A Tale of Two Chemists: Sleeping Buffalo Hot Springs and Bowdoin National Wildlife Refuge

Sleeping Buffalo Hot Springs and Bowdoin National Wildlife Refuge

Friday June 2 and Saturday June 3, 2023

Shortly after our dinner was ready, it started to rain. We decided to eat in the car—staying dry and avoiding spilling chili all over the tent. After a while, the thunder started rumbling. Then we started to see the flashes. Some time around nine pm, we retired into the tent. I read my book for a while but found that counting the seconds between the flash and the rumble was interfering with my concentration. I lay on the cot counting... The storms carried on for several more hours. During a lull in rain at 11:30 pm, I jumped out of the tent to answer a call of nature. No sooner had I settled back onto my cot, the patter of rain on the tent resumed. Thankfully, the inside of the tent remained dry and no pond developed around our tent.

In the morning, we set out for Bowdoin National Wildlife Refuge. Most of the journey was on paved road but one section of road was dirt. Presumably because of the heavy rain overnight, the mud was deep and the car was sliding around. Mike did a masterful job of driving. The refuge encompasses Lake Bowdoin. Before the last ice age, the lake was a horseshoe bend of the Missouri River. The ice sheets force the river from its old channel to the present course 50 miles south. To a large extent the water level in the lake is supplemented from the Milk River to provide a suitable habitat for migrating ducks and other birds. A 15-mile one way gravel road circles the lake and some of the surrounding wetlands. According to refuge literature, the drive takes 1.5 hours. In our case, the elapsed time was more like 6 hours. There were so many gulls, ducks, pelicans and other water birds as well as many grassland species. Some National Wildlife Refuges can be a bit disappointing, but this was fabulous. We didn’t see much in the way of other visitors except for a guy towing an ATV. First, he went past us as we pulled off the road. Then to our shock, he came back, (what part of “one way” do you not understand?) meeting us in a place where there was no pull out. He drove his truck off the road and we got by! (I should say that for most of the loop the “road” was on a gravel dyke above some pretty wet looking prairie).

By late afternoon the sun was out. We returned to our campsite and took advantage of the “hot springs pool”. Even I spent a lot more time in the warm water (too hot for real swimming) than in the icy plunge pool. Thankfully the weather overnight was benign.

Gloria

Route 2, the main east-west highway in this part of Montana, photographed in the early morning as the previous evenings storms moved away.

Wilson's snipe

Western meadowlark

Wilson's phalarope. Having seen several of these birds in the last few days we are absolutely convinced that what we were seeing in the Great Salt Lake were Red Necked Phalaropes.