Libby MT to Post Falls ID

After spending nearly a week and a half at Glacier, we left on Wednesday and drove a couple of hours to Libby, Montana.  We decided to take Highway 2 and enjoy the backroads for a while.

The drive was quiet and scenic with not a lot of traffic.

Then we were stopped by construction for about 15 minutes but the scenery was nice and the weather was pleasant so it was kind of a nice break.  However, driving through the construction got the motorhome and the car very dirty.

Part of the construction involved fixing a rock slide area that was still sliding a little bit. 

 

We arrived at Two Bit RV Park within about 30 minutes of going through the construction.  The site we decided on had 30 AMP instead of 50 AMP but we didn't want to have to move the motorhome to another site and we liked the shade on this one.

This park allowed washing of RVs in the park and did not charge a fee so we washed the motorhome and the car that evening.

On Thursday we decided to do a day trip on the Kootenusa Scenic Byway up towards Eureka, Montana, which was near the Canadian border.  The beginning of the trip went by the Kootenai River.

We came to Kootenusa Dam.

There had been a major rock slide when the dam was being constructed and Highway 37 was being moved.  And they still have monitors in the rocks to determine if another slide is about to occur.

 

We continued traveling north towards Eureka and could see Lake Kootenusa to the west at times along the road.

As we approached Eureka,

 

we could see the Rocky Mountains again to the east.

We headed south on Hwy 93 to drive through Eureka...

 

...and then turned around and headed back north towards Canada.  We didn't have our passports so we only drove within a few hundred yards of the border.

 

We had picked up subs at Subway and drove to Rexford Bench National Forest Picnic Area to have our lunch.

 

We could see the campground across the lake.

 

The lake was clear but not quite as blue as Flathead Lake or the lakes in Glacier.

 

We decided to drive down the west side of Lake Kootenusa on the way back to Libby now NF 228 Road.

While the road was not quite as good on the west side, we thought the views were better.

 

We could see this National Forest Campground on the other side of the lake that had some big rigs parked at it.

 

We stopped at a couple of National Forest campgrounds on the way back.  One of them had dispersed camping where we could have gotten the motorhome in but the roads would have been very rough.  We went into McGillivray Campground and found several sites that we could have camped in and the roads were paved.  The campground does not have hookups but the sites were very nice and private and the campground was very shaded.  Maybe we will camp there the next time we are in Libby, Montana.

As we continued heading south, we saw what looked like a swimming pool in the lake. 

We found out later that it was a floating platform for swimming.  There were several people there enjoying the cool water.

We stopped at an overlook where we were able to get a birds-eye view of the dam...

...and the area where the rock slide had occurred many years ago. 

 

We stopped at another Corp of Engineers campground on the river side of the dam that only had about 5 or 6 sites but it was nice also because the sites were right along the river.

We had taken a longer day trip that we had thought we would today so we were fairly tired when we got back home.

On Friday, we drove from Libby, Montana, to Post Falls, Idaho.  The manager of the campground gave us an alternate route to travel than what the GPS was giving us because there was major construction along Hwy 95 causing hour-long delays.

These "back-roads" were also scenic with little traffic except when your entered towns.

When we turned west on Highway 200, we soon entered Idaho.

 

We were taking our time because we knew we would gain an hour going into Idaho because we would be entering the Pacific Time Zone.  We stopped at this pull-off next to Lake Pend Oreille to eat some lunch.

 

We pulled into Coeur d'Alene RV Park in Post Falls, Idaho, around 1:00, where we will be for the next week.

Below is a map of our drive from West Glacier, MT, to Libby, MT, to Post Falls, Idaho.

View West Glacier to Libby to Post Falls in a larger map