Day 21 - back in Billings

August 29, 2021

It was a bit chilly when I got up this morning in Stanley, North Dakota but I went ahead and grabbed a shower, packed up, and had a bite to eat before getting on the road at 8am. I almost forgot about the photo of the courthouse across the street but grabbed it before I left.

Rather than charting a direct route back to Billings, I drove north, on Highway 8 to the town of Bowbells where I got gassed up.  I figured that this might be a county seat and I found the courthouse for another photo.  This is Burke County, ND.

The town is pretty quiet on a Sunday morning.

I continued north about as far as one can go before crossing into Canada and headed west on Highway 52.  It was very quiet and the roads are straight and flat, quite a difference from the roads back east

The next town of size is Crosby, ND and I searched out the courthouse for Divide County and another photo.

It’s also quiet this time of day.

Up the road I ran into more construction.  These guys have to work weekends.  It was a 6-mile project reworking the shoulder on both sides of the road.  As I was probably the first vehicle to show up in a while, I had to wait while they radioed for a pilot car to come down from the construction headquarters up on the hill to the right. 

The pilot car led me along the paved road and was there to make sure I didn’t get hit by the many semis pulling side-dump trailers or the excavating and earth moving equipment along the way.  I noticed they were bringing in lots of fill material and, up ahead, I saw they were flattening the top of a big hill for their borrow.  

It was somewhere along here where I ran into a plague of grasshoppers.  What a mess.

Not far from the construction zone I arrived at the Montana border.

About 5-miles later I was riding along with cruise control engaged when, all the sudden, it pops out of control and the cruise light starts flashing and the “engine trouble warning light” was illuminated.  Uh-oh.  I tried to re-engage the cruise and that wasn’t going to happen.  Other than lacking that feature, everything else seemed normal so, since it was running fine and I was in the middle of nowhere, I pressed on to the next town 

I rolled into Plentywood, Montana and hunted down the county courthouse for Sheridan County..

While parked, I shut of the ignition, waited a bit, and turned it back on.  The engine warning light was still on.  Hmmm.  Well, it’s not like I would find a Yamaha service center in Plentywood on a Sunday morning so I hit the start button and it started up and sounded fine.  Before I left, I texted my son, Dan, the motorcycle and automotive expert, and told him what happened.

I continued on and rode on to Scobey.  This was the first time I’d been to this part of Montana, it’s northeast corner, and not a place one is likely to pass through going someplace else so it has to be a destination of its own.  I’d wanted to see this area and it wasn’t disappointing.  The corn crops that had dominated most of my travels had transitioned to grains, I assume wheat and barley.  There were also many fields of smaller plants, pulse crops probably, knowing that Montana is know for growing lots of lentils.

Once I got rolling to Scobey I tried the cruise control and it worked just fine.  That’s puzzling but is also the nature of today’s high-tech machinery that is loaded with sensors of all kinds and several computers to keep things working together.  It’s nothing like my 1976 Honda CB750 that I did a similar ride on back in 1979.  That bike had 4 side-draft carburetors, a standard points-and-coil based ignition system, and very little wiring.  The likelihood of diagnosing and fixing something on the roadside with that bike was high in those days.  From that, we’ve traded up to a higher level of reliability, efficiency, and some creature comforts and safety features like cruise control, ABS brakes, electronically adjustable suspension, and traction control but with the added inability to work on problems in remote locations without hauling along lots of diagnostic tools.

I found the Daniels County Courthouse on Main Street in Scobey and read that it’s on the National Register of Historic Places.  It certainly does not look like most of the courthouses I’ve seen.

While stopped, I checked my text messages and Dan said it sounded like an “intermittent error” that self-corrected.  The engine warning light will remain on until the code can be read and then cleared.  

As I headed south on Highway 13, I really had the feeling that I was in eastern Montana.  The Big Sky and views unencumbered by trees.

I crossed US Highway 2, a road I’d been on and crossed numerous times on this trip, and continued on Hwy 13 but only for a half-mile.  I stopped behind a semi hauling hay that was waiting at a railroad crossing.

The train wasn’t going anywhere and I could hear its engine running at an idle to the right.  It appeared that it was stopped at a red light, probably waiting for another train to pass so it could continue on.

How long we’d be waiting would be pure speculation so I pulled up the navigation app and looked at an alternative route.  If I went back up to US 2 and headed west, I could cross the tracks in another town and it only added 15-minutes to my total travel time, so I made a U-turn, got back to US 2, turned left, and headed toward Wolf Point.

Back in 1991, when I was finishing up my student teaching in Southern California and looking at relocating, hopefully to Montana, I subscribed to a “Vacancy Newsletter” put out by the University of Montana in Missoula which listed open teaching positions across the greater Pacific Northwest.  While I was interested in Billings, I didn’t see vacancies in my teaching discipline there but I did notice there were always openings in Wolf Point, Frazer, Browning, and Busby.  A bit of research showed these were schools on the various Native American reservations in the state.  I wasn’t interesting in those positions because I really wanted a larger town and the economic efficiencies one brings.  However, I was always curious about what those communities looked like and I got my chance to see when I rode through Wolf Point and Frazer on my search for an alternative route around the train.  Wolf Point is the larger of the two but still a small town.  Frazer was really small though it does have quite an attractive school.

I got to Nashua and headed south on Highway 117 which took me directly to Fort Peck.  This is the home of the largest earthen dam in the United States and that holds back the Missouri River creating Fort Peck Lake, which is huge.  My wife and I came up here a few years ago to attended their summer theater and to tour the dam. Both are well-worth doing.  Today I just grabbed a few photos and kept rolling.

These towers are used for surge control in the power generating station.

Here I am looking back at the towers from on top of the dam itself with the afterbay showing on the left.

Here’s the lake to the left and the dam goes off in the distance to the right.

The remaining miles were all about covering distance.  I went south on High 24 for about 60 miles of rough road until I arrived at the junction of Highway 200.  There was a rest area there so I pulled in for a break and to fiddle with the music player on my phone.  A pickup pulled in and the driver rolled down his window for a chat.  He was waiting for his wife to show up in their car which they were leaving at the rest stop before heading to their cabin.  He talked about ranching in the area, the drought, and the welcomed recent rains that greened things up again.  He started going off on Native Americans when I veered the subject elsewhere.  His wife showed up and we wished each other a nice day and they headed out.  

I headed west on Highway 200 and hoped that I would find a gas station in Jordan since I was down to 2 bars on my gas gauge.  I lucked up and found one and, after filling up, knew that I had enough gas to get me back to Billings.  Although Jordan is pretty small, it is famous for the Freeman standoff with the FBI back in 1996.

From Jordan, Highway 200 continues on passed Winnett where I turned to go through the town and to get on Highway 244, a shortcut, to Highway 87 which would take me back to Billings.  Here’s a few shots on that shortcut road.

I pulled into my garage about 8:30pm.  It had been a long day and a long 3-weeks but all good since it was a motorcycle trip.  

Today’s ride was a personal record on this bike: 584.5 miles.  My PR is about 650 miles in one day going from somewhere around Reno, Nevada to Ogden, Utah in 1979 on my Honda CB750.

Here’s some stats from the trip:

Days gone: 21

Riding days: 19

Days off: 2 in Pittsburgh, one on the way out and one on the way back

Nights camping: 16

Non-camping nights:  1 night a friend’s in Lake City, MN  and 3 at son’s in Pittsburgh

Longest day: the last one with 584 miles in about 12 hours.

Total miles for the trip: 6,658 

Gas used: just guessing but I get about 55 mpg so about 121 gallons

Cost of fuel: this is recorded somewhere but I’m guessing at about $3.10/gallon so $375.  (Update: the accountant gave me my credit card charges for gas on the trip and it totaled $453.26.  One fill was for both mine and my sons bike.  Another two charges were actually for beer, so my estimate was pretty close.)

Total cost of the trip: calculated after returning, about $1,250.  This covers fuel, lodging (campsites), food and beer, toll over the big bridge, etc.  This does not include the cost or maintenance of the bike itself (oil change, tires, etc.)

Hours riding:  I could look back through the blog but I’d guess about 130 hours

Best road: all off them

Best part of the trip: Pittsburgh to Maine and back to Pittsburgh with my son

Worse part: traffic getting around the outskirts of Toledo, OH

Scariest part: Mackinaw Bridge

I’ll do a few more posts over the several days with some final thoughts, primarily so I have them written down where I can refer to them for future rides.  Yes, there will be future adventures.