Category: August September 2023

We woke up in the early hours of the morning to some strong winds. It seemed to come out of nowhere. We checked the weather app but there were no warnings for our area. There was no rain with the wind and after an hour or so the winds started to diminish. after a leisurely breakfast, we headed back through town and started across Highway 16 to our campground for the night. It is a beautiful site amongst the tall pines.

We had a quick lunch after we set up and then took the truck out for some sightseeing. First was a stop at the Tie Hack Reservoir. Joyce camped here in 1969 with her family. According to her Dad, the lake didn’t exist then and in fact the camping area was where the lake is today.

We then headed south on Hwy 16 to a scenic road that was recommended by the National Forest staff. Known as the Crazy Woman Canyon Road, it’s a one lane gravel road. On the advice of park staff, we drove in about 8 km before turning around. the stories are varied how it got its name. One says it was named for an Indian woman who lived alone in her teepee here and went insane. The other is a story of a settler who witnessed the violent capture and scalping of her husband and children and went insane. Regardless, it was a passageway for the Native Indians into the Big Horn MountainsI was a . The Crazy Woman Creek runs along the road for most of the way. It was a fairly busy road and there were lots of places to pull off and pitch a tent and have a fire. We did several set up.

Our next stop was Sheep Mountain Road. It was much less travelled and had lots of potholes. We did get a nice view from the top however. Our exploring done, we headed back to our campsite for some supper. We should get cell signal Friday to post this!

Made it to the top of Sheep Mountain around supper time. We only saw about 4 vehicles in the whole 16 km round trip!

I’m sure once we head into Yellowstone Park, we’ll encounter more traffic than anywhere on our trip! Today, despite being back on the Interstate again, the other vehicles were scarce.

Last night, we sent the night in a city park in Douglas, WY. Our decision to push on worked in our favour as we really had no rain where we spent the night. Of course, we have no way of knowing what it would have been if we had kept to our original plans, but we were happy with the outcome of our decision. We had no fees to pay and there were about 6 other campers in the park.

As we drove today, we had quite a bit of sun and as we approached the town of Buffalo, we could see the mountains towards Yellowstone to the west There were even some snow-capped peaks. Tomorrow we’ll see them much closer.

Since we were ahead of our schedule by a day, we had to find a spot for the night. The National Forest Campground where we are camping tomorrow night only had sites that were first come and it was about half an hour from Buffalo. We found a Recreation Area along side De Smet Lake with beautiful sites for only $15/night and were able to pull into a site with a view of the lake. It’s great stopping around 2 pm since you have much more choice of your site. The sun is shining bright and even though our fridge is running on electric, the solar is keeping up and we haven’t been draining our batteries!

Tomorrow we head into areas with limited to no cellular coverage so our posts will be more intermittent. However we should have cell coverage on Thursday as we head north to our next 2 night stop. The weather outlook is great for the next days – upper 20s, sunny with lows at night about 13-15C.