Day 44 Glacier National Park St. Mary’s Campground, St. Mary Montana

Captain’s Blog

Thursday

July 16, 2009

Ron couldn’t post any of our pictures from yesterday because he deleted them by mistake. He had downloaded them into the computer but somehow it didn’t work. Not too many, anyway. En Route to Glacier we stopped in Bynum, at the Two Medicine Dinosaur Center to see the world’s largest full - scale model of

Seismosaurus halli (earth-shaker lizard; a Guiness Book of World Records listing at 137 feet long and nearly 23 feet tall at the hips. We couldn’t get a good photo but Ron does have a video clip of it. The center also features the first baby dinosaur bones found in North America.

We stopped at the Trex Agate Shop next door housed in a converted church. The owner’s has some interesting items and an interesting history. Back in 1978, a renowned paleontologist John R. “Jack” Horner was a “preparatory” at Princeton University who had come to Montana to do research with an old friend. The two were searching for baby dinosaur bones – a rarity at the time.

John and Marion Brandvold, long-time Bynum residents, had always been amateur history buffs and by 1978 had become pretty fair fossil sleuths on their own. Marion invited Horner to identify a cache of small, fossilized bones she and her family had collected earlier that year in a badlands area west of Choteau. Horner confirmed Branvold’s belief that the bones were those of baby dinosaurs and they were off on a search for more baby dinosaur bones.

Eventually, the fossil hunters discovered and named Egg Mountain, in Willow Creek anticline- a series of small badlands hills that yielded the first known nests of baby dinosaurs in the Western Hemisphere, eggshell fragments and whole, fossilized eggs. And to think we met a family member involved in finding those baby dinosaurs.

We continued on our way on very long winding roads that looked like ribbons in the landscape. We stopped at a roadside pull-over and had lunch. It was absolutely spectacular and you could see for eternity.

In the distance we saw what looked like a bright yellow magic marker stripe in the landscape that

was a beautiful strip of yellow flowers.

We arrived at Glacier National Park around 5 PM after driving/riding 302 miles. We got a great site with a view of the mountains despite arriving late. We opted to hang around and get an early start tomorrow with our first stop at the visitor’s center. It was 9:30 PM and the sun had not set yet but we were both so tired we hit the sack anyway.

r0n NOTE: Deb wanted to know how do I get so much water on the top of the bathroom sink in the morning? Can anyone help me out I think it is a Man Mystery?