RocketDog's Maiden Voyage

On Monday, we left our little sometimes-guest house in Hamilton...

...as advertised on our porch sign, designed/built by neighbor Heather Kempka (salvagesignco).

 

 We couldn't wait to depart the noisy street work out front, in the name of new City of Hamilton water lines.

(That's Heather and Jeff's little yellow bungalow, left of the mountain of rock.)

So we headed to real mountains, south and then west, over Nez Perce Pass...

...See the deer in the middle of the road? Five -- including two fawns -- skedaddled left and right, far ahead of us. (This actually is the same Nez Perce road pictured on the way home, but who's counting? Probably a few of our pickiest Montana friends.)

And the Selway River was our destination. It's just over the Bitterroot Mountains from us in Idaho, but a trip there takes nearly three hours, often on washboard roads. We wondered how our 1990 RocketDog would do. Our own teeth were clattering. What about Dog's many ancient parts??

Well, we all did fine. Here's RocketDog tucked snugly across from whitewater in the Selway.

Our campsite at Indian Creek was small but shady and with views across the Selway to a tiny -- infinitesimal, really -- slice of the 1,340,587 acres in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. It's a mind boggling amount of wild land. We are so lucky to live near it!

As sun set behind mountains to the west, extreme heat of the day subsided. We even built a small fire. Bugs were a problem -- mosquitoes and biting flies. But with screens up all around the van, we slept bug-free, snuggling to stay warm in temps reaching nearly into the 40s. In fact, we slept like babies.

Alex did a bit of gentlemanly fishing off of a big rock at the favorite Selway swimming hole.

We left a day early, however, when a log decided to move under Al's feet as he fished another site along Indian Creek -- a haunt from his childhood summers here. As he stumbled slightly, a small branch stuck his arm; Alex pulled it out. Later, a Hamilton doctor retrieved a half-inch splinter, gave him antibiotics and two stitches. I'm glad we made this call to return!

Said splinter.

But not before we stopped to smell the flowers -- so to speak -- on the drive home. My favorite?

Beargrass (Xerophyllum tenax).

Look at this Beargrass bouquet! It's hard to forget an entire forest of these. We were lucky here, too. Beargrass, says the book Wildflowers of Glacier National Park, periodically produces "mass flowering displays that blanket open slopes with white, leaving a forest floor of dead stems the following summer... Elk and bighorn sheep browse the flowers, sometimes nipping off the entire flower cluster. Individual plants live a long time and are resistant to fire." What an alpine treat.