The Lolo Motorway, Part III

Sunday Morning we woke up a bit before we should have, due to a bear sniffing around the outside of our camp. Particularly around Shelby and The Fisherman's tent. They awoke to something very large sniffing their heads through the tent fabric... yeah. Not cool. We think he just must have been wandering through, and noticed new smells, because we had (thankfully!!) practiced bear safety, and had all our food locked away. So he sniffed a bit, then wandered off, and that was the end of that, thank the Lord. These gorgeous birds (Stellar Jay's) were all over... and had no problem getting close to us. I wish we had these at home, because at one point Debris was driving me crazy, and I told her to catch the bird for us for dinner, (with relative certainty that she wouldn't be able to) and she snuck quietly all over the campsite for 1 1/2 hours with a dagger in her hand attempting to catch that bird. It was wonderful.Girl time. There was a lot of this.... Girls in this family place a very high value on girl time, and these little one's are no different. :-)All the kiddos on the bridge...And then, leaving camp... almost all the road had a steep cliff up on one side, and a steep cliff down on the other side. Truly beautiful.Non-posed, at the Indian Post Office--pictures from the guys first trip there are at the end of The Lolo Motorway, Part II. The Fisherman and Shelby... also non-posed, and just too sweet. :-)

When on a trip like this, it's always amazing to think of these guys doing this trip, without any idea of what was ahead of them. And, without much more than vague trails and Native American guides to help them.

Picture time at the Indian Post Office... Kage and her kiddos.

The Fisherman and Shelby's family picture.

Frank and Me, Kiki and Debris... The next stop was the lake that they guys ended up at on Saturday... they actually hiked down to it with their fishing poles and brought home a cutthroat trout The Fisherman cooked for dinner. At the time this seemed perfectly okay, and I snapped the picture, and then told him to move back from the edge. Now when I look at this picture I'm a little horrified that I took the time to snap the picture! And the guys, and the lake and hillside they conquered. So then we headed out, with just a few more stops along the way. We actually did all total a little less than 1/2 of the Lolo trail. We cannot wait to come back, and do the other half. It was an epic trip at an amazing location. As someone who's grown up around the Lewis and Clark landmarks my whole life long it's so easy to get really apathetic about those landmarks, but with kids it's been really fun for me to view them with new eyes, and truly appreciate what an amazing part of our countries history the Discovery Corps's mission was. We parted paths at highway 12. We decided to take Hgwy 12 home through Idaho, since we'd never seen that part of Idaho or of Highway 12 before. It was BEAUTIFUL, and unfortunately we didn't stop to take pictures, because we'd already used up all the time we had allotted for "Pull over!! I want to take a picture of that!" situations. So we ended up taking a big beautiful circle on I-90 to Missoula, and then home from Missoula on 12 basically, with a few detours and whatnot's thrown in. We're looking forward to Lolo 2011!!! :-)

And so concludes three posts worth of pictures that ended up being just plain agonizing to narrow down, haha! Have a great weekend!