Camping Down the Boulder

Cassandra decided to sell 'Storma', her Class C motorhome, since she wasn't using it enough to warrant the upkeep of another engine. She bought a 12 foot trailer that she can tow with her pickup, so we decided to go down the Boulder and camp for a couple of days so she could try out the tiny trailer. The beautiful Boulder Valley south of Big Timber is where 'The Horse Whisperer' and 'A River Runs Through It' were filmed.

We left Wednesday afternoon and drove about 50 miles south of BigT - the last 20 or 30 of those miles being on a rough, dusty road. There are several small Forest Service campgrounds in the area, so we chose an unmarked road and drove about 1/2 mile to a nice area along the Boulder River. We quickly settled in for a couple days of total relaxation. Cassandra has been super busy with her many projects and businesses and she needed to decompress.

****** Handsome Ham ******

Ham the dog and Binky the adolescent kitten were with us and Binky had great fun learning to hunt. He caught 2 or 3 mice while we were there - his first successful hunt I think. There were a couple of guys from Wisconsin camped nearby and they said they had caught about a dozen trout over a foot in length in the past few days.

Cassandra left a couple of hours before me on Friday. As I was leaving later in the day, a car passed me and signaled me to pull over. Surprise! It was Mitzi, a woman I had met at the RVW convention. She had planned to go through Yellowstone on her way to Washington and I told her to look us up if she came through BigT. Well, she had stopped by Cassandra's North 40 Coffeehouse and Vicki told her we were camped down the Boulder so she came looking for us. She had already checked out most of the campgrounds when she saw me zip by in a cloud of dust.

She and Cassandra struck up a friendship too, and Mitzi ended up camping on the property and hanging with us for a few days. Later Cassandra said to me, "Nony, you bring the most interesting people over - keep it up!" I had previously introduced my California buddies Anne, Holly, and Rosemary to our Montana circle of friends. (H & R have since moved to the Big Sky state.)