Day 15 - Bozeman - Bear Canyon Trail

Bozeman, 41 miles total and 23.4 mpg. Totals for the trip, 2777 miles, 23.4* mpg. Those are the stats.

Today turned into a maintenance kinda day. We didn’t exactly plan it that way, but that’s what happened.

I slept in until 9am, partially because I was up from 3-5 for whatever. I wrote the end of yesterdays blog, did some email and finally got back to sleep.

Breakfast was the first order of business, and we chose the Main Street Overeasy. The food and service was excellent. Go there! Someone there knows how to run a restaurant. I couldn’t bring myself to try their bread pudding – because I was already stuffed – but I hope to get back.

The first thing I did was accidentally reset the trip miles and mileage totals. So now I can’t just read them off the dashboard, I have to add 2736 to whatever it says. And the total mileage won’t be exact anymore. But hey, it’s close enough, eh?
After breakfast we headed over to CostCo to see about glasses repair. Which was fine, but somehow we didn’t have the broken glasses with us, so a quick (1 mile) trip back to the room was in order. On the way out of CostCo I just couldn’t resist a 1 TB external hard drive, so we got that along with the Yellow Tail Shiraz. The boys and I stayed in the room while S-H went back for glasses repair and some shopping. When she got back I was frustrated at the external drive, because it had a Trojan on it, and contacting customer service was becoming a problem. It’s always something.

In her travels she discovered, at PetSmart, that the boys could get washed today – and they really need a wash job – a week in the pet-a-tentiary and they smelled like kennel dogs. Bluck. Appointments were available today, so we decided to do it. What we didn’t know was how long it would take – over 2 hours. So that is pretty much shooting a hole in doing any hiking today.

However, it has given me a chance to upload pictures and reformat my new external hard drive. And that’s what I have been doing.

I called Doug Alexander and left messages at home and on his cell. We hope to get together for dinner or something – haven’t heard back yet. That pretty much catches things up to now. More later.


S-H and boys are back – boys smell much better! We are going on a short hike – it is already 5pm. So we picked Bear Canyon, a easy short hike not far from Bozeman. Off we go. The drive to the trailhead is quick and easy. The hike is essentially up one side of a drainage that has a small creek running – it’s a nice hike, with pretty flowers and scenery – trees, glens, etc. The most exciting thing is on the way down, when S-H and Jake are way in front of Woody and me – she saw an animal that initially she thought might be a fox. It approached, but she scared it off.

Then she waited for me. We traded dogs, then I went first with Jake. Soon we spotted the animal again. It is way to big to be a fox, bigger than Jake by a lot. I managed to get a picture, telephoto at over 60 yards, and I’m not sure what it is. It has a collar, so it could be a husky of some sort, but it could also be a collared gray wolf. I saw it a couple more times, but couldn’t get another picture. I vote for wolf.


We swatted mosquitoes down the trail, and drove back to the room. Still no message from Doug Alexander. We clean up and go to Santa Fe Red for a Mexican meal. We sat outside and had a great meal. Just a few mosquitoes. And it cooled down nicely while we were there.

That’s about it for Sunday – tomorrow we plan a fairly long hike – weather looks like it will be perfect.