Joe & Wilma's Excellent Adventures

 June 19, 2024

Wednesday

Waterfalls

We did stay in the rest of the day yesterday.  Got some things taken care of on the phone, I fixed a nice dinner.  But the weatherman lied -- it started raining again off and on about 3:00 p.m., and around 7:00 we had a thunderstorm and a downpour.  

This morning it was 41 degrees when I got up at 7:00.  My phone said it was supposed to get down to 36 last night but I don't know if it made it -- probably did.  

But it turned out to be a nice, sunny day  -- until our evening rain storm that seems to be a daily occurrence.  Our two days of rest here have been good for us, but we’re back on the touristy trail this morning. Our first stop was at the visitor center where we loaded up with material for the area. It seems there’s plenty to see and do here. One of our things here is the Charles Russell Museum.  The Visitor Center Lady said we were really lucky because they are working on the big museum in Helena and all of the exhibits from there are now up here in Great Falls at the museum.

Our first destination was Ryan Dam and Ryan Island.   As we turn down the road to the first Falls, we could see snow on the mountain range in front of us.  We are assuming it was from last night since it got so cold here.  Every peak in the mountain range has snow on it this morning.

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At Ryan’s Dam and Ryan’s Island we hiked over the bridge and up to the lookout to see the falls, which is right in front of the overflow for the damn.  This is the Great Falls for which Great Falls, Montana is named. All of these falls and dams are on the Missouri River.  What a sight, and the lovely smell of pine accompanied us on this little hike, but that was enough of a hike for my right knee at the moment. 

This dam has a pretty waterfall right in front of it.  There was a bridge over to a small island, another hike for us.

Our next stop was the Morray dam -- there was not a waterfalls there.

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The road at the Morray Dam took us all the way down, practically to the rivers edge. The water is very pretty pretty-- clean looking --  and you can see they’re only letting water out through one of the overflows here. 

With Joe’s background in generating stations, he finds all this very interesting and is very, very knowledgeable and explaining it to me.

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Next, we drove back to the Rainbow Dam.  The falls are more visible from the other side, so we’ll catch that later.

Black eagle is the third dam we drove to. It has a little bridge to an island on the other side. 

Our next stop was the Black Eagle dam.  Here, too, was a little bridge and island, smaller than the first one.  

 They had parts of the dam laid out here and a picture showing how it all worked.  Joe had me take a picture of this water turbine  

After three dams and two waterfalls, we decided attempting all five waterfalls in one fell swoop was a bit too ambitious for us so when we crossed back over the river, we decided to take a lunch break. 

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After lunch, we went back to the camper for a while, then decided to take a drive out to the First Peoples Buffalo Jump State Park, which was about 18 miles south of town. They were open until six so we thought we probably had enough time.  There was a small museum at the visitor center so we walked through the exhibits.

 Then it was another 3 1/2 mile drive to the actual Jump.  We parked the jeep and walked the trail to the edge of the cliff where the buffalo runner would lead the buffalo over (another hike).   

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We left there with 1/2 hour to spare before they locked the gate.  We had another view of snow-covered mountains on this drive.

There are prairie dog towns along this road, so that’s always interesting to see and we saw two deer on the grounds of the state park.  Later on, outside of the park, we saw a group of 8-10 deer.  We first thought they were cow elk because they looked so big, but we finally determined they were deer too.

We came back a different way (of course -- Joe found a dirt road) and came upon a field of cattle.  We are pretty sure the brown one is a longhorn.  Not sure what breed the black and white one is.

We got back to the RV about 6:15, before our evening rain storm, and felt like we had a pretty good day.  There is a lot to see around Great Falls, and we have to pick and choose what we can work in, since we run out of energy pretty fast.  Hopefully, tomorrow we can check off the other 2 falls and a couple of museums.  It's supposed to be another nice day.