Two Dog Flats is the open grassland at the east foot of the mountains, where prairie meets peaks and the wind seldom lets up. It is the park's named wildlife spot on this side, best early in the morning, with grizzlies often seen nearby and elk on the meadows in winter.
The mountains let go here. Two Dog Flats is where prairie meets mountain, open and nearly treeless, and the aspens near Rising Sun are bent for life by the prevailing wind. Downslope gusts on this side often hit fifty miles an hour and sometimes reach a hundred. Just outside the park's eastern boundary, in Browning in nineteen sixteen, the temperature fell from forty-six degrees to minus fifty-six in twenty-four hours. The park calls that an all-time world record. The ground changes here too. From Rising Sun Campground east, the bedrock under this road is young sandstone and mudstone, plastered with glacial debris into rounded hills. The peaks are far older. The Lewis Overthrust pushed a stack of rock about a billion and a half years old up and over rock only about seventy million years old, then carried it fifty miles east. So here the old rock sits on top of the young. Old mountains on one side, young hills on the other. Watch these meadows, especially early in the morning. Grizzlies are often seen near here, and some east-side bears spend all summer in lowland meadows and aspen groves and go high only to hibernate. Elk winter here too. If you see a bear from the road, don't stop near it. Drive on at least a hundred yards and pull over somewhere safe. Just past the park boundary is the Blackfeet Reservation, home of the Blackfeet Nation, seventeen thousand three hundred twenty-one members by the Nation's own count. The creek you crossed at Rising Sun honors a man named Otokomi, or Yellowfish, a part-Blackfeet man who went with Grinnell on his early trips. His English name was Rose, and Roes Creek is that name, spelled wrong.
Photo: Terry Ott / Flickr · CC BY 2.0