Reaching the Falls

Just outside of Fort Benton I saw my precious prairie dogs for the last time. I was pretty sure I saw the familiar mounds when we drove by after Geraldine, and when I biked past them, I was proven correct. I was so thrilled to see them where I didn’t expect them that it softened the blow, knowing I probably wouldn’t see them again in the wild, at least not for a long time. The ride from Fort Benton to Great Falls was mile after mile of golden grassy hills. Much like Fort Benton, I biked more than halfway there, then backtracked the next day and retraced my steps with pedals. I needed to get to a bike shop. My bike was functioning, but not well. The Lewistown bike shop had only been a temporary solution. At least this time I knew that my bike pretended to behave on the stand, that I needed to test it before I let a mechanic tell me it was fixed.

I got to the bike shop and did my best to explain the problem. I tested my bike and continued to have the same problem. I told the mechanic so and he began explaining to me how to shift gears like I hadn’t biked this bike 4,000 miles to get there. My response came out terser than I intended. “I know how the bike works. I’ve biked it thousands of miles. I rode here from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This is a new problem.” Which got him to test ride it himself. He saw the problem after that. My mom browsed the shop, sat down and waited for a good hour. The mechanic would adjust the bike, think it was working, then test it out and have the same trouble. The owner decided to call in his best mechanic to be sure I’d have a working bike. He had just left when we arrived at the shop. We went out to the car to eat our lunch, and shortly after, we were told the bike was ready. I tested it and it worked! It worked well. Better than it had since Medora! I breathed a heavy sigh of relief.

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When that was finally done we went to the Great Falls Interpretive Center to revel in a large Lewis and Clark exhibit—it was basically an entire museum dedicated to them. We stayed for a lecture. I browsed the books in the gift shop as I did every time there was one, chatted with the woman at the register about my bike ride and asked the woman from the front desk about what the best route to take through the mountains was. I had held off on that decision thus far because there were two vastly different routes with pros and cons to each, and the fire was an ever-changing situation. That night I did research on how close campgrounds were and where the fires were, and I assessed the elevation for the second or third time. One route was straight through the mountains west of Great Falls. It was the way Lewis and Clark allegedly returned from the Pacific. It was over 200 miles of steep inclines and drop offs. The other way was almost 500 miles but every single incline was gradual by comparison. My mom told me she’d go which ever way I chose, so while I battled internally for a while over which way was best, I finally decided I wanted to take the route that would let me see the headwaters of the Missouri River, the lands Lewis and Clark encountered the Shoshone and the most difficult mountains of their journey. I chose the longer route.

The next morning after getting a Harry Potter/Ravenclaw themed coffee from a quirky coffee shop, I drove my mom to the other side of the Missouri, through farmlands, into grasslands to a hiking path. We were going to see the Great Falls that I had heard so much about. Way back in Saint Charles I talked to a woman at the Lewis and Clark Boathouse and Museum about the falls. I had read that they were dams now, that the falls weren’t there. She said they were, and that when I got there, I needed to put myself in a position where I heard them before I saw them. So I took my mom on this brief hike on the steep, grassy hillside above the river, along a narrow dirt path lined with prickly pears. Each time we came over the crest of a hill I thought I would see it, but it would be just a bit further. One more crest and I saw it. It was dammed, but you could see the stony falls below a constant stream of water from the dam above.

I felt giddy, seeing that sight for the first time, knowing that Lewis had been there two centuries ago. Below us we could see a lush green oasis. There was a picnic area that seemed alien in the wild terrain, but it was beautiful. We headed back to the car and drove down to explore. There was a walking suspension bridge over to an island where we could climb stairs and get a closer view of the rushing water. It creaked as we walked over it. My mom had to take a quick journey outside of herself to get across it. She doesn’t like heights. There was an odd little building with a sign outside of it. Evidently it was built to exhibit the new technology of electric topped stoves. The dam was built in the early 1900s. I wondered when the little building was built. I jokingly told my mom that I was going to get married on this island and force everyone to cross that little bridge to go to the ceremony. I was mostly joking, but it was gorgeous, nonetheless.

After Great Falls we went to the Charles M. Russell Museum. Montana is obsessed with Charles M. Russell. He’s a cowboy artist from the turn of the century and had considerable success in his lifetime. I didn’t even know his work, but I was hoping to see art that might inspire visuals in my head or even directly portray the Lewis and Clark Expedition. I wound up really enjoying the museum. It was huge and a large portion of the collection was by Charles M. Russel, but there was also art by more contemporary artists, and even a Warhol exhibit we weren’t allowed to take pictures of. It was pouring when we got outside. I hadn’t planned to visit the cabin his studio was in or the house museum next door, but I was not dressed for rain, so I hopped from one building to the next to explore on the way back to our car.

The rain calmed not long after, so quickly I forgot about it, sometime after my second coffee of the day. I love museums, but they are so much mental stimulation that I always wind up ready for a nap while I’m there. After that we returned to the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center where there was a long paved bike path along the river. I had seen what looked like a statue of Lewis and Clark from the road the day before. When I investigated it, I found that I was right. We went on a long walk to try to find it, but when we got there, the image on Google Maps did not match the sculpture we saw. This was a sculpture of Lewis, Clark and Sacagawea that looked like it was made of scrap metal. I returned to the visitor center where we parked and asked one of the NPS employees if he knew where the sculpture was. It took some deduction, but he eventually gave me vague directions. My mom and I went on quite the adventure trying to find it. We walked for miles around a horseshoe shaped park before I decided to take another look in my phone. There was yet another park! There was a statue of Lewis, Clark, York and Seaman high on a hillside overlooking Great Falls. Having finally found the statue I was content. The next morning we left Great Falls southward toward the Headwaters of the Missouri River and into the mountains.