The Yellowstone Trip

 

The Yellowstone Trip

Back in August of 2010, Patti and I took a trip with Amy and Aaron to a number of national parks and other memorable places on the way to Yellowstone and Grand Teton. These included the Badlands, Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse Memorial, Black Hills, Wind Cave, and Medicine Wheel National Historic Site. 

The Badlands are well-named. They are other-worldly bad. Over-the-top bad. But beautiful as well in their own stark and sere way. We took them in, and drove on down the road. 

Next stop, Mount Rushmore, the iconic faces of Washington, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Lincoln peering down from their mountain home. Per the brochure, it took six years to carve the faces in the cliff, six years spread over the fourteen years it took to raise the million dollars for the project. The faces are up to six stories high from chin to crown. Taking a road off to the side of the mountain, we caught a different camera angle, the side of Washington’s face.

We had a brief visit to Wind Cave National Park and its sweeping views of the Black Hills, and headed to the nearby Crazy Horse Memorial, another gigantic sculpture being carved into a cliff.

This sculpture, when complete over six hundred feet long, has been in production since 1948. We didn’t stick around for it to be completed, but hit the road for Wyoming. 

We took a pit stop in the Bighorn National Forest, and there we spied a large herd of elk making their way across a ridge. We stopped next for a hike up Medicine Mountain to Medicine Wheel National Historic Site. There we experienced a sacred site to many indigenous tribes. It consists of a circle of stones, eighty feet in diameter, with twenty eight spokes extending from the center, and seven rock cairns distributed inside the circle. We learned that the alignment of the stones might have both astronomical and spiritual significance. Cairns are aligned in the direction of the summer solstice sunrise and sunset. Other cairns line up with the rise of certain stars which might have functioned as a kind of astronomical calendar. A caretaker at the site told us that rock cairns in the surrounding mountains directed indigenous travelers of old to the Medicine Wheel.  As we walked the circle, we found abundant evidence that this place is still considered sacred by Native Americans: small gifts ringing the stone circle. 

There was so much to see in Yellowstone. Bison, grizzly bear, mule deer, elk, pronghorn. Old Faithful geyser. Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. The Yellowstone Falls. Mammoth Hot Springs. And those are just some of the park’s icons. It is a place to explore for weeks, but we only had days. Nowhere on Earth are there so many geysers. Most of the geothermal features are located within, and still powered by, a huge caldera, the collapsed belly of enormous volcanoes which blew hundreds of thousands of years ago. We hiked the ridge above Old Faithful, and saw it blow off its steam from a good vantage point.

Next stop on our journey: Grand Teton National Park. Here the mountains rise straight from the surrounding plain, without foothills obstructing one’s view of them. This is about as up close and personal as you can get with a mountain range without actually climbing them. Everywhere you go in the park, you are greeted by the grandeur of the Tetons. We hiked the Jenny Lake trail, and took the float trip down the Snake River, a swift-flowing, but smooth ride. 

Having experienced these iconic parks, it was time to head back on the long ride east. We did have one memorable moment while still in north central Wyoming. We had stopped for lunch, and had resumed the drive when not far to the north we saw a funnel cloud approaching. I put the pedal to the metal for the Big Horn Mountains, midstate, figuring no tornado could reach us there. 

We made one last stop at a Wyoming park, Devils Tower National Monument. Devils Tower is something called an igneous intrusion. About fifty million years ago, give or take a week or two, molten magma thrust up into the rock above it, and cooled underground. Over an eon or two, the surrounding rock eroded away, exposing the Tower. The Kiowa people have another account of the Tower’s origin. A bear chased seven sisters. The girls came to the stump of a great tree which spoke to them. It bade them climb upon it, and as they did so, it began to rise into the sky,  just beyond the bear’s reach. The bear scored the stump all around with its claws. The seven sisters became the stars of the Big Dipper.