Rivers

(I wrote this a couple of weeks ago... just now getting posted. Pictures to be added later.)

This has been the summer of rivers….

The Mississippi from our back yard

Here at Mississippi Riverwood, the Mississippi is high and flowing fast – for the Mississippi, that is. Most of the time it is in no hurry. It has 1230 miles to drop about 1000 feet to the Gulf of Mexico.

Unlike the rivers from where it originates in Yellowstone Park. Those rivers are in a hurry. As we were driving along somewhere near the Idaho/Montana border, I realized we had left the Snake River

The Snake coming out of the Tetons

behind and were following the Madison and I thought, “Wow! This water is headed to the Mississippi.” And I pondered the scale of the watershed that drains into that river, from where I was over to the other side of Ohio or somewhere. I’m not sure where that divide is but maybe as far as the Appalachians. Those mountain streams we were near, formed from recently melted snow are racing, tumbling down hill

The Yellowstone in Yellowstone NP

The Yellowstone following I94

sometimes dropping 1000 feet in ¼ mile. The Madison, Jefferson and Gallatin join up to form the Missouri River which takes it’s time to cross the Great Plains and the prairies to join the Mississippi in St. Louis. The Yellowstone
passes through Columbus, Laurel and Billings and joins up with the Missouri downstream near the Montana/North Dakota border. Highway 94 follows the Yellowstone to the edge of Montana.

Then we moved Down the Missouri to Pierre, South Dakota where we ate Walleye harvested from that river on its way to St. Louis.

The Colorado at Glen Canyon

The Rio Grand in the RGV

But we started the year in the Rio Grande Valley, just a few miles from where it finds its way into the Gulf. That place doesn’t look like a valley. There are no great hills or bluffs going down to the river. The land is flat there. We found the Rio Grande again in Albuquerque where it looks more like a normal river. Somewhere through Arizona or Southern Utah, we came into the Colorado River watershed. The Colorado and its tributaries have carved out amazing and beautiful canyons and waterfalls in its hurry to get to Mexico and the Gulf of California. It needs to move a lot of water to take care of so many thirsty people and their bountiful crops as it travels along the California-Arizona border. We saw that last year. This year we spent time near the Green River before it joins the Colorado in Canyonlands National Park in Utah and the Virgin River in Zion National Park. In those places they warn of flash floods where a river can rise 20 feet suddenly and if you’re in a canyon, you have nowhere to go so the river will do whatever it wants with you and you’ll probably never get to tell about the experience.

Salt Lake City has the Jordan River which goes to the Great Salt Lake which goes nowhere. Kind of a landlocked watershed, I guess.

As we traveled over the Wasatch Mountains into Idaho, we came into the Snake River Plain. The Snake and its aquifer feed Idaho. If you’ve eaten potatoes from Idaho, you probably got a little bit of the Snake River. It comes out of the Tetons and snakes its way through central Idaho where it provides abundant water to make Idaho a bread basket or potato basket, field upon field of potatoes, wheat and some hay for the many cattle. In June green as far as the eye can see. We were in Pocatello on June 5 which is the 40^th anniversary of the Teton Dam failure. That was the news headline. On that day in 1976, the Teton Dam collapsed and the reservoir emptied into the Snake River at a rate of 2 million gallons per second. Only 11 people died but the town of Rexburg now has a flood museum which was closed on the Saturday afternoon we were there. All of the towns along the river that we visited (Pocatello, Idaho Falls and Rexburg) have their flood story to tell. The Snake joins the Columbia River in Oregon when it leaves Idaho and heads over to the Pacific Ocean. We traveled along that River on our way out of Oregon last summer.

Where we’re parked on the Mississippi now, we are about 180 miles from Lake Itasca where the river starts and already here, north of Minneapolis, it is a big river.

I last posted on this blog from Fort Pierre, South Dakota. Here’s where we’ve been since then.

July 9 – Finstead’s Oak Haven Campground, New Ulm, Minnesota

July 10-13 – Dakotah Meadows RV Park by Mystic Lake Casino in Prior Lake, Minnesota

July 14 – Reunion with college friends Jerry and Colleen Bahma, Jim and Lisa Fallencheck and Larry and Marge Teig at the Bahmas in Spicer, Minnesota

July 15 – present at Mississippi Riverwoods RV Park in Otsego, Minnesota. We plan to stay here until September 1 and begin moving north before heading south again. We will take the rig up to the MBOTMA festival in a couple of weeks and then return here. 

It’s nice to be staying in one place for a while. Here we are a 45 minute drive from Greg’s place if the traffic is cooperating. Since we are on the route “up north” on Friday and Sunday afternoons it can take longer. But on a week day, Greg can make the trip pretty easily or we can go in to the city. We have a screen house on a patio in which we have set up our table and chairs. The table adjusts to a low height making it ideal for art projects (Edie is into water colors) or now writing on the computer. It’s a little bright but I’m making it work. I get to watch the river and enjoy the breeze in the shade.

I feel some pressure to try to get to see her as often as possible since it seems our time in Minnesota is so short. I’ve agreed to head out right after the Jug Band Boogie the week after Labor Day again this year. We’ll be going east through Wisconsin to the Upper Peninsula and then down through Michigan to Illinois. We have our obligatory trip through Illinois and Missouri to visit friends every fall before we head to Texas.