Mark Boyd's Family Pages

Boyd Home Page
2006 Montana
--- June 16th
--- June 17th
--- June 18th
--- June 19th
--- June 20th
--- June 21, 22




Why this web site.

You need to know this.

June 16, 2006

We drove from Deadwood (originally called Deadwood Gulch, because it is in a gulch) to Dillon, MT. We stopped at the Little Big Horn Battlefield Memorial for an hour or so.

There are lots of motorcycles in this area. I suppose that motorcyclist are sort of the cowboys of today. Individualists, adventurists, travelers, so I suppose they are drawn to these old cowboy areas of the country.

We stopped not too long after we got on the road for a pit stop, I think maybe in Beulah, SD. There two guys there on motorcycles with Iowa plates. I said, "Iowa, that's a long way." They guy said, "We're just getting started. We're going to Alaska." Another group of about 6 or 7 bikes came in just before we left.

We saw those Disabled American Veterans vans on the side of the road on I90 just after we got on the highway. I can't imagine what they are doing. It seems if they wanted to transport the vans somewhere it would have been cheaper to get a car carrier truck and haul them.

Just east of Gillette, WY, we saw lots of deer and prong horn antilope. It is truly the range where the deer and the antilope play. Connie saw in a book that the prong horn population in that county outnumbers the people.

In Gillette, there are a couple of coal mines (a large pit mine). There are trains going and coming hauling coal out and empty cars in.

There are also numerous oil wells in the area.

We saw lots of rolling prarie, bordered by mountains on the drive out to Dillon. All of the routes we took were in the valleys for the most part. We did reach 5400 feet elevation near Bridger. That was the highest we saw today.