Up early this morning. It has turned very cool, so we put on our sweatshirts and windbreakers. I went to check on Aron in his pup tent, and he was still sleeping soundly. Sadie had come out, but went with me to check on Aron.
Putting on my contacts using a cup of water Arthur brought me for teeth brushing wasn't easy, but it got done. It does appear, though, that I'm not really cut out for much roughing it. Though we are hardly roughing it! The guides make our meals and set up our camps and tents every night. We've had a concrete outhouse at all our evening camps. Our guides brought wonderful camp chairs so we could comfortably sit at lunch and dinner. This is not really “roughing it”, but it is more like Jim calls “smoothing it.”
A great breakfast of cooked oatmeal, toasted bagels, granola, and yoghurt, with coffee, tea, cocoa, and orange juice.
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on the Missouri, MT: Sadie goes in to try to waken Aron Cowen
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on the Missouri, MT: Sadie goes in to try to waken Aron Cowen
Dear Journal,
Today Saddie woke me up. The morning began fairly brisk, but I had some cocoa and warmed up greatly. We then had breakfast and hiked to some petroglyths. Then we shoved off, and I paddled 13 miles straight!!! We also saw more wildlife, and paddled through some wimpy class 1 rapids and saw some hoodoos and “walls” of dark volcanic rock. We had a tasty lunch at hole-in-the-wall, and began to hike, but I accidentally stepped on a cactus, so I had to go back!!! When we began paddling, this jerk sat in front of me, and would not follow the guide in front, Whitney, but he got tired so it was O.K. When we (finally) got to our 2nd campsite, again it was set up, but I decided to sleep under the stars. But anyway- I began a lively round of O-Hell (the card game), and then had another chicken dinner, and some just-cooked brownies. Then I watched some satellites, saw the Milky Way, and went to sleep.
Aron
Before we took off, we went for a breakfast hike to the base of a nearby bluff where there were 3 ancient Indian pictographs (or petroglyphs… I can't figure which is which). The most easily visible one was of a horse. Another looked like a deer or elk. The third was nearly impossible to see. Nearby there was another - more modern - pictograph: someone had scratched “1907” into the rock. Two sets of graffiti, many centuries apart.
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on the Missouri, MT: walk up the bluff to see the Indian pictographs
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on the Missouri, MT: walk up the bluff to see the Indian pictographs
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on the Missouri, MT: Indian pictograph of a horse
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on the Missouri, MT: ancient Indian pictograph of a deer or elk
Off we go, past eagles, past a couple of beaver lodges. We saw Citadel Rock. And Eagle Rock (which looks more like a gorilla rock). We saw some merganser ducks and went over some teeny ripples of class 0-1 rapids. We saw many hoodoos and volcanic rock intrusions that created volcanic walls where the surrounding limestone had eroded away. We also saw evidence of slippage of one layer of rock over another. Nate told us that some of the clay layers are an especially slippery clay called Bentonite that was used to help drill for oil and to cap off oil wells. Anyway, as the western mountains pushed up, this slanted the layers and some of them slid down each other on the slick Bentonite mud, creating big dislocations. We also saw some abandoned homesteader houses - or the ruins of houses.
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on the Missouri, MT:
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on the Missouri, MT: Whitney Norville in the bow
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on the Missouri, MT: Aron Cowen, Whitney Norville, Jim Cummings, and our pirogue
We put in for lunch at Hole-In-The-Wall, and most of the group took a hike up to the top to look down through the hole, but I quit at the first rise in the terrain, and Arthur, Aron, Ann, and her husband all quit just after the high pass when Aron got some cactus spines in his foot (because he didn't want to change from his sandals to sneakers for the hike). Yesterday he didn't want to put on sunblock, and he got burned. This morning he refused to put on sunblock, so I told him we'd leave him behind if he didn't put on the sunblock. Finally, after Arthur talked to him about skin cancer and after he became convinced that I really meant it that we'd leave him behind if he didn't do it, he allowed us to put on the sunblock. But he takes his lessons learned (about the sandals and the sunblock) with a good spirit. I just hope they translate into him doing what he's told the next time.
A yummy lunch of sandwiches, chips, potato salad, apples, pita pockets, other salads, and cookies.
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on the Missouri, MT: debarking from our pirogue
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on the Missouri, MT: Aron Cowen and the water cannon
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on the Missouri, MT: walk up to Hole-In-The-Wall
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on the Missouri, MT: walk up to Hole-In-The-Wall
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on the Missouri, MT: walk up to Hole-In-The-Wall
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on the Missouri, MT: walk up to Hole-In-The-Wall .. people coming down the ridge
Off we went down river. Aron was unhappy since he was paddling on the starboard side right behind a guy who did not want to follow Whitney's cadence, as we were told to do, but wanted to paddle in bursts of speed. He also had a long stroke. Whenever Aron, who was following Whitney's stroke, hit his paddle against the guy's paddle, the guy was angry as if it were Aron's fault. Poor Aron was just trying to be good. We had to tell him to adjust his stroke to the guy's, or just not paddle while the guy was paddling.
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on the Missouri, MT:
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on the Missouri, MT: Citadel Rock?
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on the Missouri, MT:
We made camp just above Arrow Creek (or Slaughter Creek) where Lewis and Clark camped and saw the evidence of many buffalo that had been herded over a buffalo jump to their deaths. Buffalo jumps were a common way of hunting buffalo for Indian tribes. One person would cover himself in a buffalo hide to disguise himself as a calf, and would lure a herd of buffalo towards a bluff cliff, then the other hunters would yell and start a stampede towards the cliff. The Indian who played the lure would have to jump over the cliff to a ledge he had scouted out previously, and hope he wouldn't be killed by the stampede over the cliff. It was a very risky role. If successful, the tribe had many dead buffalo from which they could take meat, hide, and bones. The bones would be used for digging and hoeing tools. Unfortunately, there was also a lot of waste in a successful buffalo jump. So much for the lore that the Indian lived in harmony with nature and without disturbing the ecosystem. In fact, the buffalo were pretty much hunted out before Europeans came on the scene. But then the Europeans brought diseases that killed off most of the Indians, which allowed the buffalo herds to rebound by the time Lewis and Clark came through. Then, sigh, the Euro-Americans killed off the buffalo pretty completely.
We went 20 miles on the river today! We went 16 miles yesterday, and tomorrow we will go another 13 miles: 49 river miles all together from Vergelles Ferry Landing to Judith's Landing!
Aron, Steve, Mary, Ann, and I played a game of Oh Hell, and then we had a very late but delicious steak dinner with corn on the cob and salad, and with Brownies baked under the coals in a Dutch oven for dessert!
Aron elected to sleep under the stars that night, not in his tent, and after some stories around the campfire we hustled him to bed and went to bed ourselves.
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on the Missouri, MT: Aron Cowen helps set up his pup tent