This morning we drove East out of Bozeman, crossing the great grassy plains that compose most of Montana.  Towards evening we reached Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, the site of “Custer’s Last Stand”, where Lieutenant Colonel G. A. Custer and five of his seven companies, 268 men, were killed to a man by a force of over 2,000 Sioux warriors.  The kids got to work on their Junior Ranger workbooks:

At the battlefield site, markers indicate the locations where the soldiers fell:

Custer’s marker, lower left corner, has white writing on a black background:

The soldiers were hastily buried by late-arriving reinforcements.  In 1881, 5 years later, most of the soldiers were reinterred under this stone memorial.  Custer’s remains went on to be reburied at West Point:

When Trish and I were last here in the ‘90s, this Sioux memorial adjacent to the battlefield had not yet been built:

It’s odd standing here, watching the cars roll along the interstate in the distance, and imagining the battle as it occurred on this very spot a mere 138 years ago:

There is also a military cemetery here, where veterans from the Indian Wars through modern times are buried:

The kids received their Junior Ranger badges:

Leaving at 8pm, we continued driving past sunset, arriving at the Walmart of Sheridan, Wyoming a bit after dark.  See the trip map for driving details.

Today we prepared to leave Aunt Linda’s ranch:

B with Coyote:

Trish and the kids took short rides on Coyote:

Dillon in his stall:

Bitsy:

After saying goodbye at around 3pm, we drove South, then East to climb out of the Bitterroot Valley.  We stopped to visit Big Hole National Battlefield, where the army ambushed the Nez Pierce attempting to reach refuge in Canada after refusing to settle on their government-mandated reservation:

This Howitzer was fired three times from a hill overlooking the Nez Pierce encampment before the Nez Pierce overran the emplacement and captured the gun:

The Nez Pierce were camped where the trees meet the plains.  80 Nez Pierce and 28 US soldiers lost their lives here:

The kids received their Junior Ranger badge.  For this park, they are smaller and made of metal:

We drove on to overnight at the Walmart of Bozeman, Montana.  See the trip map for driving details.

Happy Anniversary!  We left Calgary this morning and drove South towards the US border.  The terrain here is flat and planted with vast fields of canola:

After a 30 minute wait in line, we crossed into the US!  We enjoyed our two months in Canada and Alaska, but we’re all very happy to be back in the continental US.  Continuing South, we arrived at the visitor center for Glacier National Park:

The kids worked on the Junior Ranger program here:

And received their badges:

Like our rush through the Canadian Rockies, we would have loved to have spent a couple days in Glacier. We are somewhat pressed for time between now and M’s Bar Mitzvah in mid-September, and wildfires are obscuring the views here anyway, so we didn’t linger.  I really wanted to ride the going-to-the-sun road, but there’s nine miles of gravel surface during this phase of road repair, with significant delays to transit, so we will have to tour Glacier in a more in-depth way some other time.  The smoke from forest fires in Washington state made it hard to see much of anything:

From higher up, we could look down into Glacier’s glacier carved valleys:

As we drove around the South side of the park, we encountered a train pulling hundreds of tanker cars:

We intended to overnight at the Walmart of Missoula tonight, but I discovered during a bathroom stop that our rear passenger wheel had a broken leaf in its leaf spring, probably caused by the stress brought on by the leaf spring bolt failure we had in Alaska. I pounded the broken leaf back into place, and we drove to the much closer Lowes of Kalispell where we’re staying the night.  See the trip map for driving details.