Kayaking, Storm, Walking and Fish Hatchery

The water was like glass when we got up this morning.  Ted wanted to go kayaking but I had four loads of laundry that needed doing before we spent the next few days without electricity at national parks.  I started a load and was sitting in my chair doing something on my computer when I noticed him out of the corner of my eye.  I grabbed my camera just as he called me on my phone.  I went out to take his picture down on the water and my battery was dying.  I tried to take some pictures and came back in to get a battery I had just charged.  That one was dead as well.  

I did manage to get a photo and he took some looking up at the motor home.
  

He also took a great picture of some goose eggs laying on the ground as well as a few other great photos.

No sooner did he get back than the sky got ominously dark and it started to sprinkle.  I went on line to check out The Weather Channel.  They had a warning of 45 mph winds and severe thunderstorms until 6:00 p.m. Ted tied the kayaks down to the picnic table and laid the bikes down while I put the slides and awning in and grabbed some food and our computers in case we had to wait it out in the park bathroom facilities.  There would have been plenty of room as there are over a hundred fifty sites and probably fewer than a dozen RVs in the whole campground.  It was raining hard and we decided to drive to the visitors' center.  When we arrived there, we were told that they had just checked the radar and the storm would be over in about a half hour.  We chatted with the person at the counter and with another couple who were just pulling in and wanted to wait to set up until after the storm had passed.  They were from the Bismarck area and spend their winters in Mesa near Phoenix.  We have met other people who winter there and will look into that area when we get to Arizona.

The storm did pass and we returned to the RV and opened back up.  I continued doing laundry and after lunch the sun came out, it warmed up and we went for a long walk around the campground.  Down by the shore, the rocks look like small pieces of red shale.  It is very brittle and almost looks like brick.  

When we returned to our site, we drove to the Garrison Dam National Fish Hatchery.  We had both noticed these squared off ponds below the dam and thought they were a waste water treatment facility.  There are sixty four acre and a half ponds for the propagation of fish.  The self guided tour started in one building where the egg incubators were.  They incubate northern pike, walleye, paddlefish and sturgeon.  A quart of northern pike contains 60,000 eggs while a quart of walleye contains 120,000 eggs.  As fish develop, they are transferred to various other tanks or ponds which we were able to view.  We saw some unusual, endangered fish in some of the tanks.  The paddlefish, a filter feeder, is a prehistoric fish that lives for about thirty years and grows to be a hundred pounds.  In the Sturgeon Building, we saw sturgeon that were at least five feet long.  In the salmon building there were tanks with hundreds, maybe thousands of rainbow trout.  Automatic feeders are hung overhead and when the food drops, the fish look like one black blob on the side of the tank where the food is.  It was amazing to watch.

We drove to the Under the Dam Campgrounds which lie along the Missouri River at the outlet to the dam to check it out.  I have heard horror stories of campers being washed out by flash floods and dams letting go so there is no way we will ever stay at a campground that is on the down side of a dam.

When we returned, I made pizza dough and we had a loaded pesto pizza for dinner.  Thanks kp for the homemade pesto.  It is yummy.  While we watched a movie I asked Ted where the Mountain Time Zone began and upon looking it up, it runs right down the middle of the water we were looking at.  The line zigzags down through North Dakota and we were just into it.  Our phones and computer weren't aware of it, though.  We must be getting our signal from across the water.