We finally made it to Hamilton on Saturday, the 10th, to visit with Helen and Winslow Caughey and their son, Byron, who is a senior scientist at the National Institutes of Health Rocky Mountain Labs. We always enjoy seeing Helen and Winslow; seems like just yesterday that Dave was an eager young graduate student at Arizona State who walked into an incoming full professor’s office and announced he was Dr. Caughey’s first graduate student at ASU! We quickly got to know Helen and Winslow, and their family including their youngest son Byron, who as a young teenager got to go with the “boys”, Clyde Barlow, Dave O’Keeffe, and John Maxwell, three graduate students who thought they could do anything (and pretty much did) on a snorkeling trip to San Carlos, Mexico. Something no parent would do today - but in 1971 it didn’t seem so unusual.
Sunday found us leaving Missoula headed to eastern Montana to see where Barb’s mom was born and where Grandpa Fred had a homestead in 1905. On the way we crossed the upper part of the Missouri River in Great Falls. We stopped for the night at Fort Benton - small little town on the Upper Missouri and a place that we want to go back to sometime. As we were driving we could see that they have had a lot of rain this year - everything is very green and the MOSQUITOS are HUGE!
On Monday, July 12th, we stopped at the Phillips County Museum in Malta, Montana to see where Barb’s Grandpa Fred’s watch was going to live. This is a really great museum for a small county and Dave enjoyed taking lots of pictures as we went through the museum waiting for the curator to return from lunch.
Picture set #1 and
Picture set #2.
Born in Minnesota, Barb’s maternal grandfather Fred Heeck, had moved to Montana in search of a homestead in the early 1900s. His pocket watch was one of his treasures in life and the story that went with the watch is part of the reason that Barb’s mother decided to donate the watch to the museum. We have an excerpt from the biography of Fred Heeck that Clarice is currently working on called Grandpa Fred. Hope you enjoy it.
We met with the museum curator, Sharon Emond, who spent time with us identifying both Grandpa Fred’s and Grandma Nora’s homestead as well as the location of Great Grandfather John Gunderson’s (Nora’s Dad) homestead based on all of the information they had on
Phillips County homesteaders. Talk about traveling back in time.
And in the course of discussing that we were fulltime RVers, we found out that Sharon and her husband have recently purchased an RV and are planning on being in the Mesa, Arizona for part of the next winter - so we exchanged information and offered to show them some of our favorite places in Mesa - - it really does become a small world the more we travel.
Turns out the museum had a couple of features that a lot of fulltimers might enjoy. First it is right on US Highway 2 and their parking lot is big enough so that you can pull right in in your rig.
And they have a geocache located on their site - what more could you want?
We continued on to Glasgow, MT where we spent the night and caught this double rainbow during a 15 minute downpour in the evening. We also learned to check and make sure ALL of the doors on the car are closed for the night - tightly! Luckily we got a jump so we could run into the local Albertson’s for some bread and juice and charge up the battery before moving down to the Army Corps of Engineers park at Fort Peck - more about that in our next installment.