Wow, two weeks flew by!

Here we are on the eve of our departure from Missoula, seems like we just got here.  Weather has been stellar for the most part, 70's and 80's during the day and 40's and 50's at night, just about perfect!  Our campground is very nice, we have a large grassy "sit out" area where we have happy hour each evening.  There is a touch of smoke in the air from mostly prescribed burns but very little.  Our campground has been full every night since we got here, a few long timers but mostly ins and outs, busy, busy.

Gotta mention food, we found a great Vietnamese restaurant, Vietnamese Noodle, and actually went twice.  Great pho and their wonton noodle soup is the bomb with a very tasty chicken and lemon grass broth.

The delicious Pho

And the awesome wonton soup

If you are a fly fisherman, this time in late August through September is hopper season, very few of the trout's typical aquatic insect diet are hatching in late summer, and the grasshoppers are prolific, so they start attacking terrestrials, ants, beetles, but predominantly grasshoppers.  Jan and I have quite a selection of them, but I wanted to make an effort and tie up a few more for our fishing days.

A few of my hoppers

And I can report we were successful using them.  Catching fish on flies you tie yourself is very fulfilling.  We hit the great farmer's market each Saturday for some nice tomatoes, corn, and some very fresh, locally raised pork, along with other veg and stuff.  They really do a great job and it is very popular.

A few shots at the market

One very important item on our list while here in Missoula was to get the truck's broken windshield replaced, Safelite took care of it in a couple hours and then told me I needed to get the lane sensing and safety items recalibrated to be sure they didn't get screwed up with the windshield replacement.  Never would have though of that, this new truck does have a lot of stuff on it, though.  Adaptive cruise control up to and including stopping, lane control, auto parking, cameras all around, emergency braking, etc.  So it was important to get it taken care of at the Ram dealer here in town, the insurance covers it by the way. 

Trout fishing in Missoula is the real deal, there are numerous excellent rivers in the area.  The Bitterroot, Blackfoot, Clark's Fork, Rock Creek, Jocko, and tons of smaller tributaries to mention a few.  From the reports we got we wanted to zero in on the Blackfoot, and try to hit the Bitterroot and West Fork of the Bitterroot while here.  We did scope out the Clark's Fork one day, but it was muddy from a few showers that had come through a few days prior, but we did find a decent place for coffee overlooking the river:-)

Coffee spot overlooking the Clark's Fork

We took a day for the Bitterroot, and I should mention, to fish where we wanted to, required 100 miles of driving to south of Darby where the East and West fork split.  It was beautiful with nice water with accessibility, but unfortunately other than a couple bites, neither of us caught fish.

Beautiful scenery along the way

Then two more times we hit the Blackfoot, only 50 miles one way:-)  The one time we weren't successful, with more mud in the water, had a nice picnic on the shore of Clearwater River, and then yesterday for our last hoorah before leaving we fished all morning and into the afternoon and both of us caught nice fish, Jan's was better, but what can I say?  It was a great and enjoyable day fishing on a gorgeous river with the weather perfect with views and views.

One of Jan's fish

And mine

We even caught sight of a hot air balloon on the way.

Some clouds moving in

So we wrapped things up today, last stock up at Costco, it will be awhile before we see another one, and grocery shopping for our upcoming boon docking on the Big Hole river.

We'll be in Montana for another 2 weeks before we say good bye, and move to Colorado, and I have to tell you, it's got an awful lot to like.  We'll be back!

Missoula, MT

When we arrived in Missoula at Jim and Mary's Rv Park for our scheduled month, we both though it wise to confirm 3 weeks and leave the last one open until we could finalize plans.  This park is one of our favorites, it is kept neat and clean with flower gardens everywhere, large sites, and some of the friendliest and accommodating managers.  We have been here many times and we really enjoy Missoula.  

From our site at Jim and Mary's RV Park

In fact we had a favorite restaurant we wanted to get to right away and did so the next day, Iza.  Unfortunately, sometimes you just shouldn't repeat, food was still good, service was horrible:-(

We, of course, had a few items to take care of.  Our coach has an accumulator tank in the water system, like a house, it smoothes out the water flow, and when we are not hooked up to campground water, it especially smoothes out the water pump flow.  We had been noticing for awhile our pump was surging and we had no stored pressure when the pump was off.  The accumulator tank is a small 2 gallon metal tank with a rubber bladder inside that is recharged with air.  The water pressure pushes against the bladder allowing it to moderate and ease the pressure changes.  They seem to have a life of about 5 years, and ours was toast.  We had ordered a new one and it had already arrived.

Our accumulator tank

It wasn't a difficult job, so we got it done quickly and sure enough the old one was full of water with a popped bladder.  The water is nice and smooth now.

The other little thing was a surprise.  We have an instant hot water dispenser in the galley, and we use it a lot in cooler weather, but when it's warm we use it infrequently.  We flipped it on, it's spring loaded to turn off, and..........it stayed on!  We banged on it, flipped it back and forth with panic building, and finally got it to turn off.  We thought maybe we'd need a new faucet, so we looked on Amazon, and found out that just the faucet cost as much as the entire unit!  So I decided to take it apart if I could and see if it was just corroded or something.  Happy ending, after copious amounts of WD-40, lots of cleaning, wiggling and lubrication our faucet is back to working, yay.

Last year we discovered the farmer's market in town and we wanted to go back.  Tons of incredible produce, food, meats, cheeses, breads, pastries, well you get the idea.  I will admit that we singlehandedly helped keep several of these farms in the black for this year:-)

We, of course, stopped into the fly shop to see how the fishing was, and to determine if we'd go on another float while here.  Well the glowing reports of the wade fishing made us think we'd forgo a float and just try to do a bunch of wading.  The Blackfoot and Bitterroot were fishing very well and easily wadable this time of year.  But we wanted the holiday weekend to be over before we gave it a try.  So on Sunday instead, we planned to finalize our upcoming plans, we did decide to only stay 3 weeks, and pound out some reservations for our 2020 trip.

What?  We are finding that more and more campgrounds are booking up earlier and earlier.  What started this process was we called the park we stay in Durango to make a reservation for fall of 2020, we wanted a specific site, and it's never been a problem, well turned out the site we wanted in October of 2020 was already booked for half the month! Talking with them they told us that they already had some reservations for 2021!!!!!  We in years past would begin to plan our upcoming year's travels in early spring for that year, make a few reservations at popular places and over the holidays, but that would be all.  It has evolved to having to make reservations almost everywhere over the winter to what we are now finding that to get some reservations in 2020, we needed to make them now!  We aren't completely sure what is driving this, more permanent people living in campgrounds is a biggy, more people enjoying this pastime, maybe just more people period.  Whatever the case, we have to make reservations virtually everywhere a year in advance, and that is difficult.  We have now committed to going to New England, predominantly Maine next year for about 8 weeks with possibly a foray to Prince Edward Island, then after visiting our son and family in Buffalo, back across to the west, Montana, Colorado, etc.  This is the earliest we have ever done this.  So we spent several hours planning and making reservations.

On Labor Day we went to see the National Bison Range.  It is a 18,000 acre wildlife refuge north of Missoula established in 1908 by Teddy Roosevelt.  It ranges in elevation from 2585' up to 4885' on Red Sleep Mountain, much of the refuge was under Glacial Lake Missoula.  Quite fascinating, during the ice age 15,000-13,000 years ago ice would dam up the huge valley and over a period of 50 or so years the lake would fill, then with thawing, the ice dam would blow out and the water would flow out through the Clark Fork area and into the Columbia River and out to the Pacific ocean.  Pretty amazing in itself, but the flow was larger than the flow of all the rivers in the world combined!  And they think this phenomenon took place at least 25 times and maybe as many as 40 times!  Now Jan and I have seen so many bison over the years having visited Yellowstone so many times that we really didn't care if we saw a bison, we were really going for the scenery, views, and possibility of seeing other wildlife.  There is a one way 17 mile gravel loop road that climbs way up to the top of the refuge with dynamite views.

Starting up the mountain
That is the Flathead River

Sure enough, only a few miles in we caught a glimpse of a momma black bear and her two cubs on the hillside.

Momma

And her twins

They weren't very close so this is the best Jan could do.  Later we stopped at an overlook for lunch, and we could see them playing on the hillside for at least an hour.

This was our view at lunch

The Glacial Lake Missoula filled this entire valley, check out the top picture again,
all that you can see was lake, it filled to at least 400' deep!
Thankfully we've had global warming since then:-)

You could actually see where the erosion from the waves in the lake had permanently marked the hillsides, amazing.

As we descended on our road we came down and by a stream along the way and we saw something we had never seen before.  It was an elk standing in the water, plunging its head underwater and coming up with weeds or moss that it was eating!  It must have thought it was actually a moose:-)

With the weekend over it was time to do some recon and some fishing.  We started 75 miles east of Missoula along the upper Blackfoot River.  We found lots of access and many places to fish.  We had a few bites but no luck, but the day was very hot, around 90.  It was so promising we went back the next day to a slightly closer place about 50 miles out and found, with some help from a friendly guide, a wonderful spot to fish.

The confluence of the Montour Creek and the Blackfoot

Looking the other way

We both had several bites and takes, and Jan connected with a really nice Cutthroat!

Nice fish, about 15" long

We fished for several hours, had a great time, but as it warmed up things slowed down.

We are looking forward in our next couple weeks to fish a lot more, in addition to getting our broken windshield fixed on the truck.