DAY 13: Is The Dam Breaking????????

Saturday, June 13 - Hungry Horse, Montana

My morning started at about 1:30 am today......you may recall, yesterday was not one of our better days......all I wanted to do was go to sleep so today could come quicker.  Well, it did!  At about 1:30 am, I awake to, what I know as, a tornado siren.  A very very very very loud tornado siren bouncing off the sides of the mountain.  I sit straight up in bed trying to remember where I am and why I'm hearing a tornado siren in Montana.  They don't have tornado's here, do they?  As I sat there trying to make sense of what I was hearing, many thoughts were racing through my mind.  Here's just a few:  

1)  Tornado - We are camping inbetween two large mountains.  There is no way a tornado could occur here even if it wanted to.  Ruled out Tornado.

2)  Fire - I looked out all windows, smelled outside, looked for light in the sky; nothing.  Ruled out Fire.

3)  Bomb - I really didn't know what signs to look for in the event we were being bombed.  We don't have satellite reception, no cable and very limited PBS Tv to check on this so, I ruled out Bombing from a foreign country due to lack of information.

4)  Dam Break - Ahhhhhh....this was much more believable.  I saw a billboard on the way in last night that said Hungry Horse had the largest and bestest dam on this side of Montana...and I knew it was just up the road a couple miles.     I didn't rule out Dam Break.....

So, I did what any good computer geek would do and pulled out my trustee internet card.  Checked out everything I could on the Hungry Horse Dam and learned it would take out many cities if it were to break.  Yikes.  And we were only a couple miles from the dam......By this time, I could hear helicopter(s) and what sounded like a heavy duty tractor close by.  It's now been 30 minutes that the very very very very loud alarm bouncing off the sides of the mountain has been going off and I'm freaking out.  Chuck is sleeping peacefully......The neighbors appear to be sleeping peacefully.  I refuse to go outside as the neighbors told me there had been two bears in the park the night before.  These are the same neighbors who pulled out their lawn chairs from their tiny little trailer and parked themselves within 15' of us as we pulled in last night and watched as Chuck and I talked to each other between gritted teeth.  They got themselves a beer or two and sat back and smiled as Chuck and I argued over whether to put the jacks down or not and whether to pull the slides out prior to lowering the jacks, etc.  There's a lot of steps, folks, to this camping thing.   You don't just park the rig and plug in.  The first thing the neighbors said to us was, "You call that camping?"    Anyway, I digress; back to the Dam Break Alarm.  It finally quit around 2:15 am and I figured if we were going to be swept away we would have already been swept away.  I sordof ruled out Dam Break.....

The next morning, I was at the office waiting for them to open to find out what the heck that was.  Turns out, its a small town and they have a volunteer police, fire and ambulance department.  Everything in town is volunteer. So when they have an emergency such as a car wreck, heart attack, broken finger nail, they sound the alarms.  Oh ya, no dam break; someone probably just fell out of bed.  Errrrrrrr.......

So I must say, early morning alarm aside, today was a much better day than yesterday.  Got the Trike washed (I've never seen it so dirty); tried to cross over Glacier National Park, but lo and behold, the road was closed due to 70' of snow.  Yes, you heard me right.  70 FEET of SNOW at the top.  It's JUNE!!!  How can this be???  We came here to travel the well known road called "The Road to the Sun", but all we got was "The Road That Was Closed".  Errrrrrrr..... But that's okay; we decided to check out the dam that didn't break.  Way cool!!!

Tomorrow Chuck wants to go to Wal-Mart.........