After 7 weeks in Minnesota and 3 weeks in Montana, after a broken down car and a stolen bike, after buying a new car that's not exciting enough for your grandparents, after eating like royalty but never bathing, after running the AMS machine for days and staring into microscopes for more days, after meeting great people from all over the country (and France), and after deciding that I really do want to be a structural geologist, after all that it was finally time to go home.
Oh my God, we loved this place so much, I just had to put two pictures of it on the internet! One with each of us! Okay, maybe not. Let's face it: this is a tourist trap consisting of a building covered in corn. Let's move on.
There's nothing bad about the badlands. Except the park entrance fee, but it's well worth paying. This was the next place we stopped after Mitchell, SD. The Badlands National Park is a little east of Rapid City, SD. As you can see from the map below, that's quite a distance to drive from Minneapolis in a day. After the badlands we drove into Rapid City and went up to Mount Rushmore. We saw it lit up at night, but my pictures didn't turn out well. We camped in the Black Hills.
Here's the trip all laid out. It turned out to be something like 2,300 miles with all our detours. Sorry, Vivienne, I haven't introduced you yet. My dear and old friend Vivienne flew out from Seattle to join me on my road trip. She'll be in lots of these pictures.
On day 2 of the journey we left the Black Hills and South Dakota and headed into Wyoming. We stopped at Devil's Tower (again, pictures there weren't good. Probably the developer's fault!), and turned off I-90 at HWY 14 to go over the Bighorn Mountains. I was really surprised--I had no idea that this range was so gorgeous. The highway climbed from about a mile high at I-90 to 9,500 feet right away and for about 20 miles we drove across a high plateau. The fallen city was on the way up the mountain. The nice view below was on the plateau.
Beartooth Pass
After dropping into the basin west of the Bighorns we headed for Red Lodge, MT. We ate dinner there and headed back into the mountains looking for a place to sleep. We ended up sleeping in a rest area high on Beartooth Pass. Since it was dark when we got there, we didn't realize how incredible it was until the morning. These pictures don't begin to describe it. Beartooth Pass is 10,900 feet high and the environment is completely unlike anywhere around.
I was really happy the car made it up the hill. And if you haven't seen it yet, here it is, the 1987 Chevy Celebrity Wagon. From the summit of the pass you can see out over a high plateau. The road drops from here down to the northeast entrance of Yellowstone.
Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks
Yellowstone Park was rather crowded and that's a big deterrent for me. It was still very nice, though. We crossed the continental divide several times. Here's one of them. We also stopped to see the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.
Yellowstone is probably known best for its geysers. I would argue that the most impressive is not Old Faithful, though. These three colorful pictures are from the Midway Geyser Basin. The one with the crowd is Old Faithful.
The clouds of steam rising above these pools are really hot....I found that out when the wind shifted and I was suddenly engulfed by such a cloud. I was instantly transported from a pleasant, dry 75 degrees to about 110 degrees and 100% humidity inside the cloud. Ouch!
Above is where that yummy looking liquid flows into a river. And look! We were lucky enough see Old Faithful erupt. It's kind of neat, in that it is so regular. Most people seem to agree, seeing as how near Old Faithful the two-lane park road becomes a divided freeway complete with exits and overpasses.
Below is my representative photo from Grand Teton National Park. The Teton Range is beautiful and in a very different way from anything in Yellowstone. We ended up driving through Yellowstone on our third day and we camped in a campground in Teton Park that night.
Between Jackson, WY and Idaho Falls, ID we climbed up out of Jackson Hole and over Teton Pass. What a state! I can't wait to go back to Wyoming. And I'm not joking, either. They say antelope outnumber people in this state. It's so unspoiled compared with every other state.
Craters of the Moon National Monument
Christian suggested that if I have time I should stop at Craters of the Moon. I decided to work it into my trip and I'm glad I did. We saw a whole lot of basalt, that's for sure. This volcanic landscape in Idaho's Snake River Plain is just a few thousand years old. Early geologists thought it was only a few hundred years old because it looks so fresh.
One of the trails takes you up into the rim of a big crater where you can see the vent down below. The path in the photo on the right goes straight up the the very windy top of that barren volcano.
Early travelers must have thought this was like the moon. I read that one of the first explorers to cross the area had to walk for two days straight without rest because there was nowhere flat enough to stop and lay down.
Craters is a couple hours west of Idaho Falls, near Arco, ID on the map. We continued west through Boise that evening and slept on the Idaho-Oregon Border. The next morning we went straight for Seattle, stopping only once for gas.
Thus ends my trip. I'll leave you with a very contrasting photo, a picture taken in the Washington Cascades.
