Day 48---back on the road again, with a tailwind! Glasgow to Wolf Point

50 miles, 3:49, 13.1 mph

I got up early today, but last night's thunderstorms were still rolling through town, so I didn't get started until 8:45.  I packed like it was going to rain, and put the covers on the panniers, and took off with the wind!  The first 40 miles went really fast, then the wind shifted to the NNE and as I was headed ENE for the last 10 miles, I slowed down to about 11 mph.  At one point my average had been up over 14!  What a relief after so many awful days of headwinds.

Water towers are almost as big here as grain elevators

Not much to see on the prairie, and almost nothing in the towns either.  Happy it went by so fast today.

As I rolled into town, I saw this sign.....a little something for everyone.  I had dinner there, and should have gone to McDonalds.

I did have a fun time at the local museum, which is run by a nice retired couple, she from Orland, CA (she saw my Chico Velo t-shirt and was full of questions) and he from Carson City, NV.  He had worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs here, and retired in 2009.  She doesn't like it here much, for many of the same reasons I don't like it, run down towns, lack of civic pride and engagement, insular culture and miserable winters.  He likes it more, but I sense that they are headed somewhere else soon...

The museum is full of the cool homesteading stories that I've encountered in all the museums here on the Hi-Line and some compelling stories about the local Indians and how they were largely wiped out by smallpox in the early 19th century.

When I visit these museums I'm really struck by how that can-do, communitarian, pioneer spirit, so exemplified in Wolf Willow, Wallace Stegner's account of homesteading just over the border in Saskatchewan, has so completely evaporated from these parts.  Unlike the desert valleys of the intermountain west, which have also been severely depopulated, there's a sense of loss here that you encounter in each and every mile. This seems to have entered the collective unconscious here, and become part of the culture. I have passed hundreds and hundreds of abandoned buildings, just left to weather away, no part of them appearing to be recycled.  I'll be very happy to get out of this part of Montana over the next day or two.