Road Trip 7. 1000 miles from home: Off the grid in eastern Montana

We’ve been “off the grid” for six days.  We are in the Custer National Forest (there a lot of places named after someone who was such an arrogant bonehead that he “won” battles against defenseless Indian villages, and then lost the big one against one ready to fight back).  The Custer National Forest is located miles away from any population centers, so there don’t appear to be many people who come here——hooray!

We spent the last six days along the Yager Butte road.  For two of the days it rained.  But at least we had something beautiful to look at.

We took three hikes.  The land is a combination of prairie grass and pine trees.  Different from what we have seen before, and very nice.  We have 5-6 cars on our road per day.  That’s a total of about one minute/day, which means we have found the isolation and solitude we enjoy so much.

For one hike we went to the Yager Butte Lookout tower, now no longer in operation.  Still standing though.  And there was evidence of living quarters nearby.  Most of these towers are no longer used because it is cheaper to use airplanes to scour the landscape to detect fires. 

We left this morning to go to a small nearby town to see about getting some groceries, water, and a place to dump our trash.  We also have a signal so we can find out what’s been happening in the world.  Probably haven’t missed much.  For the past several months all that there has been in the news is that Trump has picked a meaningless fight with someone.  We’ll see who the latest fight has been with..........OK, just got my answer.  He called Kim "Rocket Man" and threatened to kill everyone in North Korea (in case you are wondering why won't mind being off the grid)

Then, it’s back into the Custer, somewhere, for another 5-6 days. 

Here is our campsite:



Some photos of our hikes and the lookout tower:


 

 



Pilings where probably there were living quarters:




See the tower in the distance?



Elk:



We ran across some private property on one of our hikes.  I guess we could go into it and, if caught, claim that we couldn’t read the sign because we weren’t walking on our hands: