ stuff – kind of like an upscale “Bubba’s”.  We enjoyed sandwiches rather than the full rib or chicken dinner. It was too hot for that much food and I ended up taking half of mine home anyway!

Of course on the way home we could not just drive back home on the freeway so checked out the map and took some back roads up through some amazingly beautiful farm country as far as the eye could see.  There were also some HUGE feedlots as far as the nose could smell but luckily we can not forward those along to you.

Dad could not resist taking a couple of pictures of the countryside.