Thursday (Sep 13)
This turns out to be one of those campgrounds that was bustling with activity last night, but by the time I emerge from the van at 9:30 it’s a ghost town. Even though it’s a National Park, it seems that all my neighbors were just one night stands, on their way to somewhere else. Maybe the South Unit of the park has more action.
I drove half of the auto road, up to the River Bend Overlook. It was a great view over the Little Missouri Valley. The road to get there was not fun to drive, it was work. On the way up the hill to the overlook the road was slumped and kinda collapsed and had reverted to gravel instead of pavement. Maintaining roads on this geology much be a nightmare. Any hard rain and a chunk of the hill just might slide sideways five feet. The road was so crappy that after enjoying the Overlook I had no enthusiasm for going farther on it. So instead of heading onward to the end of the road I started back towards the highway. There are a lot of interest-looking hikes here that would be fun to do someday – hike along the ridges for a few miles, then cross the road and hike back in the valley.
There was another really great CCC shelter up here at the Overlook. Seeing it gave me the same complex emotions as last night. In the Age of Trump, any reminder of how government used to work is kind of emotional.
To get back to the Lewis & Clark beat, I backtrack north on 85. Where it jogs west to continue to Williston, I go straight to Watford City in search of coffee and wifi. It turned into a frustrating twenty minutes with a happy ending. Searching for a coffee lead me to the middle of a downtown indoor mall, for a place that turned out to be a drive-thru a block away (aargh!). I drove to the other place, and it didn’t have coffee that day (huh?). I adjusted my expectations and went to JL Beers (stupid names for nice places seems to be a thing up here), a downtown sports bar I had noticed across the street from the indoor mall that advertised with wifi, and it turned out great! Quite a tasty burger – mushroom Swiss with teriyaki sauce and a fried egg. Pretty close to breakfast, and delish! The town is electric with oil boom money.
It took about an hour of driving to escape oil boom-land. Thank goodness! I found it quite wearying. So many big trucks scurrying about. You could feel greed + environmental degradation in the air
At some point in your life you’ve probably seen one of those refinery flames – where there’s a jet of flame burning off whatever it is they need to burn off. Well, on this drive going east from Watford City there were at least five of these visible at one time, in all directions. And not just the little 10′ birthday candles I used to see driving by the Chevron reinery in Richmond CA. These were 20-30, maybe 40′ high …turning the prairie of North Dakota into a particularly flat Bosch painting.
This went on for almost an hour, then I must have passed the edge of the Baaken shale, because I started to notice … not something, but the absence of something – the road is not clogged with giant trucks and there are no 40′ flames in the distance. I was back on regular old featureless prairie, no clots of trucks parked every few miles doing mysterious things.
The Missouri is still flowing east at this point, so I have been following Route 23 east from Watford City, then north to follow a bend in the river/lake, then a lot of east, then south on US 83 to the edge of another huge lake created by Garrison Dam on the Missouri. This lake is mostly called Lake Sacakawea (odd spelling) but apparently the arm of the lake that trails off into a valley east of the riverbed is called Lake Audubon for some reason. My stop for the night is right here on Lake Audubon right before a long bridge over the lake.
WHUFU page for: East Totten Trail Campground
Right on the lake! Spacious, level, wide-open sites. Stupid reservation-only Army Corps sign-up.
Bar and Grill 400 yards up the hill.
tonight:
It's kind of spectacular here, a level pad and picnic table 40 yards from the lake. But the check-in system stresses me out.
There is a pretty nice bar and grill at the top of the hill.
There is an RV and boat at the far south end of the campground, but otherwise the place it deserted. There is a really enticing grassy area to the left (north). I parked there first, but after spending some time getting the van level and perfectly situated on the grass I get out and I read the fine print on the sign. This section is closed for the season! AAARRRGGGHHH. So I move back over to the parking pads, where the fine print says I have to call ReserveAmerica to buy tonight’s camping. That’s four minutes of my life I’ll never get back, but I’m paid up (a mere $9 – no service fee!) and can now exist here without stress.
It’s very pretty, but there’s really nothing to do here without a boat. I take an evening walk in the form of walking up the hill to see what’s up with the Fort Totten Bar and Grill. The parking lot was very interesting because two HUGE windmill blades were parked in the lot, each with it’s own flatbed and cab. It’s hard to comprehend the size of these things when they’re up in the sky, but down here on the ground they are enormous. [At the time I wondered where the third blade was, but since then I have seen two-bladed windmills, so maybe I was indeed looking at the whole kit right there.]
The bar and grill was fun. The bartender was an easy guy to talk to, as bartenders should be. He was glad to escape the Baaken Shale mess. I ordered the “Buffalo salad”, and it was a mistake. My body is saying ‘get a salad’, and he gave me the impression it was a regular salad with buffalo wing blue cheese for the dressing. I like blue cheese! But the chicken on it was super spicy (Buffalo style?), and it was hard to digest. Oh well…. It helped to have the short walk back to the panorama of my van by itself along the beautiful lake.
Friday
It really is quite awesome to sit in the van with the door open with a huge lake 50′ away, with everything still and quiet. It’s overcast and off-season, so it’s very quiet. I get good phone reception here, and the calmness of the moment encouraged me to try to call my sister in Florida. She’s in a managed care facility, and I haven’t had much luck before, but since my new plan is to drive more or less straight there, it seems important to talk to somebody down there. It was very frustrating, even though I’m her brother the lady on the phone could not tell me anything, “since I’m not on the list” of people entitled to know. I badgered her long enough that she took the phone down the hall and handed it to her. It turns to be the last time I ever talked to her.
Around noon, time to go. Drive back up the hill to the gas station I walked past last night – the giant windmill blades were gone!, Take a left on US 83 and cross the Missouri yet again, and I’m back on the Lewis and Clark Trail.
Fort Mandan is down the road a few miles. It has a big part in the Lewis and Clark story. It’s the place they wintered on the way west, and it’s where they picked up Sacajawea, who turned out to be such an important part of the expedition.
The exact site of Fort Mandan is apparently lost to history, but the State of North Dakota has built a replica in the vicinity of the little town of Washburn ND. Washburn appears to have the only breakfast place in a few miles so that is my destination. The Cafe 77 was delightful. I was lucky, because they closed for the day while I was in the middle of my meal. It was earlier than their normal closing time for some employee reason. They turned away some disappointed people while I was finishing up – glad that wasn’t me! Breakfast was really well executed (as opposed to well done :). She had made a fresh pot o’ coffee for me, and we both hated to see the rest go to waste, so I brought in my traveling cups and took all of it to go. Nice woman, nice place.
I hiked the trails along the river for most of the afternoon, it was great.
I hang out pretty late into the afternoon because my planned destination is not that long a drive. It’s a North Dakota state park a little south of the metropolis of Bismarck. I got there, and was annoyed to find that campsites weren’t $22 as the website implied, but effectively $28 because as an out of state visitor I had to pay the day use fee also. On a many days I woulda just gone ahead and done it, but it caught me wrong today. I said thanks (politely, really!), exited and went back to the camping app. It tells me that there is a place about four miles south of here that appears to be glorified boondocking on county land. Well, it’s almost dark, so I figure what the heck, that works for me.
WHUFU page for: Little Heart Bottoms
It would be an insult to campgrounds to call this one. it's just a gravel road in the bottomland (right inside the levee in fact), with turnouts where you can pull off and park.
Random OHVs roar past well into the night. It is the road to the Little Heart Gun Range.
tonight:
I stopped a fellow driving out to ask about spots further along, and he said "well... they might be kinda noisy because of the shooting range". That's where he was coming from. I thanked him for the heads up.
There is a turnout on the right immediately after the levee, facing on to a pond. That is where I have settled, and it really pretty nice except that the mosquitoes are so thick I fear to open a window or door.
Well, my string of amazing campsites is definitely over. But no complaints really. It’s kind of a godforsaken little spot, but still I had an oddly good time here. If I had to do it a second night it would get tiresome really quickly, but it was quite cozy for one night. I had good phone reception, so with the wonder of Personal Hotspot I was actually more connected than I have been most evenings lately. I am still trying to figure out how to make Flickr work for me – moving my photos to Flickr has a lot of advantages, but a disadvantage is that I need internet access to work on them.
[Jumping ahead, six weeks from now, out of nowhere Flickr changed their business model from offering a gigabyte of free photo space to charging a monthly fee for every picture over 1000. Pissed me off quite severely. This will be the last trip where I show Flickr pics … eff those people.]
Saturday
I crossed the Missouri last night yet again, back to the west side to follow Route 1806. There is really nothing in the way of services over here for the next 80 miles, which is generally great, except that I will miss my quality morning coffee experience! Therefore I am backtracking 20 miles and back across the river to Bismarck!
I am good with this. I kinda wanted to see what Bismarck was about anyway, and Yelp shows a 5-star coffee place – the Gifted Bean Coffee House – inside the downtown library! I am looking forward to that.
However, this is Saturday, a day when unexpected shit happens to the weary traveler. After I had navigated the surface streets to within two blocks of the library, there was …. a parade! This caused immediate “dang, I hate weekends on the road” thoughts, but it turned out to be a very modest parade, and it was already starting to break up when I came on the scene around noon. So instead of NO parking because of the parade, I got extra good parking because everybody was leaving the parade! It’s all about the timing ….
After parking on a leafy side street with big old clapboard houses on one side and the new-ish library on the other, I stride purposefully into the library carrying my laptop, and sure enough, off to the right past the new books and the reference section was an enclosed room that smelled great and sold coffee and goodies. Cheesecake is a big thing up here it seems. It’s been featured at multiple coffee shops the last few days. I guess it’s to help build up your natural insulation for the long hard winter ahead :). Anyway, I had an americano and a piece of cheesecake and wifi’d away, and felt a little smarter because there were so many books around, and all in all was very content with this as a way to spend a couple of hours..
On the way out of town I stopped at Which Wich, one of those chains where you check off all the ingredients you want on a bag and they assemble the ingredients and put it in the bag. As I often do, I got a hot sando for here and a cold sando to go. My “for here” sub was ok, but I chose badly or they executed badly, because my Italian sub for tonight turned out to not be very good. Oh yeah, they call them “grinders” up here for some strange reason. Also, “soda” is “pop” up here. Whatever …
Now that I am a few miles along on the east side of the river I elect to stay here for the day, to follow Route 1804 instead of Route 1806. It’s really a pretty drive. Rolling hills forever, cottonwood and ash sheltering in the valleys and the endless Lake Oahe (the local incarnation of the Missouri River) snaking along to my west for the whole day.
It’s been five days since my last shower so I’m in that grimy mode again. The little town of Pollock had a lovely little park on a small peninsula of the lake right next to the road where camping is allowed for a “suggested donation” of $10. It was a very pretty place, leafy and green and right on the lake, and on many days this would’ve been the end of the road, but today, no shower means no stay. In fact, this place had no bathroom at all, not even a porta-potty that I could see. $10 is a lot for that! :)
So I drove another hour or so, Lake Oahe to my left the whole time, to a likely place that Allstays marks with their Army Corps of Engineers icon, but which sure looks like a casino campground:
WHUFU page for: The Bay Casino Campground
Allstays calls this Indian Memorial, an ACE campground. The signage is in the standard ACE font and color, and it just has the distinctive well-engineered style, so I am calling it ACE also.
If so, then clearly it has been leased back to the tribe. It's on the edge of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.
Nice place!
tonight:
It was a relief that the gate to this place was actually manned ... by a bored but pleasant kid who checked me in, without the usual Army Corp rigamarole.
He assigned me a site with electricity but charged me the tent rate. I was so excited about the prospect of a shower that I didn't even inquire about a Senior rate. It's all good in the neighborhood.
Here’s to perseverance and happy endings! A wonderful shower, then a nice evening walk around the perimeter of the little peninsula that the campground occupies.
The full name of this place is a little unwieldy. It is the campground associated with an Indian casino called Bay At Grand River Casino. So it is officially “Bay At Grand River Casino Campground”, which is a mouthful. Whatever, as mentioned in my Spot entry I am quite sure this was build by the Army Corp, then given or leased to the reservation. It’s getting kind of run-down around the edges, but it’s a real nice campground in a wonderful location.