Category: Uncategorized (Page 10 of 12)

Not much to report today. Nothing super interesting, no cool pictures. I figure these days will happen every now and then, and that’s alright.

I drove south through Nebraska, stopping at the comparatively large town of Scottsbluff to complete the dreaded task of laundry. To my utmost surprise, it was pleasant and painless. Scottsbluff Laundromat, I owe you a life debt. Also—adding an additional delicious Tide pod makes all the difference in the world.

I crossed into Wyoming again, cutting through the southeastern corner and spending an hour in the comfort of the Cheyenne library. Once the worst of the heat was over, I plunged down to Colorado, stopping for dinner at Johnson’s Corner, which is the mile-high version of Red Arrow. I did appreciate the time to rest, unwind, and think. Things over the next week are looking more lively: I’m heading into the Rockies for the first time, and I’m catching up with a friend in Denver. Lots to do—stay tuned!

Before camping last night, I went to a ranger talk about paleoart, which is a quasi-official name for artistic renderings of prehistoric creatures. Fossil records only tell paleontologists so much about what certain species looked like; the rest is the collective educated guess of the paleontologist and the artist. The speaker was adequate, but the material was fascinating. Science has progressed to the point where we can tell what color fossilized feathers were—no more guesswork there.

I woke up early again to get into Badlands before the heat became unbearable. I set out into the backcountry, armed with a topographic map and a compass in case I lost my way in the canyons. One of the sage employees at Wall Drug, font of knowledge, told me the prairie rattlesnakes have been more active this year, so I kept my eyes peeled for them as well. Turns out I needn’t have worried. My planned two-mile loop was a breeze, and while I spotted rabbits, birds, and squirrels, nothing slithered my way. Most impressive was that on a busy Labor Day weekend, I had this corner of the world all to myself.

As much as I enjoyed South Dakota, it was time to move on, but I would have one more encounter before I left the state. My route south took me through the Pine Ridge Reservation, belonging to the Oglala Lakota people. Farms are few and far between, as are businesses, and houses are in poor repair. Chronic alcoholism has crippled the reservation. The crimes of European settlers resonate here as strongly as anywhere I’ve seen.

The point was made most strongly as I pulled into Wounded Knee, site of the last significant armed conflict between Native Americans and the United States government. The Wounded Knee Massacre occurred after the death of Chief Sitting Bull and the surrender of Chief Big Foot, also known as Spotted Elk. The surrendered Lakota people were surrounded by the US military, who disarmed the men of the tribe. A disagreement broke out, a rifle was discharged, and soldiers rained down fire upon the mostly-weaponless Lakota men, women, and children with mountain guns. If you haven’t seen a mountain gun, it is a small howitzer.

I read this not in a well-maintained visitor center, but on a single wooden sign; the word “BACK” was spray-painted at the bottom to indicate the text continued. The clearing where the massacre occurred was mostly empty save for a couple of simple pavilions. A woman had set up shop nearby, and invited me over after I finished reading. Valerie pointed me in the direction of the cemetery where the victims were buried, showed me her jewelry for sale, and offered stories about life on the reservation. She couldn’t have been older than my parents, but did not look well. Her fluffy white dog yapped angrily at my heels through the tablecloth. Feeling very much overmatched by the situation, I bought a buffalo-tooth necklace with beads of the four primary Lakota colors: yellow, white, black, and red.

I drove up to the cemetery. A single brick arch, whitewash fading, announced the small graveyard. Newer headstones surrounded a marker commemorating the victims of Wounded Knee. Over two hundred and fifty Lakota, buried in a mass grave. Wall Drug boasts two million visitors a year; only an hour away, I was all but alone.

Hello! I’m on the moon!

The moon, otherwise known as Badlands National Park, is incredible. I woke up at the crack of dawn to avoid the ninety-degree heat of midday, and hit the trails early. This particular snapshot is from the cratered surroundings of the Door trail, where eroded mini-canyons pockmark the landscape. For reference, the bottom layer is waist-high, and the furthest visible outcroppings are thirty feet away. You could spend days exploring only a square mile here.

I would have spent far more than two and a half hours in the badlands, but I’m already fairly burnt, and staying outside would have been medically irresponsible. So instead I retreated indoors to the overwhelming Wall Drug, located in the town of Wall. I had seen at least sixty-six billboards for the place during the forty-mile drive from Rapid City. What is Wall Drug? Well. It’s like a department store crossed with a mall, covered with kitschy Wild West flavor, advertising five-cent coffee and free ice water, with animatronic jug bands and a splash pad out back, taking up an entire city block, sporting its own chapel, filled with people browsing for hats and cowboy boots and jewelry and local artwork and snowglobes and Wall Drug sweatshirts and hot beef sandwiches and those souvenir rock bags. Somewhere in here, there’s a drugstore as well.

Wall Drug seems to be famous because it’s famous—the Kim Kardashian of shopping centers. It frequently rides the line between inane and insane, but you can find quiet corners to rest and relax. It’s been a welcome place to read and plan tomorrow’s early-morning excursion into the badlands. I picked up a topographic map and a compass just to be safe. I’m planning on a 7-10 morning jaunt and attending a ranger program or two, if I can ever find my way out of Wall Drug.

The forecast for the Black Hills was closing in on triple digits, so I got an early jump on the day and left camp at 6:30 for Wind Cave National Park. No cave tours for me today, though—I want to limit my trips underground. A fungus known as White-Nose Syndrome has been eradicating bats across the country, and it’s tracked from cave to cave primarily by visitors’ boots. Out of caution, I’m limiting myself to one cave system per pair of shoes, which means Mammoth Cave and Carlsbad Caverns.

The surface is gorgeous, showing off a serene prairie with occasional red canyon walls. I walked out a while and was coming back when I turned a corner and hello, buffalo! He was on the trail not 25 feet from me, staring me down. Way too close for comfort. I slowly backed away, avoiding eye contact, and tucked myself off the trail while the bison moseyed by. I did not get a picture, as I was more concerned with not dying. Readers, I will only go so far for you.

I took the scenic route out of Wind Cave, stopping momentarily as a buffalo calf crossed the road. Since it was so close, I decided to go to Mount Rushmore. I will admit that, going in, I was not an admirer of the monument. It struck me as a testament to American hubris: giant reliefs of slave-owners, staring over native land. Perhaps it’s unfair for me to view historical figures through a modern moral lens. I do think I can fault the sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, for not cleaning up after himself. The slope of the mountain is awash with chunks of chiseled stone. Like Devils Tower, I preferred the distant views to the park proper, which was more like Sad Disney World with no food and no rides. Children screamed, bad tattoos were on display, and La Croixes were imbibed. Not my favorite stop.

The heat was getting unbearable, so I hid out in the Rapid City library for a few hours (no Cary Grant sightings). From there, I pushed east and made camp on a high ridge in the badlands. It’s a popular spot, but there’s plenty of room for everyone. A bighorn sheep has joined us as the sun sets. It’s a pleasant night.

With each push further to the west, the stars get more brilliant. I spent a good chunk of the night lying in bed and staring, not at anything in particular, but rather taking in the whole. I’ll have to do some Stargazing 101 when I’m in the mountains.

I took a jog into Wyoming to check out Devils Tower, because why not? It was an hour away, which quickly turned into almost two hours. Wyoming—The Construction State. The landscape here: plains bounded by vibrant mesas and filled with more trees, hills, and color. The tower is visible from at least fifteen minutes away, and I think it’s most impressive at a distance, the ruler of a crookedly majestic skyline.

Devils Tower (no apostrophe, possibly because of T. Roosevelt’s horrid opinions on spelling) is not a National Park, but a National Monument. Both are under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service, but a National Park needs to have multifaceted value as a nature preserve, landscape, recreation area, cultural site, etc. A National Monument only needs one layer of significance. This means that the average visit consists of driving up, looking at the Tower, and leaving. I’m glad I swung by, and won’t visit again. I liked E.T. better, anyway.

After working on some website tech support, I drove into Custer, South Dakota, which is everything Medora wished it could be. Yes, it has the pandering Western storefronts and a Pizza Hut, but there is a greater sense of exploration and wildness here. Hard to explain, but it feels like a Dakota tourist town should. I could even shoulder the “country” music pumped onto the main drag (that song that goes “no hugGEENG no kisSEENG” is truly dreadful).

My meal, a carnitas wrap, was quite good, and dessert, blackberry pie, was even better. Custer can cook. I have retreated a few miles west into the ponderosa pines. Next stop: hiking Wind Cave and a peek at some more big rocks.

I camped in the same place for the first time. I liked that spot—in a little grove of trees, just off the highway. But off I went, down US-85, toward Theodore Roosevelt’s southern unit. My first stop was the park’s side entrance, where I planned to hike to a petrified forest before the Dakota sun came out in full force. Alas! The road to the trailhead became deeply rutted, beyond what my Corolla could handle. Dejected, I turned back into town.

Medora is a small town trying very mightily to be quaint. Faux-Frontier storefronts line downtown; with the badlands in the background, it’s a cool effect. But that effect is only an affect (see what I did there?). Instead of meeting rugged ranchers at the café, I was served by awkward, pale young men like myself.

To the park! The southern unit is right off the highway. This, and its proximity to Medora, make it much more popular than the northern unit. It’s much more open, with more prairie and fewer badlands. This means the views aren’t as stunning, but the wildlife are more visible, and this part of the park featured multiple prairie dog towns. I would pay a lot of money to put up a development for these guys next to my house. They’re hilarious in their squawking, posing, and scrambling.

It was too hot to hike in the afternoon, and it looks like that’ll hold true for the next week or more in the plains. So I got some driving in, heading south on the Enchanted Highway, a quirky route filled with locally-made, seventy-foot-tall iron sculptures.

Northwest South Dakota is the emptiest place I’ve been so far: so. much. space. I went a solid three minutes with no buildings, cars, or trees in view. I finally made it to the edge of the Black Hills, where the temperature cools by almost ten degrees. I had a solid burger and a good conversation about town scuttlebutt at the local bar. Not a bad way to cap off two weeks on the road.

What a day! I started early, since Teddy Roosevelt National Park is only about five minutes from my campsite. The park is named as an homage to the Trust-Buster’s time spent as a rancher in North Dakota, and aims to capture the prairie as it was before Euro-Americans pushed west. I spent today in the park’s North Unit, and by the time I had traversed the fourteen-mile scenic drive, I had seen herds of buffalo and several bighorn sheep.

I stopped by the ranger station for a talk called ”Perceiving Coyote”. It was led by Ranger Rob, who reminded me of a very intelligent Andy from Twin Peaks. He discussed how coyotes have been different things to different groups of people—emblems of trickery or creation, pests, evil predators, or just another animal. Are any of these perceptions more right than another? Should we try to assign morality to a part of nature? Great questions, Ranger Rob, which stayed on my mind as I headed out into the backcountry in search of a prairie dog town.

I took the Buckhorn Trail into the prairie, wading through waist-deep grasses and clambering through dry creek beds. All around me were the cliffs of the badlands, showing colorful stripes of sandstone, siltstone, mudstone, and clay. Occasional groves of trees peppered the landscape, and insects snapped, crackled, popped, and occasionally torpedoed into my chest. The trail was poorly marked, and I lost it almost immediately. Using only wit, guile, and my map and GPS, I tracked down the prairie dog town and sat down for lunch with my new friends.

Only two miles from the main road, I hardly saw anyone on my hike (I found the trail on the way back). After returning to the car, I drove into nearby Watford City for supplies and rest. I wish I were a better photographer, so that I could show more clearly how different and special this part of the world is, but for now I’m stuck with mostly words. Talk to you tomorrow.

Back into upper Minnesota, which the radio called the Northland, the land of giant American cars and really nice people. Seriously—at least two-thirds of the cars are high-clearance Ford/Chevy/GMC/Dodge units, and the gas station clerk gave me a free coffee. Feeling slightly out of place in the Corolla, I settled in for a leisurely drive through the deciduous forests, along with the coffee and NPR. Folks, remember to keep supporting Ukraine.

I crossed the Mississippi about fifteen miles from its source, still an unassuming stream. I pulled into Moorhead, next-door neighbor to Fargo, and followed the Food Bible once again to a gas station chicken shack. It advertised the chicken as ”broasted,” which I thought was a portmanteau of ”broiled” and ”roasted”; I now know it to be Minnesotan for ”deep fried.” It was… pretty good? Certainly not Food Bible-worthy. This would be a harbinger of things to come. Before leaving town, I bought groceries and stopped to see the wood chipper from the exceptional film Fargo. Frances McDormand plus Steve Buscemi? Instant classic.

I cheated for this next bit, because I was in a bit of a rush to head west. I have a feeling most of my trip will be spent out in the plains, deserts, and mountains, so I hopped on I-94 and gunned it to Bismarck, where I could not find any good restaurants. I resigned myself to an Arby’s reuben and a bag of baby carrots, and started the final leg of today’s drive. The plains are only truly flat for a couple hundred miles, after which they morph into sepia-tinged hills. This is the most rural place I’ve been so far—cars and buildings are one a minute, and towns are little more than a gas station and a reduced speed limit.

Five hundred miles from this morning, I made camp at Little Missouri National Grassland, and it was all worth it.

I couldn’t help but run through the trails and jump. Look at it! Click on it and look closer. My woeful camera skills can’t come close to showing this place’s beauty, but you can still see how the grasslands are full of surprises.

Tomorrow I head to the nearby prairie of Teddy Roosevelt National Park, and hopefully find some prairie dogs!

Goodbye, Upper Peninsula. I’ll miss you!

In Wisconsin, I continued to hug Lake Superior and stopped for gas at Odanah. A handwritten sign on the door said, “Arthur Nelis is no longer welcome at Three Eagles Convenience.” I wish I had asked who Arthur Nelis is.

A quick spin over to Superior, Wisconsin, brought me to the worst part of my trip: errands. I changed the oil in the Corolla and went to the laundromat. Wow, do I hate laundromats. This one was overpriced and undercleaned my clothes—I may have to rewash some of them before they’re wearable. Lunch picked me back up, as I had a cheap and delicious Olive Burger (olive cream cheese and sautéed onions) from Anchor Bar. This is what I’m talking about, Food Bible.

I entered Minnesota, which means it’s time for Prince and Bob Dylan. Where would I spend the night? Somewhere up in lake country. Minnesota may really have ten thousand of them; they lurk around every corner. I looked at the map. North Star Lake, Deer Lake, two different Johnson Lakes. Boring. Then I saw something that took my breath away. Impossible! I raced to the miraculous campsite, which is a cozy spot with a picnic table, and watched the sun set on the pristine shores of—sorry, dignified readers—Big Dick Lake.

I plan to press on through Minnesota into the Dakotas, where I have several activities planned. Things are about to get flat.

I set out today to explore the western section of Pictured Rocks, which took me to Munising, a surprisingly colorful little town right on Lake Superior. I heard my first Southern drawl in West Virginia, and here I heard my first Frances McDormand-in-Fargo accent. The visitor center is right next to Munising Falls, so I walked over and basked while I ate breakfast.

I also visited Miner’s beach, which had the best view yet of the lake. I cannot stress enough how uncrowded this area is; it only sees a fifth as many tourists as Cape Cod does, and I think it’s just as pretty. I puttered around the woods for a while, spotting some deer and a red-breasted nuthatch, then geared up for lunch. The plan was to try both regional specials, smoked whitefish and Cornish pasty, but given the size of the pasty I devoured, no fish would be had. Beef, potatoes, carrots, and rutabaga in pastry—surprisingly good.

I drove to Marquette, which is not home to Marquette University, but does have Northern Michigan University, where I relaxed and hid among the students moving in. I’m now camped on the western side of the Upper Peninsula. Tomorrow, I ride to Wisconsin.