2011 Wyoming/Montana Trip – Day 4

Tuesday

We put some serious miles in during one day, 479 miles to be exact traveling from Jackson WY to East Glacier in one shot:

As you can see from the map, we did some running around Bozeman MT to try to find a caliper bracket in hopes of fixing my brake woes. Unfortunately, after calling and stopping by every parts store in town, I was out of luck. So off to Home Depot we went to gather supplies to MacGyver something together. In the end, I came up with a solution that seems to be holding up just fine. I’ll document that later on.

Unfortunately, when I jacked up the front to fix the brakes, I noticed that my lower ball joint was sloppy on that side as well. So back to the parts stores we went to try to find ball joints and a ball joint press. Unfortunately, I struck out on the ball joint press. While I could just hammer the things out, I’d rather not do that, as with my luck I’d wind up bending the knuckle. So for now, the spare parts are just riding along.

We’d lost a lot of time running around Bozeman, so we had to abandon some more wheeling yet again (Monday/Tuesday were going to be our major wheeling days). We scrambled to make the best of it by running by some ghost towns.

On the way:

Our First Ghost town was Granite, the road up there wasn’t rough to traverse, mostly just a rock shelf road up to where the towns stood:

Then we got to the ruins of the tramway:

And into the town (not a whole lot left standing):

And back down we went:

Our next Ghost town was Garnet, this town lived into the 1940’s before being abandoned which is part of the reason there were so many buildings still standing. The road up isn’t difficult, but it was very narrow and steep in some parts. It got a little interesting when you met a car head on: