It’s a Dam Big Country — Day 3

A late start this morning.

First up the Canyon Fer­ry dam about 20 miles south­east of Hele­na MT.

The lake behind it is huge and full of boats and fish­ing and stuff. From the ‘front’ it’s not a very impres­sive dam.

To reach the vis­i­tors’ cen­ter (closed) and an entire sub­urb of Hele­na you dri­ve across the dam.

It takes a few min­utes to fig­ure out how to get around to the back side of the dam from the vis­i­tors’ cen­ter. It’s worth a few min­utes of wan­der­ing around to find this.

The riv­er down­stream of the dam is pret­ty impres­sive as well.

At the camp­ground ffrom which I took the last pic­ture I was scold­ed by this starling.

Leav­ing the Hele­na area I took Hwy 12 east. At the left turn of 12 in the Townsend I found the Broad­wa­ter Coun­ty EMS rais­ing mon­ey to buy radios and pagers.

If there’s only one stop sign in town that’s where you stand to get the most atten­tion. (That’s the new guy out there look­ing for mon­ey so that he can have a radio too!)

Had a love­ly chat with one of the mem­bers who was orig­i­nal­ly from *Sno­homish*. He said they tried the traf­fic stop thing a while ago to hand out appli­ca­tions for EMS/Fire train­ing and peo­ple kept try­ing to give them mon­ey. So they’re try­ing it again.

Stopped for lunch in White Sul­fur Springs. The wind was real­ly blow­ing. I felt the Shark get light a cou­ple of times.

On the way out of town I found this lit­tle dam. No name, no noth­ing. Just a lit­tle dam with a shal­low lake behind it and not much to speak of in front of it.

Much of 12 runs through cat­tle coun­try. These wind­mills broke up the monot­o­ny a bit.

While I was tak­ing the wind­mill pic­tures this love­ly fel­low was singing at my back.

Final stop for the day before head­ing to the motel was Har­low­ton. I stopped to use the loo at the park and I found a small town rodeo arena.

These two fel­lows ran over to great me.

But quick­ly lost inter­est. The bulls being moved around behind the pan­els were much more interesting.

I packed it in for a final run to Roundup.

Okay, maybe not. Small towns are full of sur­pris­es and here not two blocks from the are­na was the last elec­tric loco­mo­tive on the Mil­wau­kee Line set up in a pock­et park.

(Yes, I have a pic­ture of the sign describ­ing the exhib­it. I’ll send it to any train nuts who ask.)

Hmm,  that’s a lot to say about a day that seemed like it most­ly con­tained this:

Today’s Route:

View It’s a Dam Big Coun­try ‑Day 3 in a larg­er map