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Fort Peck Dam

I didn’t know a lot about Fort Peck, MT before I visited, but it’s a really interesting place. The town started as a trading post along the Missouri River. In 1934, The Army Corps of Engineers rolled in and built a new town about 2 miles from the original town to house all the workers for the big dam project. A number of shanty towns grew up around the area too to house the ~10,000 workers. Some of those buildings are still around, including the hotel where we had brunch on Sunday.

The dam is a monstrosity and it’s incredible to think about workers in the 30s, 40s and 50s building something that enormous. The dam itself is made up of rock and earth. It’s a shade under 4 miles long and 250 feet tall. The coast line of the reservoir is longer than the coast line of California. The reservoir is the 5th largest man made lake (by volume) in the United States.

To get enough dirt for the project, they dredged a bunch of dirt and pumped it to the dam. We went swimming in one of those dredge cut lakes while we were there. They had to modify their design in flight because part of the dam slid while they were building it.

PBS has a great video about the building of the dam. Unfortunately we can’t watch it online here, but it’s a regional thing so maybe it will work for you. Even if it doesn’t work, you should be able to watch a ~3 minute preview.

In the picture below, you can see the road that runs along the top of the dam. To the right there is a park by smaller lake below the dam and that’s where we had the family reunion. Up on the hill on the right side of the picture is the town of Fort Peck. I hope that we’ll get to go back and visit again some day!

Fort Peck Vacation

Fort Peck, Montana. It’s not the first thing that comes to mind when you think about a summer vacation, but nonetheless, that’s where we were last weekend. Tyla’s family on her Dad’s side had planned a big family reunion. It was probably the biggest family gathering since her grandpa died in 1999.

Getting to Fort Peck is not small feat of traveling. Your options are:

Fly to Great Falls, MT and then drive ~5 hours to Fort Peck or fly into Glasgow, MT and drive 30 minutes to Fort Peck. Both are not cheap options and then you have to rent a car.
The Empire Builder line from Amtrak happens to go from our area to Glasgow. That takes 16-24 hours but it’s not cheap either and oh yeah, you have to rent a car when you get there.
Drive 915 miles.

After much debate, we decided to drive.

Don (Tyla’s Dad) made the trip a few times when his kids were younger. He would leave super early in the morning, drive until the car got wild, and then stop at a hotel with the pool to let the kids burn off energy. Then day 2 would just be whatever was left of the ~15 hour drive.

We planned to follow his advice so at 4:15 am on Thursday, the car was totally packed and I had just put my sleepy 4 year old son in the back seat. I hit the button to start the car and… nothing. Huh?! Thinking it was a dead battery, I put the car in neutral and pushed it out to the driveway so it would be easy to jump start it with the truck. After some finagling, I realized it wasn’t just a dead battery. It was some crazy electrical gremlin. Stuff was flickering on and off, the car wasn’t always recognizing our keyless key fob thingy, and if I did succeed in getting the car ignition turned on (just the fan, AC, lights, etc), I couldn’t get it turned off. At 4:15 in the morning, it was totally confusing.

After about 5 or 10 minutes I decided to give up and take the truck. But wait, the car is sitting in the driveway with the windows rolled down. I can’t leave it there. But at this point, I couldn’t even get it turned on enough to put it back into neutral! I searched around on the internet trying to find the override switch to put it into neutral, but failed. After much prayer and random guesses, I finally got it back into neutral. But… I wasn’t strong enough to push it up the hill into the garage! With Tyla’s help we were just barely able to get it back into the garage.

We transferred everything over to the truck (pulling stuff out through the back seat because we couldn’t get the electronic rear hatch open) and left the house 1.5 hours later than planned. What a start to a very long trip! I tried to stay calm though and just realize that there was some reason that God didn’t want us to take that car or wanted us to leave later or something. I didn’t know why He wanted it this way, but I knew that somehow it was for the best.

Elijah was obviously fully awake at this point, but he ended up getting some sleep around lunchtime. He was an incredible traveler! It exceeded our wildest expectations. Our only stops were for gas and super quick bathroom breaks. We made it out there and back in pretty much the same amount of travel time as Don, Logan and Megan who were in the other vehicle. I never would have guessed that going into this.

The truck ended up being nice to have on the trip. We had a lot more room inside and it was very easy to pack stuff in the back. I also appreciated the extra horsepower. Interstate speed limits in Montana top out at 80 and the two lane highways are 70. It was awesome being able to punch the accelerator at 70mph and easily jump up to 90 or so to pass someone on those two lane roads. I’m not sure the 1.4L EcoBoost Escape would have handled that as well. We got 19.3 mpg on the trip out and 18.7 on the way back. I’m assuming that we had a tail wind on the way out and a head wind on the way back. It’s a little lower than the published highway ratings due largely to the high speed limits and speed up/slow down style of 2 lane roads. We averaged over 65 mph including stops! I normally plan for a 50mph average when I’m traveling long distances with other people.

We made it to Great Falls, MT on the first night and stayed in a hotel with a nice pool and waterslide. It took about 10 hours to get to that point and then we only had 5 hours of driving left the next day.

Don’s twin brother (Dean) and his wife were very kind to let us stay in their beautiful home overlooking the Fort Peck Dam. We thoroughly enjoyed our time with them. Elijah’s favorite part was Dean’s ATV. There were a few miles of dirt roads behind his house and we took the ATV out every day for a ride. Tyla took some rides with me too.

The family reunion was on Saturday and we had over 80 people at the park. The total population of Fort Peck is 233 (as of 2010) so we made a noticeable bump on the population chart that day! Nearly all of the relatives were there. I was lost in a sea of names but found some great people to chart with. Tyla was positively giddy with all the people she got to reconnect with. And Elijah was in heaven with all the kids that were running around. He especially latched onto Dean’s granddaughters who were 8 and 10.

Aside from the family stuff, we also got to do a little exploring. On Saturday, Don took us out to show us the two farms that his family had owned and worked. We spent over an hour driving around dirt roads to check them out. Don’t tell Don you grew up in the middle of nowhere because he’ll just laugh at you. You’ve got nothing on him!

On Sunday he and Dean showed us the spillway for the dam and led us on a 4WD adventure up to the top of “TV Tower Hill”. It’s the highest hill in the area so it has a great view (and lots of communications antennas.)

The drive back started at sunrise on Monday morning. We made it back to Post Falls, ID the first night and then drove the 5 hours home on Tuesday. Our stop there was at the Red Lion hotel. They win the award for best free hotel breakfast ever! The buffet was delicious and we had an incredible view overlooking the Spokane River. At both hotel stops on the way out and the way back, we were able to have dinner with Logan, Megan and Don who stopped in the same town.

So we drove 1830 miles (plus the miles driving around while we were there) in 6 days with 2 days of visiting in the middle. It was a LOT but man that drive is so beautiful. I like the Seattle area but I would LOVE to live further away from the hustle and bustle. Those endless miles with no other cars around were very addicting.

A huge thank you goes out to Dean and Aileen for opening up their house to us and another one goes to Tyla for all the prep work she did to entertain Elijah on the trip. He was definitely done by the last day of travel, but all in all, he gets an A+. Our success now has me thinking about a family road trip to visit some of the national parks down in Utah…

P.S. This post is already crazy long so I’ll save the pictures for another day. It will take me a while to sort through them and edit them.

Route Planning

Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!

Tyla has a lot of extended family members in Montana, and a few years ago, we drove to Fort Peck for a fun weekend. When the topic of a Tesla comes up with her family, the question is often asked, “Could you drive it to Fort Peck?” The short answer is, “Yes, but I probably wouldn’t.” The fastest route breaks off of I-90 at Missoula, heads up to 2, and crosses to Fort Peck. The Tesla route planner keeps you on I-90 to I-94 and then heads up to Fort Peck after a final charge in Miles City. It’s 1133 miles instead of 985 miles and it adds charging time too. If you use a third-party route site like ABetterRoutePlanner.com, you can get a little more creative. While not as fast or convenient as a supercharger station, RV campgrounds provide 50-amp service which isn’t too shabby, especially if you’re planning to stop there for a longer meal or overnight anyway. And in a pinch, lots of hotels and shopping centers (even in Montana) have much slower charging, but I wouldn’t rely on that for a trip.

If you look at any of the charging network maps, Montana and the Dakotas are barren except for the interstates. It’s easy to drive across the states but going deep off the interstate gets tricky. This is one of the reasons why we still have a traditional internal combustion engine vehicle. I have no plans to get rid of the truck and it’s always there as an option if it makes more sense for road trips. If you have multiple cars, you don’t need your electric vehicle to be capable of every drive you might ever take.

Ignoring extreme examples like Fort Peck, most of our drives straightforward with the Tesla. The car navigation system predicts battery usage and automatically routes to chargers as needed. One of the longest trips we have planned this year is to the small town of Alsea, OR. Google Maps says it is 292 miles and 4 hours and 42 minutes. If we took the Tesla, we’d have a single 8 minute charging stop along the way.

However, that leaves us with a 10% charge when we arrive at our destination. While I assume there’s a 110v outlet that we could slow charge from, I’m more likely to plan the route to include arriving with enough battery so I don’t have to worry about charging at the destination. Adding that means that total charging time increases (round trip) to 41 minutes spread across three charging stops. I guarantee that the people in the car with me would need more bathroom stops than that anyway.

When we were debating the purchase, I spent a lot of time plugging in our common drives to the Tesla route planner. Most of them don’t require any stops at all, but for the ones that do, it’s rarely more than 20 or 30 minutes of total charging time. It will take a little more planning, especially if someone needs a bathroom break and I try to find an EV charger on the fly to take advantage of the stop, but we’ll definitely be trying it and if it proves to be too annoying, we always have the truck which is a great road trip vehicle.

2017 Year In Review

Since you’re reading this on my website, let’s start with the biggest change I’ve made on this site: I quit blogging every day. Around Memorial Day this year, I stopped forcing myself to get a post up every weekday. That ended a streak of nearly 4000 weekdays in a row with a blog post. It has felt a lot more freeing to only write when I have an idea for content instead of scrambling the night before to try and fill an empty spot in the calendar. And while this is a terrible model for driving traffic to a site, my main goal has always been a kind of “life journal” that might store some interesting nuggets in the decades. To that end, I tried to write some longer articles about memories from my childhood. Those felt like some of my better posts from the year: Childhood Christmas Gifts, Baseball Stories, Parental Albums and Sleepwalking Stories.

The biggest change for all of us this year was the loss of Tyla’s mom to breast cancer. Nancy had been battling the cancer for years but it was pretty clear early in the year that we were crossing the point of no return and in the end, it went downhill very quickly. Those weeks and months were full of a wide range of emotions complicated still further by having a four year old in the mix. I found it really difficult to be supportive both to Tyla and Elijah at the same time. For example, many times I felt like the way I could help the most was to get Elijah out of the room/house and give him a normal day, but that meant I wasn’t there to help Tyla. But we all made it through, and because all of us believe that Jesus died for our sins, I know we’ll be reunited in heaven.

I said things declined rapidly. Just the weekend before she died, we were all camping at Cape Disappointment. It’s a beautiful park right along the ocean. I thought it was healthy for Tyla’s family to spend that time together, have time for long talks, and have one last outing with Nancy. Elijah had a lot of fun riding his bike around the campground and sleeping in the tent. Whenever we ask him what he wants to do for vacation next summer, he asks to do that trip again.

Our other summer vacations included Memorial Day weekend at Discovery Bay, a week in Indiana, and our long road trip to Fort Peck, MT. Spending 4 out of 6 days on the road with a four year old turned out about as perfectly as it could (aside from the crazy car trouble at 4am as we were trying to leave.) He did fantastic and now it has us thinking about some other road trips that we might take.Between the funeral and the Brandt family reunion, we got to spend a lot of time with Tyla’s extended family. I finally feel like I know most of the kind people who send us Christmas cards every year! It was nice for them all to meet Elijah too.

At the 2016 Christmas party, Logan mentioned that it was his “man mission” to climb to Camp Muir. The guy he was talking to said, “I’ll go with you!” In the blink of an eye, we had a crew of people ready to hike up there with him. I had been there back in 2010, but it was such a great hike that I knew I wanted to do it again. Half the fun of hiking Camp Muir is all the training hikes you need to do ahead of time! We hit a lot of great trails including: Little Mt. Si, Lime Kiln Trail, Mt. Pilchuck, Lake Melakwa, Mason Lake and Little Bandera Mountain. I had Elijah in my backpack for a lot of those hikes. Next year he’ll be too big and it will be time for him to hoof it himself.

Hiking Camp Muir with a group that big and vary different schedules means that you randomly pick a date on the calendar and pray for good weather. Thankfully, the weather was PERFECT. The smoke from the wildfires cleared out and we had blue skies and perfect temperatures. I beat my previous time by 40 minute (16%) so I was very happy about that. I didn’t feel nearly as tired the next day either so I’d say our hikes leading up to this one were chosen well. The only downside to the day was that Tim was planning to come with us but he got injured shortly before the hike. So that just means we’ll be doing it again. Tim, let us know when you’re ready and we’ll put it on the calendar!

I continued on with the woodworking hobby, and in the beginning of the year, I made my biggest tool investment yet: a beefy new Grizzly table saw. That continues to be solid purchase in my book and it gets a lot of use. Projects this year included a set of wooden blocks, a plant bench, a Washington bottle cap map, an anniversary photo printed on wood for my parents, piano book shelves, a couple Mother’s Day signs, the Instagram photo frame (my favorite project of the year!), magnetic coasters, laser cut decorations for Elijah’s birthday, a cutting board, a jewelry holder tree, two wood signs carved with a router, a storage closet makeover, a wood semi with two trailers, a marquetry butterfly, and a drum. I feel productive when I read that! Even with all those things checked off the list, my project idea list has grown so I better keep going.

See you in 2018!

Previous Year In Review Posts: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016

2017 Christmas Ornament

We pick up one or two ornaments every year as a family and this year, we decided to get one from our Montana trip. Not surprisingly, we didn’t find a lot of Montana ornaments as we drove across the state so I decided to make one myself. This ornament is cherry plywood cut on a laser cutter. It’s a map of Washington, Idaho and Montana with our route highlighted and “Fort Peck 2017” written across the bottom.

You can see our past ornaments in these posts: 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2008-2010

Indiana Trip

Our summer vacations were dedicated to family this year. At the end of July, we went to a family reunion in Fort Peck, MT and then a couple weeks ago we flew out to Indiana. We had originally planned to go earlier in the year, but we ended up moving the trip as it was the same week that Tyla’s mom passed away. Thankfully Southwest has an incredible flight change policy!

We were in Indiana for 8 nights, and, as usual, we had a great time. It was so relaxing to just hang out with very few responsibilities. Luke, Rachel and David came for the weekend so that added some extra fun. Grandpa and Lynnette came down for the day too so Grandpa and I could celebrate our birthday together. We didn’t do anything huge but we had a bunch of good day trips including a botanical center, lots of tractor rides, putt putt golf, go karts, the Studebaker Museum and a water ski show.

Thanks again to Dad and Mom for hosting us and spending so much time playing with Elijah!

Montana Trip Photos

We took over 1000 pictures on our trip out to Fort Peck, Montana, but here are a dozen of my favorites. The building in the field is the school where Don’s mom taught, the farm pictures are from the two farms that Don grew up on, and the military pictures are from a memorial for all the people from northwest Montana who served in the military.