Wolf Creek, Montana to Gates of the Mountain, and back. 42 miles.
Sunday morning, we had a nice sleep in after the festivities of the previous evening. Lillian had booked us boat rides on a boat trip through the “Gates of the Mountains” which is a river gorge that had been dammed up after the Lewis & Clark expedition had past through here in the early 1800s.
Here, we met Aaron’s sister, Wendy, who joined the four of us on the boat trip. What a spectacular boat ride and scenery!
On the boat tour, we had a very cool, knowledgable tour guide/captain. About halfway through the tour, deep in the mountains, she stopped the boat to tell us about a tragedy that had occurred in 1949, after lightning had started a large forest fire at Mann Gulch. A team of brave young firefighters were flown in to jump into the gorge, but tragedy struck when the winds changed direction and brought huge flames bearing down on the team, who ran for their lives except for two guys. The leader started a new fire around him to preburn the area in the hopes of diminishing the severity of the main fire, a technique which had never been used before. He hunkered down with various gear over him and waited for the fire to literally run over the top of him, and survived. Another young firemen headed up the hill on the left, in the hopes of avoiding the worst of the fire down in the gulch, where all the other men had remained and tried to outrun the fire. He also survived while everyone else in that team died in the fire. A very sad and sobering story, with a nice monument to commemorate these brave souls.
Our tour guide also brought the boat up close to some incredibly old Indian rock drawings, seen here….
See the face in the rock?
The boat ended just otherside the “Gates of the Mountain”, where the captain turned us around to see the “gates” closing as we moved across the river. Note in the series of pics below, how the cliff faces on each side appear to “close up” like gates, as we moved along the water.
Can you imagine what Lewis and Clark thought about this place, in the early 1800s? Their expedition trudged right through these gorges (before the water was dammed up much later).
After this epic boat trip, we headed back to Wolf Creek, where Aaron cooked up some brats on the grill, and then Wendy left to head home, while we settled in for the night.
Tomorrow, we planned to go out to a nice Mediterranean Restaurant in Helena for lunch. Yum!!!