Travelogue: Missoula to Hot Springs and back, May-June 2010

By Edward Campbell


Missoula, MT, June 10 (ECM)--This is not about the particulars. Those who are concerned with them are studying this for the wrong reason. It is not for some overrated, self indulgent, self-inflated student of anthropology sociology or psychology.

This document cannot be understood by them for the methodology of sociology, psyychology, or anthropology cannot comprehend it.

It is for those who already have had such experiences, and it would be best advised that the reader follow along with a map of the relevant territory. To them the meaning of the content is apparent since already there is something within their experience relevant to the events about which they are now to read to compare. It may be of some use for the historian, and for that reason I included enough of the historical facts to derive historical truths.

As for those who seek to know the answer to the question as to how two men are able to carry through on such an adventure, I have the following to say.

It requires cooperation, similar goals, physical stature and capablities, for a lean man cannot hike with a fat man nor a weak man with a strong one.

They must have singularity of purpose. Once the mission has been agreed upon, each must remain steadfast, intent to follow through to the goal. It requires compromise in decision making, which is frequently based on knowledge and experience.

The travellers cannot be afraid to dumpster dive, pick up useful object found alongside the road, panhandle, get dirty or small bad. Therefore, men with near equal experience travel together best. But above all they must have a similar world view, there is no time for ideological bickering in such undertakings.

When there is conflict, each man must understand that he is on his own, free to depart when and if he so chooses, to take a different road. Therefore, each man must be capapble of taking care of himself should the other man choose to abandon him. A man with out the experience to make the trip alone, should not be travelled with.

Enough has been said for the anthropologists, sociologists, and psychiatrists. They have nothing more to learn form this.

But for those who already have had some experience with these undertaking, the may find some helpful advice and, I should hope, some joy seeing themselves in these situations.

OUR GOAL: Although is has some good people, as there are god folks everywhere, Missoula is an evil vortex of capitlism, cops, and crime. A few good people, but still completely evil. Our goal was to get away from the city, and the oppression that goes along with living in the city, to go hunting and to kill wild turkey, antelope, or bison, to photograph it and publish it, to piss off the liberals. Although many goals we set before us where achieved the final aim was not.

ETHICS: Yellowhawk is aware that I am a journalist, was aware that I was keeping track of where we were, when we we there, and what we did, and was eager journalism be published about our undertaking.

WHERE WE CAMPED: We camped at East Missoula, we campted at Mill Town, we camped at Clinton, we camped at Drummond, we camped at Rocker, we camped at Three Forks, we camped at Crow Agency, we camped at MM17, 17 miles east of Crow Agency, MT.

We camped at Red Shale campground, we camped at Broadus, MT. We camped at Rapid City, and we camped at Hot Springs.

On the return, I camped at Hot Springs, Rapid City, Billings, Columbus, Livingston, and Missoula.

WHERE WE CAUGHT: Tuesday May 11 Yellowhawk and I finished our vodka in East Missoula, napped, and then walked through the night to the Milltown truck stop where we crashed.

In the morning, we panhandled and with a couple of beers killed our DTs, and set out walking east on I-90 to Clinton MT, 15 miles. Along the way, in Turah, we repacked our gear, lightened our load, and walked.

We caught from Clinton to Drummond, where the driver of the car got busted for pot doing 40 in a 35, “There's the road,” the officer to me said.

We crashed, we walked, and we caught to Garrison. We walked to Deer Lodge, picking up along the way a pair of binoculars and some insoles I had left by the roadside at Garrison on my trip to Yellowstone National Park earlier this year, in March.

We caught with a man and his son, who were headed home to Utah, to Rocker, MT, picking up a 12-pack at Anaconda along the way. Giving us a couple of beers each, dropped us at Rocker, the intersection of I-90 and I-15.

We walked to Butte and camped in the urban sprawl on Harrison Ave. Our feet hurt and we took the opportunity to wash our clothers, kick back panhandle, and swill some beer. The basic method of washing clothes in this situation is simply to submerge your clothes in very cold water for about an hour and seize the remaining daylight to dry them. Yellowhawk found a shoulder bag I had given him last summer, which he had forgotten, under water and covered with marsh slime. He washed it and added it to his gear.

Butte is an evil vortex, but the panhandling there is usually good, especially in uptown Butte. Unfortunately, we were downtown. Yellowhawk found a WW II era Nazi knife in an excavated area of the highway. “Worth about $300, but with the Nazi emblem gone only about $30,” he said. Our clothes mostly dry, we decided to walk, I picked up two cans of tunawe walked to Homestake Pass, were we picked up two cans of tuna I left by the side of the road in March on my way to Yellowstone earlier this year, and caught to Three Forks, another incredible ride. An expert driver picked us up on Homestake Pass east of Butte and at speeds up to 80 mph drove us to Three Forks from Whitehall down Hwy 69 around until it intersects with I-90 at Cardwell, then down MT 359 to Hwy 2 in a loop back to I-90 at Three Forks. Three Forks is a biker town. MT Hwy 359 passes by the Lewis and Clark Caverns State Park, we didn't stop.

Riding in the back of the pick-up under a topper and tumbled back and forth as the drive undertook four-wheel drifts around the sharp turns.

We crashed at Three Forks and in the morning walked a few miles and caught out with a Native brother going to Billings in a brand new Dodge 2500 with a high-end powertrain, smoking pot the whole way.

When we stopped at a rest area in Bozeman, Yellowhawk started going wing-nutty and thanked the guy for the ride, as if a 30 mile ride was just as good as a 174 mile ride. He wanted to go into town and panhandle. But I reminded him our earlier walking and told him in a manner of speaking that we were looking a gift horse in the mouth, convincing him we'd be crazy to turn down a ride that's already here. Bozeman is an evil vortex. Nice little college town (wink, wink, wink), but still completely evil except for the fact the panhandling is usually pretty good and it's not even close to as evil as Billings. Butte is better than Bozeman, if you're a hobo, for the simple fact that the urban sprawl is twice as big in Bozeman and the sprawl in Butte is confined to the southeast end of town.

We bopped into Billings. Billings is an evil vortex, stay away from Billings. Yellowhawk and I agreed to walk into town to help me find some better gear, but whereas it was Saturday the charities were closed. Yellowhawk insisted that we leave town immediately, Billings hates Indians and panhandlers. I agreed and we walked as quickly as possible down 27th Street to I-90, agreed to walk 5 miles to the intersection of I-90 and I-94, and to 15min of panhandling at the truck stops east of town.

Hawk struck out a one but I caught two $5 hits in 5 min flat. “Thanks for not asking,” the second guy said. We bought beer, we drank, we walked, and we caught with two Native brothers from the Northern Cheyene who said they would take us to Ashland, MT on US 212, east of the reservation where we would be able to pick-up some more beer, as both Crow and Cheyene are dry reservations.

This sounded like an excellent opportunity since both Yellowhawk and I wanted to avoid the 70 miles without services between Buffalo, WY and Gillette, WY, where it can be very difficult to get a ride. Wyoming can sometimes lack a vortex when you seriously need one.

But Yellowhawk, for some reason unexplicable at the time, decided we should bail at Crow Agency. We camped, we cooked, we slept, we walked 24 miles to Busby, MT. The first 17 that day and another 7 the next morning. As fortune would have it, Yellowhawk found a six-pack alongside he road. “Hurry up,” he said as we hid ourselves behind some sage brush. “This is a dry reservation,” he said. “If we get caught here, we'll go to jail.” We drank very quickly and hit the road.

On this hike I observed that there are main two kinds of grass, native and european. The european grass and the native grass, moreover, are starkly divided, the european grass only grows up to the fence line along the highway and no further. Evidently the european grass is incapable of invading the territory of the native grass, as a photograph would clearly show. There two kinds of grass and they do not mingle. Unfortunately, I was without a camera.

Just inside the Northern Cheyene Reservation where we immediately caught at the Jct. of US 212 and MT 314 to Lame Deer. We got water, we drank coffee, we talked to strangers, we walked, and, again, immediately caught, this time to Ashland.

We bought beer, we spared some change to the drunk Indian locals, we smoked, we ate, we walked 4 miles more to Red Shale campground in the Custer National Forest. We cooked, we ate, we drank water, tea, and coffee as we had no more beer. We straightenfed and honed the blade of the knife Yellowhawk had found in Butte.

We walked, and we walked and walked some more eventually caught to Broadus, MT. We bought food.

Yellowhawk struck out on panhandling: “I have seen even one person I would ask for a quarter,” he said after I returned from snipe hunting. The next guy walking by I asked him for .25 who then pulled out his wallet and handed me a $20.

We bought beer, we walked to the Powder River and drank the beer. Yellowhawk had a long conversation with the FWP guy about fishing. We picked up our cans and walked out by the Weigh Station and cold camped. It's nice that it's still leagal to drink at a public fishing access in Montana. I felt nostalgic for the Montana I knew as a kid, when it was a lot freer. Although it was never free, the Montana of today, like everywhere else in America, is a lot less free than it used to be.

In the morning I went into town to buy more beer and we cooked and ate and drank. I don't recall if we decided to stay two days, but afterwards we walked a whole bunch more miles and caught to Rapid. The dude who dropped us off gave me a bud and we went and smoked it in a camp just off US 16 heading south out of town.

I was exhausted as you can imagine since it was already Day 11, May 22. Yellowhawk and I quietly clashed for the first time on this trip, as he wanted to see relatives and I wanted to panhandle up a beer. We split up. I hitched to Hot Springs the next morning and got the drop on him the next evening, day 13. On the way down, I man and his wife picked me up, bought me some food, and took me back to their place in Hill City and smoked me out on some killer weed. Then he drove by Mt. Rushmore and the Crazy Horse National Monument, waste of a good mountain in both cases.

WHY WE SPLIT-UP: Although Yellowhawk is almost always on some kind of tirade against Zionism and Christianity, often claiming claiming to be a Satanist and a down right atheist, he slipped into a psychotic episode. Determining somehow, that I was involved in the so-called “Jewish conspiracy” to steal uranium buried under the Black Hills and under the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, decided to leap upon me and strangle me. Having somehow resisted this, he held me at knife point and threatened to cut out my right eye, saying, among other things, that I was always “a suspect.”

I decided to return to Montana, each man went his separate way.

THE RETURN: I was dropped off by a local friend who let me stay on his ranch during some particularly bad weather, and after the knife attack by Yelowhawk, on the 7-11 ranch road at the intersection of County Rd 101 which heads to Hwy 385, and County Rd 5, which goes to Buffalo Gap, SD through Wind Cave National Park.

I walked to the US 385 and caught out to Custer, SD in the bed of a pick-up. With an out of work 7th Day Adventist, caught to Rapid City. He stopped for me a few miles before Rapid and I picked up the netbook compter I left by the side of the road on the way to Hot Springs.

I walked to the truck stop west of town. At the truck stop a man walked up to me and asked me if I was hoofing it, whether I was camping out, etc, when I noticed the proverbial sign of oppression, a cashier, lurking in the doorway. The man handed me a couple of dollars and a handful of change, “And I'm sure they have a couple of hot dogs too,” he said to the woman in the doorway.

Fully expecting to be 86'd, after he walked away, the woman approached me and told me, to my surprise, that the truckstop had no problem with me panhandling there, that there were lots of drivers coming through going to Montana and they didn't mind if I talked to them, and that there were two hot dogs left and they were on the house.

But it was geting late and there wasn't much truck traffic, so I crashed. In the morning I got up and bought a cup of coffee with the money the man had given me the night before. Before I finished it, a truck stop worker told me I couldn't hang around and talk to drivers and 86'd from the property!

It's interesting in life to see things turn themselves competely around, hot turns to cold and what was once on its feet suddenly stands on its head.

I walked and caught to Sturgis with a convict on work release. He got 9 years in prison after being caught 12 ½ pounds of marijana in a school zone. I caught to Spearfish, caught to Beulah, Wyoming, I walked 10 miles and caught to Gellette with a fireman, a Vet who drove me to Sheridan and bought me a bus ticket to Missoula, $115, but he also gave me a $20 tide me over on my 12 hour wait, I ended up getting kicked off the bus in Billings for being drunk.

Spent two days drinking in Billings. I drank with some Indians in South End Park and passed out. One of the Indians put out a cigarette in the palm of my hand while I was pased out feeling, evidently, no pain.

There is a large blister in the center of my left hand, but it doesn't hurt. Walked 15 miles to Laurel and caught to Columbus, MT, walked 20 miles to Reed Point and caught to Livingston. Livingston is a nice town, but it is showing those signs of grown, loosing its western charm, and it's innocence. There are spectacular views of the Crazy Mountains and the Absarokees between Red Point and Livingston.

Caught from Livingston to Bozeman, Bozeman to Rocker, Rocker to Garison, one mile out of Garrison caught to Missoula, hopped out at Orange Street Ext. And stopped by a friends place on the Northside.

Reed Point boasts of “the largest sheep drive in the world,” to be held this year on Sept. 5, whereas I love sheep, an event worthy of seeing I'm sure.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: I would like to thank all those who one way or another helped me get down the road.

EHC / EHC
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Edward Campbell Media

http://edwardcampbellmedia.blogspot.com