Tuesday, September 5th - Crossing the Plains on the "Empire Builder",

In fact, I didn't awaken until seven the next morning and felt much refreshed. After breakfast in the diner we spent most of the morning in the observation car, peering out the large windows at the North Dakota countryside. We passed through Rugby, North Dakota, whose claim to fame is its location as the geographical center of the North American continent, and continued eastward through Minot. The landscape varied surprisingly often, shifting rather rapidly from tilled fields to pastureland to barren hills with wooded valleys, and sitting up high gave us a great vantage point to view it all.

On the western edge of North Dakota we passed by Fort Union, the reconstructed trading post that we had visited on our last trip to the northwest (see Wanderung 6). The square white palisade with blockhouses on the corners was only a half a mile from the railroad tracks, so we had a good look at it and could take decent pictures. The Indian teepees that I remembered from our visit were still out front, and I imagine that the re-enactors we had seen were still making history come alive inside the fort.

Continuing into Montana, the land gradually became drier. I still saw crops being raised in some areas, especially in the Missouri bottomlands, but I suspect that many or even most of the fields were irrigated. Finally, the Rocky Mountains loomed up on the distant skyline, like the fossilized teeth of some ancient leviathan. Our course across the flat part of Montana had been pretty much as straight as an arrow, but as we approached the Rockies the train started to curve around to stay more in the valleys and ford the rivers at more convenient points.

We stopped at East Glacier Station just to the east of Glacier National Park, from which point the mountain skyline that we had seen up close in Wanderung 6 was right in front of us. I had never seen a railroad station like the one at East Glacier; it was a post and beam construction using huge raw logs just cut and trimmed to fit. I reminded me of the railroad lodges we had seen in the park during Wanderung 6. However, East Glacier wasn't even a "smoking" stop, so I just had time to snap a picture of the station and the lodge up the hill before the conductor called "All Aboard!" and I had to run to re-board the train.

The next segment of our trip around the southern tip of Glacier National Park was one of the most scenic parts of our journey. We spent the entire time in the lounge/observation car moving from one side to the other as the scenic vistas opened out to the north or south. We also stopped in West Glacier just to offload passengers, and Monika and I recalled the nice rafting trip we had taken from there down the rapids of the Flathead River. The river looked too low to raft this time, and we surely did not see any rafts floating along.

Dusk fell right after we left West Glacier, and we continued on into the state of Washington as it turned into a dark night with a big moon rising in the sky. After a stop to stretch our legs (a "smoking" stop), we finally turned in for the night. The track was apparently twisting through the mountains, so I was rocked to and fro in my bunk a bit, but it wasn't jerking like the first night and I managed to get a fair night's sleep.