Bitterroot National Forest, Montana

August 22, 2023

As much as we would have loved to stay at our riverside site on the Clark Fork River, the freshwater tank was getting low and the holding tanks were getting high, and it was time to move on. Besides, there's always something new to see right around the corner! 😊

We had a pretty hazy travel day, as there were a few wildfires in the area.

The Clark Fork river valley is so pretty

The mountains can barely be seen through the haze

Our next destination up ahead--not so hazy there

Our next campground was first-come/first-serve, and it always makes us a little nervous when we don't know if there will be an appropriate spot for us when we arrive. (That is why most of our campsites are reserved in advanced--we're just not super spontaneous people.) Fortunately, there were a few open spots, and we snagged a nice private site just as someone was pulling out. The site provided us with soothing babbling brook sounds (from a creek we couldn't see from the camper), and we were well buffered from the several generators down the road.

It was quite hot (90s) for several of the days, so we didn't feel like doing a lot of hiking. A few of the mornings, we did walk some of the trails right off the campground. Most of the scenery was dry forest, but it was more lush near the creek.

Some parts of the forest looked like fall had already arrived.

One of the days we drove up a sketchy gravel road to an overlook.

Lots of haze in the valley below

At higher elevation the thimbleberries were still in season!

The overlook was dedicated to two fallen firefighters

We also went down into the historic town of Stevensville for church at St. Mary's, the site of the first mission in Montana.

The original St. Mary mission church

The haze made for some interesting photo opportunities, particularly at the end of the day:

Once again, we were pretty solar-challenged in this shady site. Rick kept busy collecting electrical data, and we are happy to say that we once again avoided having to use the generator.

Nerdy Solar Stuff:

Despite this campsite appearing to be relatively bright initially, the solar panels were often fairly shaded, and it turned out we averaged only about 1.1 kwH per day input. With about 1.9 kwH usage, that meant a steady drain of the battery each day.  It  didn't help that we had used the electric water heater on the morning of our move (no shade at that site) and we did not get back to 100% on moving day--so we started at 93% rather than 100%.

On the last day, we were down to 37%, which was not horrible (we have previously been down to 30% and everything still worked).

Earlier in the week, we figured out that we were heading down quickly, and we started to implement some "austerity" measures . . . . which mostly consisted of using only battery powered candles at night, making our breakfast toast in a frying pan, and heating water in a pan to make our jugs of iced tea.  We were not willing to give up the coffee maker or the dishwasher or the microwave (for reheating food) 😁.

Counter-intuitively, we found out that the solar input did not drop as much as expected on cloudy rainy days in this shady site.  We got around 1.1 kwH on sunny days, and about 0.9 kwH on a particular cloudy/rainy day. This surprised us, as we expected a much larger drop.

Having spent a significant time now in shady sites over the past several weeks, we discussed our plans for next year where we anticipate having more forested sites than this year. We want to avoid using the generator (but we will if we need to). We discussed the option of portable solar panels and additional roof panels.  Rick's current thinking is to buy some used solar panels while we are in Florida and parallel them with our existing panels on the roof.  This has the advantage of being the cheapest/easiest to use option (nothing to get out and setup at a site).  This would be less efficient than putting them on their own separate solar controller, but we are not really interested in maximizing gain on sunny days so much as adding a little bit more solar capability for the shady sites. We'll see--there is plenty of time to think about this.

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