American Road Trip 1: Yellowstone to The Badlands

Day Twelve: Yellowstone to Caspar, WY

Early morning (and a bitterly 36 degrees) found me rolling down my driver’s window to ask first a moose and then a bison to kindly step out of my way. The bison, in particular, seemed stubborn in an obtuse sort of way. I honestly don’t think he understood me.

Even so, I was one of the first of the day to reach the Great Canyon where the Yellowstone River has literally carved out eons of rock to reveal archaeological treasures (and a little beauty, too). After a brisk tour of the northern rim and falls, I fell in with a group taking a long hike around the Lupine Valley (formerly a part of Yellowstone Lake, but now a tree-free bison grazing heaven). The devastation of the park by fire is extensive, but so also is the swiftness of the recovery—already lodge pole pine grown amid the slow-rotting corpses of their ancestors.

Once out of the park, I began the long descent into Cody (Buffalo Bill-obsessed), and Wyoming turns into a brown and yellow rock maze, slowly devolving into scrub and shallow rubble plateaus, unusable for farming or grazing, yet some farmers seem to scratch out an acre here and there. Again, many of the farms, restaurants, and other efforts at economics are long abandoned and collapsed. When was this area busy? The roads here (which were now cooking at an even 90 degrees) seemed traveled only to move people through the state. In fact, everyone I spoke to was “passing through.”

Nevertheless, along the rock edges, the falling scree, the rock and sage scrubland, the people here have fenced off parcels of waste for themselves. Outside of the horse ranchers, I don’t see why. Little towns like Meteetse (pop. 564) retain hitching posts to their sidewalks, but Thermopolis can’t seem to decide what it wants to be: the world’s largest hot springs, a dinosaur dig, historical museums, or what I actually diverted off US-20 to see, petroglyphs found on some old outcroppings. I found the little-used county dirt road to the site, but the site was locked behind a gate; the sign said to pick up the key at the Visitor’s Center. And, of course, that was closed on a Sunday. So much for my diversion—even the Dinosaur Park was closed!

Descending out of Thermopolis and back onto US-20 was great, though: Red Rock Valley runs the highway and a train track along the river through a deep gorge, and the road signs mark the epoch of the stone (“Cambrian, 200-300 million years old”). As the valley floor descended, I sank into the history—or it felt like that except for the pick-up truck tailgating me.

The rest of Wyoming to Caspar was flat rock and scrub, minor twisters of dust whipped up round Wyoming’s exotic road kill. But I stopped briefly at Hell’s Half Acre, a twisted valley of crag and lime (used for the set of Starship Troopers, I think!). The 300+ acres (hardly a half acre!) was barb-wired off, and I could only get to it via the abandoned parking lot of an old café along the edge. Another guy pulled in (taking his cycle to Sturgis, SD), and we scaled the fence as he told me about the rattlesnakes which “fill the place.” Uh, thanks. Didn’t stay long.

Pulled into Caspar and found a hotel and shower. Forty thousand bikers are crowding into Sturgis this week for their annual festival. And I plan to roll through that area tomorrow. I’m going to map out an alternative route into the badlands and Devil’s Tower tomorrow. It has to be a highlight!

Day Thirteen: Caspar to the Badlands

Never should I complain again about the Woodward Dream Cruise, a relative go-cart party compared to the Sturgis (SD) Stampede, an annual gather of over 40,000 motorcyclists for one week of mayhem. It began today, just in the area of South Dakota I planned to visit.

A four hour drive brought me back to the north of Wyoming—and by now I’ve seen enough grazing and scrubland to bid the state adios quickly—but I has hell-bent to see the infamous Devil’s Tower. Rising up off the small buttes about it, that rock scraped free of the underearth rose in the late morning sky, clear and stark. (Why is Richard Dreyfus such an amazing actor?) But I couldn’t reach it: already the road into the park was swamped with belching Harleys, pouring onto the shoulders and in the turn-offs, gathered under the billboards and around the worn cafés. I pulled off amongst a small group at a farmer’s fence and snapped photos, but with regrets moved quickly on.

Trying to get away from the bikers was a challenge all day, and I still haven’t fully succeeded. Since little Sturgis can’t hold them all, they simply pour out hogging onto the roads in a 100 mile radius. It’s not that I’m against bikes or their riders (necessarily), but that so many of them weaving in and out, sorting and resorting themselves on the road—it’s a bit dangerous. And helmets are definitely not the order of the day in Wyoming, nor are all traffic rules.

So I took some backcountry roads to approach the highlight of the day from the south, the Crazy Horse Memorial. This is simply spectacle, a family-produced, public-funded decades-long project to build both a testament to the Native Americans but the largest mountain carving in the world. Without exaggeration, all four faces of Mount Rushmore could fit tucked behind the chief’s ear.

I could write or speak about this for some time—it’s fitting and moving, dramatic in scale but also in the efforts of the sculptor’s surviving family to continue the construction. This fall, much of the mountain debris will begin to be turned into the larger project, a Native American Cultural Center of North America, starting with the construction of a much-needed university for local indigenous peoples specializing in leadership training. I paid an old bus driver, Hutch, to take me down to the quarry site where only 10 workers were surveying and drilling in preparation for tomorrow’s blast. The mountain is only half-excavated for the statue to be carved out, but seeing this project has long been an ambition of mine. Hutch said with some pride, “This rock’s good; our friends down the road (Rushmore workers) are paying six figures a year just to maintain that little thing. In the past forty years, we’ve spent about $400 for a few strengthening bars.” That the place was also swarming with Yamasaki’s and Harleys didn’t bother me—in fact, one biker took my picture for me!

So going to Mt. Rushmore was a bit underwhelming in contrast. It was good to see it, but I did not anticipate the concert stages, the auditorium, the lights, the ice cream bars, and, worst of all, the obscene town of Keystone which somehow compels every car which visits Rushmore to drive through all four tourist-trapped city blocks. The narrow streets were lined with bikes, the balconies of the hotels and pizza parlors were lined with bikers watching them, and one little Toyota Camry tried to inch its way through. I will be paying for the largest freeway overpass in history. . . .

So I turned south away from Sturgis and headed for the Badlands, my goal for the evening. I will describe these more in the next entry, but this desert moonscape does not belong here, rising quickly without warning from the buffalo grasslands. I pulled in this evening to a primitive campsite in the Badlands, the wind is kicking up big time (I hope my tent holds), and I am typing this as I look at the rose sunset on accidental peaks.