Hungry Horse, MT

Monday, September 9, 2024

We started our day in Lincoln, Montana at the Moose Creek Campground on the Blackfoot River. Despite us all waking up around 11:00pm last night coughing from the wildfire smoke in the air, the four of us slept through the rest of the night. Andi said he had lots of crusty things in his eyes this morning, and the kids were still coughing. For me, I could taste the smog in my mouth.

The air quality alert on my phone read 164 for this area of Montana this morning. By comparison, the air quality rating at home in Wisconsin was 39.

Fortunately, our travels were taking us to Whitefish, MT today, and the air quality looks much better there. As Andi was packing up the outside of the RV in preparation to leave, he brought the Starlink satellite in to show us all the ash that had collected on the dish overnight. Crazy that we’ve all been breathing in that same air & debris.

The sky as we drove toward the Seeley Lake / Swan Valley area was a hazy orange color. It got better as we neared Kalispell, MT.

In Kalispell, we parked the RV in front of a shopping center and pulled out the school books. Andi set the Starlink Mini up in the parking lot, so we’d have internet. Not long after we parked there, a woman knocked on our camper door. “Knock, knock!” she said. “I just have a few questions about your Starlink.” Andi chatted outside with her for a bit, eventually swapping email addresses. She gave us some good tips for Alberta and British Columbia, and he helped her with some questions about traveling with internet.

While Tory, Aden, and I did math and language arts, Andi went into TJ Maxx to buy Aden a swimming suit. “You remembered to bring me goggles, but you forgot swim trunks?” Aden asked me with a smirk. Apparently so.

Andi and I told Aden we had a treat for him if he could focus on getting his schoolwork done. “What is it? Is it Chick-fil-A?”

It was Chick-fil-A. This kid has done school in enough shopping mall parking lots to know what’s up.

We usually get CFA to-go, but we had some extra time today and decided to eat inside the restaurant. Andi placed our order ahead of time, so our food was ready to go once we arrived. I’m pretty sure Aden’s eyes rolled back into his head with his first bite of chicken nugget. “This size is about right for us, Dad,” he said. “Get the 30-piece, and you’ll get 10; I’ll eat 20.” Is it obvious that Chick-fil-A nuggets are his favorite food?

Andi and I wanted to stop at Kalispell Kreamery while we were in the area, but the retail store was closing soon. When we visited the Kalispell / Whitefish area in 2019, we did a farm tour at the creamery and tried some of their delicious yogurt and chocolate milk.

Smartly, Andi called Kalispell Kreamery and asked if we could buy their products anywhere else in town. The woman on the phone told us that most Super One Foods in the area carry their milks and yogurts, so we made the grocery store our next stop.

We hit the jackpot at the store, and loaded up on plain and honey yogurts, chocolate milk, and ice cream. We bought some for Andi’s cousins Laura & Shaun who were meeting us in Whitefish later tonight.

Andi reserved us a camping spot for two nights at Whitefish Lake State Park, so we drove there next. We didn’t realize this campground was located right in town. We also didn’t realize there was a train track that ran right beside it. (Though, we should have guessed as their usually is by most campgrounds.)

When Andi pulled up to the entrance gate, he asked the young woman working behind the window if there were additional spots open for tonight. Andi’s cousins Laura & Shaun hadn’t booked a campsite yet. “Unfortunately, all the spots are full,” she said.

“Is there any group spots open? Or just a parking spot? Anything you can do?” Andi probed her. “No, there isn’t anything,” she responded with a dazed look.

Shoot. We didn’t want to stay here if Laura & Shaun weren’t able to stay with us. Andi drove to our reserved camping spot in the state park to check it out, but it wasn’t anything spectacular. It was also in a heavily-wooded area, so our Starlink satellite internet wouldn’t work well.

We topped off our RV with water and helped ourselves to use of the campground dumpsters, and then headed back to the entrance. When Andi asked the gatehouse worker if we could get a refund on our camping reservation, she looked at him with the most stoned-out expression and said, “Buuuut, I already checked you in.”

“Right, but can you refund my money? I don’t want to stay here if there’s no room for my friend.” Andi said.

“Umm, well, can you come back later?” she asked.

“Sure, when? Like in five minutes? An hour?” Andi asked.

“Um, well, my boss is in the bathroom,” the woman said.

OK, then. We pulled forward and waited a few minutes until the gal’s boss came back. Eventually, the boss approached our RV parked on the side of the road, and told Andi he refunded our money. For the record, the boss couldn’t have been older than 25 years.

Our new camping plan was to find a boondocking spot near Hungry Horse, MT. The western part of the United States has a lot of these spots which are federal forest land with camping available. They’re free to camp, but there’s no services available.

Andi drove to a spot near Hungry Horse Reservoir that he found using an app called iOverlander. Reviews for the site proclaimed amazing views of the lake & surrounding mountains. The road wasn’t paved (they never are, haha!), but the reviews said 4x4 wasn’t necessary.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have any cell service so we couldn’t verify that we were on the right road. Using spotty Google Maps, the iOverlander app, and Andi’s general memory of the area, we followed a dirt road to the top of the mountain. We’d just filled up on water so we felt every bump and boulder we slowly drove across.

The gravel road went on for miles with nowhere to turn off, and even for us to pull over. It wasn’t a steep drop down the cliff, per se, but there wasn’t much shoulder either. After 45 minutes of crawling along the bumpy mountain road, we finally stopped to hook up the Starlink and try to figure out where we were. Andi sent a message to Laura to tell her to meet us at Lost Johnny Point Campground nearby; we were aborting mission. “I think it’s safe to say we got Googled.” Andi said.

Now, turning around the RV was our challenge. I got out of the vehicle and watched as Andi made about 65 tiny turns to get the RV pointed in the opposite direction. He narrowly missed hitting a small boulder in the front by this much.

“That wasn’t sketchy at all,” Andi yelled to Tory and Aden in the backseat as we started driving down the mountain. “Yeah, it was!” Tory retorted. “All I could think about was the RV going off the side of that cliff, the propane tank bursting, and us dying a fiery death,” she said. Tory has an flair for dramatic death scenarios.

“Oh, we weren’t even close to that happening,” Andi said.

“I give that an eight out of 10 on dangerous drives we’ve made,” Tory finished.

Eventually, we made it back to the start of the gravel road and pulled into a wide gravel opening. “This would work to camp for the night, wouldn’t it?” I asked Andi. We decided to park here instead of going to an actual campground, and text Laura the Google pin to find us.

Laura & Shaun arrived shortly after we did. They pulled their camper next to ours, and Andi grilled us all dinner — grilled chicken, a pre-made bagged salad, steamed broccoli, and french bread. The six of us ate dinner on our laps, and enjoyed each other’s company for the remainder of the evening.

As we were sitting outside visiting with each other in the dark, Andi noticed that our RV’s inverter stopped working. He tried to take a look at the problem in the dark, but it was hard to tell what was the matter. We sat and talked for a while longer, and then Andi tried doing a hard reset on the RV’s power system. That worked! “What did you do to fix it?” Shaun asked. “I gave it time,” Andi said.

I gave it time. We decided that’s the theme of our next week of travels - give it time. Everything’s better when you slow down, and give it time to marinate.

We plan to stay around the Whitefish, MT area tomorrow.