Chinook welcomes home its wayward (grand)son

(Susan)
Today beat out yesterday for record mileage; we hit 95 miles from Saco to Chinook. Now that we’ve started trying to push ourselves a little bit, perhaps inspired by the dudes we met in Medora who are doing Astoria to NYC in 6 weeks, we’re finding that it’s not actually too hard.

Today we had a tailwind for most of the day, until just east of Fort Belknap Agency when the wind stopped and then turned straight around. Here’s our hypothesis for how this happened: Most of the day we were biking towards a ginormous storm system, which we passed just south of on the road to Fort Belknap Agency. The storm is a low-pressure zone that sucks the air towards it from all sides. So once we went on the other side of the storm we were moving opposite of the movement of the air and thus the tailwind became a headwind. Physics! It works, kids!

Unfortunately, once the headwind hit, there was no place to stay that had showers for another 30 miles, so here we are, all those miles later, in Chinook. Among other notable features, Chinook is the birthplace of Brice’s paternal grandfather Howie. We know that the family did not stay very long here, so we probably don’t have any long-lost cousins around to barge in on, unfortunately. (Grandpa Howie, will you fill us in on what your parents were doing in Chinook and where you all went from here?)

More cliffs along the southern edge of the Milk River Valley:

A bull (foreground) and his herd of girlfriends: (I didn’t think anyone kept bulls around anymore!)

The Bears Paw Mountains off to the south:

In Malta, we visited the tiny but well-curated Great Plains Dinosaur Museum and Field Station. (Unlike the dinosaur museum in Glendive that we fortunately avoided, the museum in Malta is not run by the Foundation for Advancing Creation Truth.) Montana is well-known for its fossil deposits, including especially important fossils like Leonardo the Mummy Dinosaur:

(The Bike Blog’s lurking paleobotanist will be pleased to know that the museum also had a nice little plant section, too.)

Tomorrow we’re off to battle some more headwinds until we get to Havre, where we’ll bum around for a day or so.