At the town of Challis, the route follows the valley of the Salmon River, heavily wooded and very lush. We stop a couple times to enjoy the river's edge. The ride becomes very scenic as the road climbs over the Bitterroot Range into Montana. Tonight we stay at a motel in Missoula, get cleaned up, and dine out. July 7, 1986.
Today is a sleep-in and then shopping day.
In the afternoon we head another hundred miles north to beautiful Flathead Lake. We were fortunate enough to get a camp site right on the lake. Our first major destination, Glacier National Park, is an hour up the road. But Alaska is far more complex geographically, culturally, ecologically, and politically than most Americans know, and few writers are as capable of capturing this complexity as John McPhee. The Alaska road trip series, North to Alaska, is offered in installments each of which has about a week to ten days of entries from my journal.