Whew!  I have made no recent posts despite enjoying a fabulous tour of the Black Hills, Badlands, Yellowstone, and Teton Mountains area.  Mostly that was because many of our stops were in remote areas without such amenities as cell phone, Internet, or even electric service.  Internet service, where we had it was sketchy.  At Yellowstone we could read e-mails but not send them.  At the Tetons the server cut us off after 30 minutes and would allow access again only after 12 hours.  Then we were hiking or sleeping.  So, I didn’t prepare much.  Now, I don’t want to cobble together my notes.  Instead, I offer a brief summary.

We gave a sigh of relief after the excellent wedding.  Elley and Adam reported a fine honeymoon visit to Sardinia.  We made the hard drive in the little car from here to Cheyenne in three days.  The RV shop there said the steps on our rig had been repaired but the battery was dead.  “Oh,” I said dumbly.  I started the engine with the house battery and expected the truck battery to be fine.  But, no charge came and I popped the hood.  There I found the battery disconnected.  The shop had done that and had forgotten.  I hooked it back up and all was well.  The next morning we drove to Rapid City. 

The Black Hills and the White River Badlands are close to Rapid City.  The first location sports a couple of small national parks and the Mt. Rushmore Memorial.  The last was built as a tourist draw and has been marvelously successful.  It is oversized and unfinished, but the portrait of Washington is wonderful and the colossus has made the mountain sacred not only to the Sioux Indians but to Americans in general.  We enjoyed a day there.

We also toured Jewel Cave National Park and Custer State Park within the Black Hills.  These mountains are a simple blister in the earth’s crust (of unknown cause).  A lump of old granite floated up causing a bulge in younger sedimentary rocks above it.  Erosion has cut through and formed a roughly circular mountain range with upwardly folded ridges of the younger rock making circles around a cluster of peaks of old granite in the center.  The range makes its own weather and cultivates a mountain forest surrounded by “short grass prairie” or desert.  The dark pines gave rise to the name, “black hills.”  We encountered our first free range bison in the Black Hills.

We enjoyed one day in the Badlands National Park and it was a rainy one.  That gave us wonderful light and coolness in a place that can be drab and hot.  We walked among grand erosional features and watched tourists watching wild sheep.  We also stopped at the famous Wall Drugstore mall and took a cup of their nickel coffee.

Our stay was only five days, not enough really.  We spent one in town because one of the tires on our rig threw its tread on the drive from Cheyenne.  The auto club service changed the tire and we bought a new one in Rapid City.  While there we visited the geology museum at the South Dakota Museum of Mines and Technology.  There we found a fine collection of rocks and fossils.  The school itself is benefiting from the grand boom in mining that is enriching the Rocky Mountain region.  We enjoyed seeing that as much as we enjoyed seeing the housing developments under construction at Cheyenne.  Oil is still more valuable than gas.  Gas is enriching our fair state but not as much as oil is Wyoming.  Still, I’m not complaining.  Thank God for fracking.  Think what our heating bills would be otherwise.

From the Black Hills we drove directly to just north of Yellowstone.  My sister, Laurie, flew into Bozeman MT.  We picked her up and spent one night at nearby Livingston and then drove into the park and to the campground near Mammoth Hot Springs.  We had no reservations there and planned on a mid-morning arrival.  Our site enjoyed a great view of Mt. Everts. 

I had directed Laurie to maintain an Eastern Time schedule upon her arrival in the Mountain Time Zone.  She agreed to a four a.m. wake-up and an eight p.m. bedtime.  This schedule gave us two benefits.  We beat the heat associated with the intense high altitude sunshine in the afternoons and we beat the crowds that developed at all of the prime attractions in mid-mornings.  One day we pulled out of the Norris Geyser Basin at Noon to find a mile-long line of cars waiting for parking spaces.  We had arrived at 8 a.m. and had taken a great parking space.  We were almost alone on the trails and found a crowd only upon our return to the visitor center. 

We also probably had the best space in the lot at the Old Faithful visitor center and were among a dozen people who gazed at the 6:40 a.m. eruption of the most famous geyser in the world.  We saw it erupt three more times before we finished our day there in early afternoon.  We had walked more than six miles and were dog tired but had seen the eruption of at least four major geysers and many smaller ones.  What a spectacle! 

The park offered many adventures.  We were once stuck on the road in a canyon by a herd of buffalo that were migrating through it on the same road.  With cars trying to go in both directions there was some snorting and jostling to get through.  I finally found a pull-off and parked.  One does not want to piss off a bison.  Margaret can testify to that!

We encountered buffalo jams and tourist jams in the park.  We became jaded after two weeks in Yellowstone.  Every day we would encounter a first day tourist, who upon finding their first buffalo would park the car in the middle of the road (in violation of park rules) and get out to stalk it for a photograph.  Cars stopped for buffalo created unnecessary delays for everyone.  The buffalo would occasionally stop on the roads and jam up the traffic.  A ranger coached us on a slow approach and a tap of the horn to push them off the road.  I followed his advice but never used the horn.  And when a buffalo simply stopped, so to would I.  But mostly, I could, to the amazement of first day tourists, push through the moving herds.  Still, at least once a day in Yellowstone one is stopped for many minutes by the massive herds of buffalo.  I had last visited Yellowstone in 1967 and can’t remember seeing a single buffalo then.

And, there were the elk.  A never fading vision is of elk grazing while  lying down on lawns in the town at Mammoth Hot Springs.  Employees of the concessionaires gently encouraged them with words to move.  They needed shotguns loaded with salt, but that would probably be banned by silly park rules.  Instead, the animals are tolerated and put tourists at risk of injury.

I had not seen a single grizzly on my last visit to Yellowstone.  On this one we encountered bear almost every day.  Partly the sightings were because of our early schedule and caused me to reconsider it a couple of times.  Anne and I, and a bear had a surprise encounter only once on a hike, but that was more than enough.  I had the bear spray out of the holster, armed, and aimed before the brute finished sizing us up, considered its options, and moved off at a jog.  Then it turned and walked back past us.  We waited a few more minutes to make sure it was alone before continuing down the trail.  Although I enjoy seeing grizzly, I prefer being in country that does not have them.  Probably the only animal on this continent that is a worse hazard is the polar bear.  Grizzly seem only kill you when you irritate them.  Polar bears will kill you to see if you’re tasty. 

Laurie was interested in seeing the mammals and commented on our not seeing wolf and moose.  We worked hard at the wolf but kept missing them.  There are a couple of famous wolf observation sites in the park.  One, the Lamar Valley in the north end of the park is a fair drive from Mammoth Springs.  We made one early morning drive there, but that was where we were driven off the road by the herd of buffalo in the canyon.  Then, when we finally arrived at the lookout and got out of the car, a grizzly jumped out of the river and put us right back into the car.  No wolves that day.

We moved our camp to the middle of the park, at Fishing Bridge, which was close to the Hayden Valley, another miles long prairie hosting an abundance of large game animals.  There we found another group of wolf watchers.  We enjoyed talking with them but could not quite appreciate the joys of spending one’s entire vacation sitting at a lookout waiting for views through a telescope of wolves two miles away.  We would stop early, on our way out or late on our return to camp.  They would tell us that wolves appeared just before our arrival or just after our last departure.  I would tell them the names of the birds in the trees.  Anne and I never saw wolves there, but one morning Laurie dropped us off for a hike to the summit of Mt. Washburn and returned to the Hayden Valley lookout.  There she enjoyed a distant view of a wolf lying down among the sage brush.

Anne and I, meanwhile, enjoyed a close view of a grouse putting on a full-blown performance for a hen.  He spread his tail, blew up his pouches, and cooed softly.  She demurred so we did not enjoy any x-rated birding.  Reaching the summit while conversing with a couple of Maine hikers we enjoyed a view, I kid you not, of the entire length and width of the park and the Tetons too.  We could even see the lookout where Laurie was watching the wolves. 

We could not find a moose for Laurie.  Even though Anne and I were going on to the Tetons for a week after Yellowstone, we made a one day trip there with her both for a close look at this magnificent range and a better opportunity for moose.  We enjoyed looking up at le Gran Teton (the great tit) but found no moose.  Anne and I would, of course, find moose later during our stay there after her departure. 

The next day, we drove Laurie out of the park to the town of West Yellowstone.  There we stocked up on groceries and went out to dinner.  Then we left her at the visitor center where she would get her shuttle ride back to Bozeman.  We returned for our last night in Yellowstone.

Our move was a small one to the Coulter Bay campground in Grand Teton National Park.  There we did a lot of walking including one grand hike to a pass on the ridge of the Teton Range.  The Tetons are much “birdier” than Yellowstone, and that made me very happy.  The dominant thrush of the Tetons is the Swainson’s Thrush, a bird that is not regular in places I regularly visit.  So, for our week in the Tetons we daily relished in the unfamiliar song of this thrush.  That was happy because each of the thrushes has its own peculiar song, and each of their songs are among the loveliest of bird songs.

Most folks visit the Tetons to see the mountains, and we enjoyed them too.  I dare say that the Teton range is the iconic range of the Rockies even though it can be argued they are not part of the Rockies.  More on that some other time. 

Our week there went by too quickly especially because we had to return home quickly.  Anne had agreed to work for two weeks in Gettysburg at the beginning of this month.  So we pulled out of the Tetons and arrived home four days later.  Our Western adventure had started at the end of April when we drove to western Kansas to bird there.  It was interrupted by our return for Elley’s wedding in June but continued until the end of July. 

Now we have chores and two weeks of paid work for Anne.  We’re going to Melissa’s wedding this weekend.  A garage is under construction  as I write.  I need to take a photograph.  Two walls have gone up this morning.  .  .  Bummer.  Three walls are up.  I had hoped to photograph one being raised but was too busy writing this.

Our next outing will be the September hike of the Appalachian Trail.  This will be a two week walk that will include the finish of the some 2200 miles of that path.