Last summer I spent three months rolling around Montana (a month) a other states like Idaho, North Dakota, Wyoming, and at the end Oregon and Washington. A few things I saw:
-Hail storm in June in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Ice balls just started flying out of the sky, pelting my car like rocks.
-Coal trains across Montana, coal headed to China.
-Livingston, Montana on Fourth of July. Good place to be. Huge craft fair, where I talked for an hour to Tracey Roberts of Rattlesnake Creek Alpacas. She grew up raising cattle, riding horses, trapping beavers, and shooting deer and elk. Now, she has kids and decided to take up raising alpacas. She takes the wool and sews hats, gloves, scarves, and other products herself. Says often she hangs out in the barn with the alpacas to chill, sewing.
-Butte, Montana: officially one of America's most busted cities. Once the richest city in Montana, now destitute as mining has disappeared.
-Snake River. My vote for America's baddest river. It's so wide in parts it looks like a lake, water is pure teal, and it keeps resurfacing along the highway from Wyoming through Idaho through Oregon and Washington.
-Rugged, able-bodied people. It's amazing how people's body structures are different in a place like Bozeman, MT. So many people look in shape--not anything crazy or fake or glamourous, just people who can do stuff, hikers, climbers, bikers, etc. Here in DC, you often see a 40 year old man jogging who looks like a deer trying to stand for the first time, like he just bought his body and has not figured out how to use it yet.
-Independent people. So many examples of this.
-Fargo, North Dakota and Boise, Idaho: two cool midsize towns where you can get a huge 3 BR house for the same price as a small condo in DC. Boise stood out to me for really solid, down to earth people. I liked the vibe. Fargo seemed like a good place for an entrepreneur looking to expand, cheap rent and a neat downtown, funky vibe. Major biochemical industries up I Fargo. Both towns are works in progress, but the development is visible. Spokane, Washington is another midsize town, very green but downtown looks like it needs more of a facelift.
-Wal-Mart in Bozeman, MT has a massive rifle and fishing section and sells fishing licenses by the dozens. I still have never fired a gun in my life and I don't think I've ever caught a real decent-sized fish.
-Boise BAM JAM 3 on 3 basketball tournament. Just stumbled into this tournament walking down the street in downtown Boise, about ten blocks were blocked off for it. To my surprise, a lot of the teams were good, both kids up through adults. Apparently it is the largest streetball tournament in the Northwest.
-The Basque Block in Boise. Took a tour of the block with a lady who was Basque herself and grew up there. This block was home to boarding houses where Basque men from Spain came over on a government-sponsored program. The deal: they had to go tend sheep on the plains for three years--often totally alone--and in return they got citizenship. This lady's dad was one of those guys. In winter, they came in from the plains and stayed in Basque boarding houses, her family ran one and when she was a kid she would sing Basque songs to the guys living there. They had a jai alai court in one.
-Ice age glacial lakes across North Dakota. Usually people--including me--think of Wisconsin and Minnesota as the "Land o' Lakes," with thousands of lakes created by glacial processes like erosion and kettle lakes (giant pieces of ice that broke off and formed a pot-like hole) during the Ice Age. I didn't realize that the lakes also extend across North Dakota, all along the highway. So you see mile after mile of green and crops but also one small lake after the next, cool.
-Mount Rushmore. It stood out to me just how good it is, how well done the sculpture is given it is just a huge piece of rock. Saw some mountain goats nearby on one mountain road where you can view the profile of George Washington from different angle than the park. Also went to the Crazy Horse monument but you can't actually go up close because they are still building it.
-Glacier National Park - the drive is definitely great, huge views. Unfortunately, only 10% of the original glaciers remain, and being summer their area was low. But did see two bears and a trio of bighorn sheep i.e. rams with the curly horns up close. They walked right across the road in front of people to try to get to a parking lot, apparently they like to lick antifreeze from the asphalt (and somehow it doesn't kill them), but the park rangers were stationed there to keep them out.
-Foreign kids working in the US CIEE program. This program hires foreign students to work over the summer, including in a lot of state and national parks. I talked to kids from Russia, Taiwan, China who were waiters and cashiers in the national parks. One Russian girl was from Krasnoyarsk, she was surprised I knew (generally) where that was (Kuznets basin coal area). She was more surprised after I went out to the car and brought back my Geography textbook which has a photo of mining winter in Krasnoyarsk.
-Huge herds of buffalo. Saw in Yellowstone and also in Custer State Park in South Dakota. Cars were lined up on the road amid around fifty buffalo. Some buffalo were licking the headlights on my Toyota Camry, I had recently polished them to pass inspection and the chemicals were still on there.
-Painted Hills of Eastern Oregon and the Palouse region of Washington. Welcome to another planet, these hills are so other-worldly. Like driving across the moon with grass and crops on it, especially canola. The hills are a maze, like a driving test. Fast and Furious should do some scenes here among the canola and wheat. I blew $100 in gas just driving through these hills.
-Pullman, Washington - now hear this: the Lentil Capital of America. Holds the annual National Lentil Fair.
-Walla Walla, Washington - dual-identity: downtown is full of shi-shi wine bars and restaurants, because Walla Walla is the heart of Washington's wine country. Six blocks out from downtown: trailer homes.
-Few ethnic minorities. About 90% of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho are white. By contrast, Northern Virginia is 55% white with immigrants from all over the world.
-Gambling in dumb places. In Montana, gambling is legal and found in all kinds of places. There are gas stations with video gambling. Many regular hotels have a casino where people can throw their lives away. Overall, it looks very tawdry and emphasizes just how cheesy gambling is and why it should be very limited.
-Great Plains. They are great. They are huge. It is truly incredible that we have this much flat space. Also incredible that it is devoted largely to grains, like wheat, soy, corn i.e. monocultures. Very frequently, I would look out and think. "what if these ten square miles of wheat were covered in 200 different crops instead of just one."
-Lewis and Clark Historic Trail Interpretive Center, Great Falls, Montana. Learned a lot there. Those guys did an amazing trek dragging boats across range after range of mountains. Incredible luck to meet Sacajawea who recognized her Shoshone brother with them and took over navigation using her memory of the mountains. They had furs there from all kinds of animals that were hunted/trapped, neat to feel them. It said the ate about seven pounds of meat/fish per day.
-A lot of poverty and also a lot of rich folks. Montana is a prime example. On magazines there, it is common to see many pages of real estate ads for $16 million ranch estates where you basically own a lake or a view of a mountain. Many wealthy people buy a home there--and often don't even live in it except for a season or a few weeks out of the year. Meanwhile, Montana lacks jobs and there are many poor and homeless. Overall the population of Montana is only one million, but ten million tourist come in each year especially for Yellowstone and Glacier national parks, two of the most popular in the US national park system.
-Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA. I went to Gonzaga High School in DC for three years and also Georgetown U. which are both Jesuit, so seeing Gonzaga University another Jesuit school and a big basketball school was an obvious attraction. Nice modern campus, but neighborhood is just a bunch of suburban-style houses it is not really downtown per se.
-Kansas City and suburb Overland Park. Was not impressed. Unbelievably hot in summer, felt like being in Chad (never been to Chad though). Overland Park is rated as a top place to live in Kansas City, but only because it is a wealthier area with a Whole Foods etc., not so much a real city but just a vast chunk of sprawl. There is a huge medical research park there which provides jobs. Downtown KC is full of gentrification, flipped buildings, overall just looked cheesy to me. Omaha similar on a smaller scale.
-Space. So much of it. The US is a huge country. Very few countries have the luxury of having the amount of space that we do.
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