Duck Lake, MT to Lizard Creek Campground, WY
463 mi
Welp, I’ve finally run out of pre-made drafts. Hi everyone, Joseph here. It is January 29th March 8th, 2026. Spokes seems so far away now, so my retellings from this day onwards might not be as detailed, but I’ll try my best. I might do an update post after I’ve gone through all of the road trip blogs, but until then, let me reminisce on what happened 5 6 months ago.
I woke up this morning in Duck Lake campground, tucked inside the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. What a tranquil place to be. The air is crisp and the only sounds I hear are those of nature. We couldn’t really see the lake the night before, so the first thing me and Ramona did was walk out onto its shore. The views were spectacular. We could see the mountains of Glacier National Park nearby, perfectly reflected by this clear lake’s surface. It really is a marvel of engineering that a road could cross those mountains. As much as I wanted to enjoy the views, however, time waits for no one. We had a long drive today, as per usual. We had to make it to Lizard Creek Campground, inside of Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. To get there, we had to cross Montana and go through Yellowstone National Park. We wanted to see Yellowstone before dark, which meant that we had to get on the road early.
We were starting to get into a routine with this camping business. We would usually try to eat something quick for breakfast like yogurt, then quickly pack up our tent and get on the road, trying to make it to the nearest town quickly. I wanted my morning drink, at a cafe, and we also just needed a place with running water. Duck Lake Campground was primitive, meaning that there was no running water. We had gotten used to this style of camping already in Utah, but it definitely calls for some good planning. This time, we stopped in Browning, the headquarters of the Blackfeet Reservation. As with many other reservations, there were a lot of casinos in this small town. In fact, the cafe that we ended up going to was even located inside of a casino! We continued on, following US Route 89’s path straight up and over many hills. Upon crossing Glacier National Park, we were well and truly back into the Great Plains, but it looked a lot wetter than Western Kansas. Eventually, we saw signs for The Montana Dinosaur Center, and given there wasn’t much else to see in this part of Montana (and the fact we needed a bathroom), we decided to check it out. We contemplated buying a ticket to see the exhibit for a while, then decided that dinosaurs were cool and went inside. We spent a surprisingly long amount of time inside, marveling at all of the molds of various dinosaurs, a real T-Rex bone that you could touch, and even an active archeological excavation. We definitely enjoyed this museum in the middle of nowhere, and the guy working at the front desk was super passionate about his work too. Highly recommend a quick stop if you are ever in this part of Montana.
We continued onwards for a few more hours, eventually stopping in Helena, the capital of Montana. This was actually our first major city since Seattle! “Major” here is definitely relative to this part of the country, the entire Helena metro only has a population of 77k. No matter it’s size, the fact that we had come back upon civilization was huge. You see, after Helena, our next “major” city would be in South Dakota, which we wouldn’t reach until the end of the following day. We had the very pressing issue of fixing our cooking setup, which had already failed us for the last couple of days. This city had the only hardware stores for many miles, and we had to take advantage of this fact. We headed straight to a Home Depot. To summarize the events of the day before, we had figured out that the problem with our setup was seemingly not the stove. At first, we thought that the problem might be with the adapter for the large propane tank and our camping stove. We spent a while looking for the adapter, eventually found it, then bought and tested it with our setup outside. It still didn’t work. Next, we decided to replace the propane tank itself. It was possible that some component of the tank had gotten damaged and was preventing any gas release. So, we swapped the tank for another one. This also took a while. When we go to test it, guess what? IT STILL DOESN’T WORK. At this point, we were stumped. The propane tank setup HAD worked perfectly for most of the trip and only started failing on us on our last camping day in Austin, NV. We decided to ignore the results of yesterday’s troubleshooting and assumed that the camping stove itself was somehow malfunctioning. So, we went to an outdoor sports store to go and buy a new camping stove. We spent probably another hour in here deliberating on what to get and eventually bought a new stove. We unboxed it right outside of the store to make sure it would work with the propane setup, and won’t you believe it, IT DID NOT WORK.
I mean, at this point we had independently swapped out every component of our setup, and we still couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Even worse, we had spent well over two hours of precious daylight trying to fix this. We decided to give up on the large propane tank. This felt like admitting defeat, but admittedly we had been too stubborn to just cut our losses and try the only thing that we had seen did work. If we had just accepted the nice couple at Logan Pass’s camping propane tank, we could’ve avoided this headache. As the saying goes (with some liberty), the best time to make the switch was yesterday, the next best time to make the switch is today… So, we went back inside to return the new stove and bought our own camping propane tank. We try it outside to make sure it works, and of course, it worked beautifully.
Well, that sucked. And, worse yet, we were barely going to have enough time to see any of Yellowstone. We got some smashburgers for lunch and then gunned it South into West Yellowstone. We managed to make it with a bit over an hour of daylight to spare and asked the people at the ranger station what we should do (and used the restroom there, of course). We decided that we should just try to go and see the Old Faithful geyser located at the other end of the park, and if we had time, we could backtrack to some of the other attractions. Speeding through Yellowstone felt like I was running through an amusement park, seeing all of the springs and geysers (attractions and rides in this analogy) but not being able to stop at a single one. Oh well, maybe next time I can stop properly. We eventually made it to Old Faithful. We had 15 minutes to spare before it was set to erupt. We went into the visitor’s center, used the restroom (again), got a sticker, and then sat down on the floor right in front of Old Faithful. The pictures don’t quite do it justice, but it was pretty cool. It’s also amazing how so many people can gather quietly to watch a marvel of nature.
Once we had gotten our fill of Old Faithful, it was unfortunately time to leave. I wish we could’ve spent more time at Yellowstone, but I suppose I will need to dedicate a future trip to it. The sun was setting and we still had to make it to our campsite in Grand Teton National Park. Darkness quickly crept in as we made our way across park boundaries, and we eventually made it to Lizard Creek Campground. Now that our stove problem was fixed, we could finally make the sausage pasta we had been trying to make for the two previous nights. It was quite good.
MIT Spokes 2026 
Leave a comment