The Well Behaved Dingo

THURS MARCH 6
Sarroar

The one thing you have to do in Missoula is eat fish tacos and drink brain wash. Back in our day it was easy finding brain wash, but now only one store, Liquid Planet, carries it. You have to get two fish tacos, one with hot sauce one without, a brain wash, and sit outside and eat. If you can’t find brain wash or <gasp> don’t like it get one of those huge cups of water in Taco Del Sol. Perrrrfection.

For us, the only other thing to do was to go to the dog park because it was early, so there wouldn’t be many dogs, and we had nothing else to do. It’s actually a pretty nice dog park with the river running on either side of it, and three or four trails to walk. A good dog park has to have space to walk away from other dogs and not just a big field where they all stand and stare at each-other. Walking in the morning there turned out to be really nice. A word of advice: if your dog is chasing ice flows don’t try to get her one and fall in yourself. And for god-sakes clean that dog-food off your shoes it makes you look like even more of a bum than you are.

dried Embarf from the night before.

kommie sticks.

After bagel sandwiches and fish tacos, Missoula didn’t have a lot to offer us. We did the usual dance calling ranger stations, finding out all their campsites were closed, looking on the internet for any obscure but great camp site, visiting trailheads to see how populated they were etc etc. We took highway 210 out several miles to what some website claimed was essential Montana camping but turned out to be the drive way to a little trailer park.

We headed back to town. I needed to buy a headlamp and I figured I’d ask about winter camping. After a long explanation with maps and way too much enthusiasm, I came out of the out door store with what I thought was going to be an awesome place to camp. The salesman guy assured me the roads were “no problem” and so we went back out on highway 210.

Ten miles out we turned up the road we’d turned around on before. That was a laugh. For the first mile or so, despite all the bad advice we’d been given before, we were feeling optimistic. The road was clear, the guy had said he’d camped here this time of year. But then the snow started.

It wasn’t bad at first, mostly level and not too deep, but pretty soon we came on a Subaru turning around on account of the ruts. We passed a parked car and then the people hiking a mile or so on, the snow almost to their knees who looked at us like we were crazy to still be driving. But The Big Easy is a beast and we were plowing through that spring melt like, well, a snow plow.

Then we came around a curve and hit an upgrade, a steep you’ll-slide-backwards-if-you-stop sort of upgrade. With no where to turn around I threw it into first gear and gunned it. About half way up we started spinning out intermittently. Just before the crest we were creeping with just enough momentum to keep from spinning our wheels. We made it to the top, barely.

At this point there was only one other tire track from some truck that had treads twice as deep ours and definitely had four wheel drive. Fortunately there was a turn around at the top of the hill and after a brief hike down the road to watch the sun set we turned The Big Ugly around and headed back.

Nothing had panned out. We parked by the hospital, read a little and went to sleep.