Flat Head Lake and Big Fork, Montana

Our adventure continued northward to Montana where we had a short but joyous visit with our daughter, granddaughters, and great grandchildren.

This a view of the marina on the north end of Flathead Lake, Montana. Our daughter, Mary, purchased the use of a pontoon boat for the day, and treated us to a trip on the lake.  We enjoyed a relaxing trip and picnic aboard the boat.

Captain Tony steered us out of the marina onto the lake.

Here is a good view taken as we left the marina.

We went out onto the lake along the Northeast shore.

There are some beautiful homes located on the hillside along the shoreline of the lake.

Right along the shore we spotted some very nice homes.  Our whole family could fit into this one.

It was a very hazy day, but some people were enjoying fishing anyway.

This is an expansive view of the lake as we headed Northwest.

This is an island on the North end of the lake.  It took us about two hours to get this far.

Some folks choose a more primitive way of getting from place to place on the lake.

I always love to capture images of Nature's creatures.  These two are enjoying sun bathing on a private dock.

After our adventure on the lake, we enjoyed pizza with the family and watching the deer mow the grass in the yards surrounding Robyn's house.

This mother had to keep protecting her twins from a yearling doe that was most likely her fawn from the previous year.

We also took some photos of our family.  I hesitate to post them because I don't want the blog to become a family album.  Never-the-less, here are some picture of a couple of our granddaughters and their beautiful children.

Becky, Colton, Wyatt, Robyn, and Scarlett.

Grandma and Sean were added.

Grandpa and Sean joined for the photo-op.

We posed with just the great grandchildren.

Becky joined us for this one.  We greatly enjoyed our visit with all of them.

On the next blog post, I will show a couple of pictures of Antelope Island, Utah, and Willard Bay State Park, Utah.

Big Hole River, Glen, Montana.

We left Cedar City, Utah and headed north to visit with other family members. The Madison River in Montana was our planned destination for a 4th of July campout with Eileen, Jared and Sandy. 

Alas, it was wall-to-wall people along the Madison.  We could not find two canpsites so we headed west.  The first night was spent in a pull off for trucks. As the traffic declined during the night, we were able to get a peaceful night's sleep.


We found two very nice campsites along the Big Hole River.  The fishing was excellent, although I just enjoyed the ride and watched Jared real them in.

This sign marks the entrance to the campground.

The boat launching area is located just down stream from the bridge.  Jared and Eileen launched their raft upstream and took it out here.

This is a view of the river down stream from the launch site.

Although the ground was a little uneven along our campsite, it was a quiet, almost private site.

Jared and Eileen's 5th Wheel was an easy walk from ours.  As one can see, there was plenty of room.  We were using our pickup to transport the raft to the launch site.

We made a side trip to Bannack, MT and enjoyed a guided tour by a gentleman who was a retired history professor.  He filled us in on a lot of the history of how the Idaho-Montana border was determined, and how the mining in the area was carried out.  The food and supplies were shipped in from Salt Lake City, UT.

I did not have my camera along, but took some pictures with our Android phone.  

This is a group photo taken on the stairs of the hotel in Bannack. Sandy was the photographer so she is missing in this photo.

Here is the hotel from the outside.  We took some other pictures, but I am having trouble getting the blog to open them from my downloads.  Here is a link to the Bannack website. A lot of information about the "Ghost Town" can be found on the site, although we were told by our guide Bannack had never really been a ghost town because one lady had continued to live there.


A movie was purchased that had been filmed in Bannack.  Jared rigged up a huge movie screen on the side of his 5th wheel.  We had fun seeing the scenes in the movie we recognized from Bannack.  I'll leave a critique of the movie to others, but I'll suggest that it did not get two thumbs up.

Our Stay in Cedar City, Utah

Cedar City was a very pleasant stop-over on our way north.  We enjpyed our visit with Ben and his family and friends.  Ben took us to Navajo Lake where we kayaked with our grandson, Josh, and two friends of their family.

Josh was surveying the lake after we got my kayaks unloaded.
Ben had another kayak which had been loaded on his car.  It was the kayak I built when I was attending Oregon State University. It is about one year older than Ben.

Ben also took along his pontoon boat from which to fish.

Navajo Lake provides a nice beach for launching the kayaks and pontoon boats.  Margaret and I went all the way across the lake, while Joah kayaked to the east end.  

The fishing was great, but the catching was poor.  However, we all enjoyed ourselves.

Ben is one of the scout leaders in his church, and took his boys to a small lake set aside for youngsters to fish.  He was teaching them how to fly fish.  They had a good time, and the fishing was better than it was at Navajo Lake.

The boys fished from the dam that impounds the water.  You could probably throw a stone clear across the lake.

This boy's father had joined us, and here they proudly displayed their catch.

Of course the trip would not have been successful if the scout leader had not been able to teach them fly fishing without landing a couple himself.

Not all of our time at Ben's was spent fishing and kayaking.

Chrissy came to visit with her three boys while we were there.  This is Logan panning for the camera.

Here are two of the boys and Ben and Chrissy in the background.

This is Haley's new little kitten.  Cute, mischievious and active.  I teased her continually about stealing it and taking it with us.  I'm sure she realized I was only teasing, but played along with me anyway.

The next blog entry will see us at Big Hole River, Montana.

Pictures of Lake Mead

I left off on my last blog post with a promise of some pictures of Lake Mead.  For some reason blogger will not let me post all of the pictures I want to on each post.

This is the store for the campground, with the lake in the background.  We were pleasantly surprised to learn that our senior pass entitled us to a 50% discount for our camp site.  We had a reservation for the handicap site.  Since it was the beginning of Father's Day weekend, it was also the only site we could have gotten.

This is another view of the lake.  There are kayak and boat rentals available.  I went onto the lake with my one person kayak early in the day and stayed on the water for about an hour.  

By mid-day the temperatures were in the low 100's.  It got up to 115 degrees.  At 9:00 pm the wind coming up off of the lake was still very hot.

The entry into the camp is very steep so we decided to leave very early Sunday, June 18th (Father's Day).  We wanted to avoid having our truck over-heat climbing up out of the park.  We also wanted to avoid as much of the mid-day heat traveling across the desert to Cedar City.

We arrived in Cedar City about noon and it was a "cool" 81 degrees.