Russ found the RV park I was camped in about 4 pm. He’d originally estimated arriving at 1 or 2, but as clouds rolled overhead and the wind picked up, he had to revise that optimistic estimate. He showered and stowed his bike, then we headed out to one of the two bar/restaurants in town for dinner.

The next day, I took him out to Hell Creek, so that he could see the fantastic rock formations. He was suitably impressed, and probably took much better pictures than I did (they really have improved the iPhone cameras since my iPhone 6). Check his blog.

We took our time going out and back, partly because i had to keep stopping to allow for pictures, and partly because Russ complained that the washboard road was ”rattling his brain.” It was nearly one o’clock by the time we got back to town, so I suggested checking out the little dinosaur museum in town. (“Every little town in Montana has a dinosaur museum,” the ranger at Hell Creek told me.)

What we didn’t know was that we would be greeted by, and given a tour by, the woman who found the first nearly complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton—Kathy Wankel. “Let me show you the T. rex I found,” she said, and led us to a display replica of the scapula, arm, and digits of a T. rex—the bones she and her husband Tom unearthed just outside of Jordan in 1988. Her discovery led to the excavation of an 85% complete skeleton, the Wankel T. rex, currently on loan to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.

There were lots of other bones, fossil imprints, and models of dinosaur skeletons—including a life-size Triceratops—but it also housed a museum of the history of Garfield County, Montana, with a replica schoolroom, collections of World War I and II memorabilia, local ranch brand designs (Tom Wankel told us that Montana is the only state that still uses branding to mark herds), and vignettes of everyday life in the early 1900s, all carefully labeled with ”donated by . …” They even had the original two-cell jailhouse and a collection of early farm implements, including a ”sod-buster” plow. Russ and Tom had fun swapping farm stories inspired by some of the items Russ spotted.

But a storm was brewing, and as thunder rumbled across the sky, we took our leave and headed back to cover Russ’s bike and close up the camper before the rain.