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I'm grateful for the additional support. I've spent a considerable sum in dollars and hours on maintenance and prep so i think if I can keep a light foot on the skinny pedal I'll be OK. Hotter than the hinges of Hell now (late afternoon) loading up and hitching up. I've got to survive this...

You're so very kind. We've got reservations all made and the truck has had every fluid changed, right down to a brake fluid flush. Weather doesn't look terribly hot on our route over the next several days, so maybe the old war horse will rattle across the country at 1,700 rpms without fault...

Jerry, If the Good Lord is willin', creeks don't rise, and our 23 year old F350 diesel with 300,000 miles cooperates for her 7th trip from NC to the Northern Rockies, our ETA in White Sulphur Springs is late afternoon 7/22. We'll enter the cowpasture grounds of the Red Ants Pants Music Festival...

Thanks for the preview. We'll be passing through the Shields Valley enroute to White Sulphur Springs soon.

Colt Killed Creek was in fact named by Lewis & Clark after they had to sacrifice one of their pack horses there on the outbound leg in September 1805. They'd been able to acquire horses from the Shoshone at Camp Fortunate just east of Lemhi Pass a month earlier, but they erroneously assumed...

I'm unsure what you mean by caves in Southeastern Montana, but once you get east of the Little Rockies, Little and Big Snowies, and Pryors/Bighorns in MT/WY, you've gotten out of where the Madison Group outcrops at the surface in Montana (and, therefore, where Madison caves and caverns are...

Been on the road (within 160 miles of home, however) parts of the last 3 weeks, so just catching up with your Journey. It may come as no surprise to you to know that the caves you found in the Pryors, as well as the ice caves up top on Big Pryor Mtn, are hosted by the Madison Group limestones...

General O O Howard led the pursuit of Chief Joseph from Idaho through much of Montana, almost to the Canadian border, in 1877. Howard was much criticized during his Civil War and Indian campaigns.

Turns out the professional literature notes the presence of Mississippian limestone in the Dragoon Mountains, but further notes that the limestone unit altered by contact metamorphism from the hot granite intrusion is an impure limestone of younger age---the Pennsylvanian-Permian Naco Group. I...

The 7th picture in this sequence appears to show the contact between light tan granitic (and thus intrusive) rock (left side of photo) and a grayish intruded rock which appears to be limestone (right side of photo). Any time you've got cold limestones intruded by hot igneous rock like granite...

I just came across a YT video from Solomon's Outdoor Adventures entitled "Geology of the Santa Rita Mountains & their rich copper deposits--Tuscon, Arizona". Incudes Mt Wrightson and a lot about how the many metallic mineral deposits were formed, with a focus on a controversial yet undeveloped...

Given that your geology "expert" hasn't earned a dime from swinging a rock hammer at mineralized outcrops since 1983, you are fortunate to have encountered one of the easy ones for this aging prospector to comment on. The nearly ghost town of Cleator, AZ lies at the northern end of the Black...

Ah yes, the Morrison Formation: Deposited by terrestrial (nonmarine) sedimentation arising from eastward flowing streams originating due to rising landmasses in the vicinity of today's Klamath and Sierra Nevada. The landmasses arose due to collision of island arcs with the western continental...

I first read Cherry-Garrard's book about his Antarctic adventures and misadventures around 20 years ago and have read it at least twice since then (typical for me when I enjoyed or was positively affected by a book}. Being both a field geologist (by undergraduate degree and a handful of years'...

Sweet! From the "Y" where you'd gone straight, we'd come in from the left. We also stopped and walked around at the picnic table beneath the huge lodgepole pine at or near the Russell Point sign. Great country, those Little Belts! Foy

Thanks for checking about the rock hammers, but I'm happy to say I still have the last hardrock rock hammer/pick that I earned a $ with before 1984, so I'm good. Given the typical lag between your days afield and when you post, plus the spectacular cloudless skies in your pics, we may have been...

A little tardy on catching up on the ROF trip report and you folks certainly did not disappoint! I've got too much truck + camper to go along but it's sure compelling when folks like Dave and Terri are along! Cooking and navigating!--if Terri could read a geologic map she'd be pretty much the...

In late September, the Missus and I did a traverse through the eastern Little Belts from near Checkerboard out to Utica. We didn't know it at the time but the valley and canyons of the South Fork of the Judith River above Sapphire Village was the area in which Charlie Russell first lived and...

Me, blather on and on about Montana rocks? Why sure! As mentioned a number of times since I've been tagging along with you, the thick sequence of Mississippian age carbonates throughout the Rockies (mostly limestones approx 325 to 360 million years old) provides incalculable resource values in...

I can't say that AT heavy lugged tires would be my choice for deep, coarse sand. Generally, the finer the tread, the better on sand. The real, and only, trick is airing down. I'd get down to 22-24 psi and if she still spins, get down to 16-18 psi. Much lower than that and you've got to be...