But it wasn't to be, as Upper Lake Como campground was full, and Lower Lake Como campground kinda sucked. Just down the road (if 25 miles is "just") is Painted Rocks State Park though, so we hauled Ludwig down the West Fork and found this site.
Luckily, it was free! Unluckily, it was free because they had some water contamination problem and thus, no water. Luckily, Ludwig's tank has had about three gallons of water in it for a long time. Unluckily, his sink faucet is broken. Luckily, Melissa looked at the set-up and found that we just had to yank off a water line underneath that has a valve on it to get at the water. Unluckily, the water in the tank had been in there for several months, and had froze and thawed at least a few times. Luckily, the water tasted perfect, as good as the water in our water bottles from home. Above we let Tater Tot do some exploring.
What's that?
A snake!
Unluckily, Melissa has found her old sunglasses and won't be wearing this much better pair anymore. Luckily, I now have two pairs of sunglasses and will hopefully never have to squint again.
Unluckily, I'm always more groggy in the morning when we're camping than at home. Luckily, I keep some super nice tea in Ludwig at all times for just such occasions.
E likes her own chair, the pink one, just fine until she thinks about it and realizes it's different from our chairs.
Three thumbs way up for the awesome WalMart awning score! I'll do a bit of sewing sometime to improve it a bit, but it's pretty nice regardless. We can't really afford the fancy-schmancy bus specific awning, however we've always thought it was pretty nice. I've got to say, I think about shade a lot differently now that we are living with a little kid.
The fam atop the dam. The three-point turn I had to execute to get off of it made me a little nervous.
Ludwig above the spillway
Melissa took this video of the dam and reservoir. The end is a little vertigo-inducing.
Trapper Peak, at 10157', the highest point in all the Bitterroots. Some of that precipitation up there is still falling as snow.
On the way home, we stopped in Hamilton to picnic in Ludwig. E is enjoying some bread dipped in hummus.
Thanks, Ludwig, for another trouble-free trip!
3 comments:
Don't you technically go up the Bitterroot? Because you're going up in elevation?
Also, that's a huge snake!
There is indeed a tension between up-ness as in "upriver" and the occidentally chauvanistic up-ness as in "North", and I have to admit that you are right: we did go up the Bitterroot River and our direction of travel was South. No technically about it.
Something curious, and which has been noted since ancient times, is that no major rivers flow South to North (with one very notable exception), at least in those parts of the world that grew into Western culture. My own amateur opinion is this incidental topographical feature probably helped foster the vague concept that North=up, held by (I assume) pretty much anyone who's ever given it a second thought. Water doesn't flow "up", you see.
To give a clue as to how long my psyche has been troubled by this tension, I remember reading the Carl Barks classic "The Mummy's Ring" as a first-grader, where Donald Duck and the nephews have an adventure sailing up the Nile--the major exception to the "rule" above. I knew then that the Nile's flow was Northerly and thought it odd that sailing "up" it meant going South.
In any case, I'm leaving my error in the post, so that your comment makes sense.
Alright,
Grady.
1. Esme is so great. You know this, but I feel the need to write it. I can't stop watching the drum set video.
2. That bag of Mill Tea made me miss Mill tea.
3. All the photos made us miss you guys.
4. I recently read a newspaper article (mostly just a list, really) about things restaurant workers do that annoy customers and one annoying habit they mentioned was using the word "guys" to refer to a mixed-gender group and I think that's just nuts!
Sincerely Yours,
Alisa
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