![]() We crossed Montana and overnighted in Williston, North Dakota, the heart of the Bakken oil patch. Something about this vast landscape makes people value human contact more than city folks do. But it's all what i call “howdy country” – your infrequent fellow travelers wave at you as they pass. This is a two-lane highway, and you occasionally encounter the locals going about their everyday business, with giant combines bouncing along the shoulder at a leisurely pace. There's so much wheat out here they pile it up on the ground when the silos are full. Luckily, out here on the open grasslands you can see them coming literally a mile away, so you can slow down and wait for them to flirt with danger. Wildlife out in this section of highway consisted of antelope, which stare at you from afar as you drive by, and deer, which, like all deer everywhere, try to run across the road in front of you. After a night in Cut bank, Montana, a small town which frequently wins the contest for lowest temperature in the continental US, we headed east through the dryland wheat and cattle operations that form the basis for the economy up here. Large snow-covered mountains flanked the road, which abruptly flattens out onto the northern plains east of Glacier Park. This railway is called “The High Line” in local parlance, and we saw many Hi-Line cafes and other businesses as we traveled east. Highway 2 goes over the continental divide at Marias Pass, topping out at 5200 feet, the tough part of the Northern Pacific railway route surveyed and built in the 1890s that opened up this part of the country to development. It was only ten miles, but seemed a lot longer than that. We noodled around town for a couple of days, exploring the park area, including a memorable trip along the north fork of the Flathead River on a washboard road. ![]() We started out going north of Highway 2 through Washington, hitting the North Cascades and Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia, and then south of Highway 2 through Idaho to see Coeur D'Alene and Flathead Lake, but we rejoined it in Columbia Falls, Montana, the western portal to Glacier National Park. Grand Coulee Dam, out in the middle of nowhere in eastern Washington. Highway 2 has two sections, the main one from Everett, WA to the Blue Water Bridge connecting Michigan's upper peninsula to the rest of the state, and another section east of the Great Lakes from upstate New York to Maine. ![]() We were already familiar with its counterpart along the Gulf coast, Highway 98, but had not explored this northern tier yet in our travels. The federal highways are numbered low to high, top to bottom, and even numbered ones go east-west, so Highway 2 is as far north as you can go. ![]() Interstates 90 and 94 were already waaaay too familiar and boring to us, so we decided to try old Federal Highway 2. Home » Blog » RV Lifestyle » Highway 2 across the Top of the USAĪfter our trip to Vancouver Island, we decided to head east and go down the east coast this fall – the question was what route we wanted to take to get from west coast to New England. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |