Since
we wanted to see the International Peace Gardens which span the
border of US and Canada, and they were east of Minot, we figured we
would be safe up there. It was a delightful 40 mile drive north over
rolling plains with lots of wind generators.
The gardens were beautiful, especially the cactus greenhouse – what an awesome place filled with an incredibly wide variety of spiny plants!
Back
to Rte 2 and once again headed west, we were amazed watching the
crops and trees being whipped around by 25-30 mph winds. The down
side for us was that this wind was dead on the nose and it reduced
our gas mileage from 14-16 mpg down to just over 9 – the lowest
we've ever seen!! Ouch! We didn't even know it was possible to push
that much fuel through our little 4-cylinder engine!
After
Minot we started to see more oil derricks and more trains with lots
of oil tanker cars. Increasingly we also saw temporary housing,
sometimes simply containers that had been converted to housing. They
looked like terrible places to live – some had no windows! And
there were lots of liquor stores. By the time we got to Williston
(pretty much the epicenter of the fracking boom as near as we could
tell), near the western border of N Dakota, it was quite depressing.
Since it was beginning to get late, we decided to wander off the
beaten track to a free campsite we had read about. It was right on
the N Dakota/Montana border but it was still in N Dakota AND
relatively close to Williston.
We
were a bit nervous about going there so Julie called the place to
check. The woman she talked to reassured us that it was safe there.
She said "We just had a troupe of girl scouts camp here this
weekend". So we decided if it was safe enough for girl scouts
it was probably safe enough for us, too. The campsite turned out to
be on the grounds of the Fort Buford State Historic Site, a lovely
setting, and we were the only ones there. We even got to watch prairie dogs pop up out of their holes right next to the camper. Also
on the grounds was the confluence of the Missouri & Yellowstone
rivers. We're in Lewis & Clark country now, the first explorers
to find a route west through the US. The Missouri river was an
integral part of this exploration, we shall follow it now as we head
further west.
Just
a few miles past Fort Buford was Fort Union built in 1828. It took a
paddle steamer 75 days to get here, 1800 miles upriver from St Louis.
It was the main hub of fur trading in the area for 30 or 40 years.
We actually had to cross into Montana and, following the driveway,
backtrack a bit to reach the fort, just barely inside North Dakota.
On
to Montana!
