The last fourteen or so posts showed day by day our our summer vacation. Anyone with investigative powers can reconstruct the entire route that we took from Salt Lake City and back to it, fourteen days later. Before our flight back to the East coast on a red eye flight, we stopped at the Ensign Peak Nature Park to see how Salt Lake City looks during sunset.
One thing that anyone will notice in Salt Lake City is the big presence of industrial complexes. I have no idea what type of industries are all those complexes, but they were an eye sore, especially after seeing all the natural beauty around there.
Coeur d’Alene is a cool town on the north side of the Coeur d’Alene Lake in Idaho. We stayed there for couple nights and had good walks along the Spokane river. The building on the right is their main resort, a bit shmancy fancy place with shmancy fancy dressed up guests. We didn’t stay at it, but walked through couple times and even thought about taking a boat tour on the lake, but thankfully decided against it, as it was super hot and would be very unpleasant on the lake, expensive and food didn’t sound that good.
After leaving Missoula we decided to stop by the National Bison Range. It is about one hour north from Missoula on HW93. You have to pay to get in, but our National Park pass got us in without any extra cost. In the park there are couple loops that you can take, one is short and take you closer to the bison herds, the other one is longer and take you almost through the entire park. We already seen plenty of Bison in Yellowstone so naturally we took the longer loop. The drive was scenic, but for the first three quarters of it we didn’t see much of the wild life, with the exception off a turkey that was a bit territorial and decided to attack our car. As we saw it, we stopped to take a look at it, but instead of running away it got on the car, on top of it, on our sunroof and started pocking at it with its beak. Making turkey noises while doing it. Later on we learned that it had a nest nearby.
As we started to descent off the mountain we saw this buck deer. He was far away, but as we started descent serpentine, we looped around him and got a bit closer. I guess our car looked somewhat cool, or smelled of some turkey and not so alien, he decided to come by and check us out. It was only maybe for a minute or two. He was making hardly audible deer noises, ate some grass, took a look at us and took off. But not before I was able to take a few photos.
As always, all photos available in high resolution at my photo gallery.
From Bozeman we maid our way to Missoula for one night stay and to check out this town. No offence to anyone from Missoula but we found it not very exciting. Of course one night stand does not allow a lot of time to know the place, but we found it not as interesting as Bozeman. They did have a nice party going on alone the river, in one of the downtown parks, with live music, food and draft beer.
This grizzly statue is suppose to be famous, can’t recall really why, but it looks cool so worthy to be shared with the world.
