Rainbow Falls Powerhouse and what's left of the Falls
With abundant nice spring weather we got the itch to ride our bikes somewhere. I've always wanted to ride along the Missouri River over by Great Falls; I'd read they have a pretty extensive trail system. So we loaded up the bikes and drove over.
Much of the trail system is through the riverfront park in town, but we wanted to see the more natural landscape, so we drove to trailhead at the Rainbow Falls Powerhouse. You can see the falls, or what's left of the falls, from down the trail a ways. I think Rainbow Dam is a must be bit farther back upstream to get the hydraulic head needed to run the turbines.
The trail was a gravel road, but the gravel was really coarse and it required more energy and made pedaling more difficult. There is also a more rugged mountain bike trail that parallels the gravel road, but we weren't up for that...
We went downstream a ways and then came to a "Natural Area" that had been fenced off / set aside and had a short trail to the top of a knoll with a nice view. We parked out bikes and hiked up, enjoying some of the spring flowers along the way.
It was pretty hot and we didn't go too far, but we enjoyed the ride. On the way home we stopped at Tilleraas Nursery, a great family-owned nursery on the west side of Great Falls, where we bought a couple of apple trees to replace the ones which died last year. We also bought some more native flowers. We asked the folks at the nursery if there was any place to get a smoothie or a milkshake, and they suggested Big Sky Deli and Bakery in Vaughn. It was right on the way home, and what a delight! How could we have driven by there umpteen times in the last 35 years and not know about it? We bought some awesome turnovers, some for the ride home and some for breakfast the next day.