The final Post

One reader of my blog questioned why there were no foothills in the Tetons. I  hope you can examine the picture and see that the Tetons, which are the newest Rockies, raised up as a huge block along a fault line and "the hole" sunk at the same time. The mountains haven't had much time to erode, geologically speaking and the hole is still sinking

Nighttime traffic jam. It was a huge herd of mamma's and their calves. (taken through my windshield)

Mammoth Hot springs with travertine features.

The travertine terraces look like desolation and things are fuming.

Wonderful patterns made by algae in the travertine.

More travertine terraces

More colorful patterns. As you might have guessed I love seeing patterns in nature

That hat!

Mud pots burbling

Why the Yellowstone is called the Yellowstone. This is the Great Canyon of the Yellowstone, just below the upper and lower falls. The valley is ochre colored rock.

Lower falls of the Yellowstone with a large patch of snow still in the valley

More traffic jams

Willie Coyote

Mountain goat

Wild Buffalo Bill Cody bronze

Encounters of the third kind at Devil's tower. Sacred Indian site but now a rock climbing Mecca.

The Quad. Washington's eye is 11 feet wide and his mouth is 18 ft wide.

It got up into the 90's when I entered the Badlands.

The Badlands and the last picture I took before I started my mad dash for home. I am outside of Cleveland tonight at my trusty Motel 6 and will get  home late tomorrow afternoon. As of tonight I have put 9156 miles on my car since I left home and have about 500 more miles to go to get home. Phew. Grand time! And thanks to all my readers for sticking with me on this crazy Odyssey!

The next to last blog entry

I am on a grand three day push to get home and Motel 6 is my savior. Today I covered an enormous amount of territory by going from Gillette, SD up to Devils Tower, then down to scenic Spearfish Canyon in the Black Hills to Mount Rushmore. After a short lunch stop there I traveled to Rapid City and then on Route 44 through some of the last existing real prairie lands still in the US over to the Badlands. I drove part of the loop road and then headed north to Wall, SD, home of the famous Wall Drug. Too kitschy for me but I did get my 5 cent cup of coffee and then drove another 200 plus miles to Mitchell, SD.  I hope to be able to do 500 miles per day for the next three days to end the trip.

My trip summation is that this is one heck of an immense country that is truly beautiful in so many ways. I would like to have just a penny for every fence post I encountered, especially the wooden ones. All of those post holes amazes me! They make some mean snow fences out here also.

But then the US I saw was very much of a “Don’t fence me in” kind of place. Wide expanses of desert, mountains, valleys, plateaus, farm land, range land. You can see the stars at night and most of the air is not polluted. This land is full of hard working farmers and ranchers.

The National Park Service does a magnificent job with a shrinking budget but an increase in tourism. They are the keeper of the country’s real wealth, its scenic beauty.

I want to thank my can of Bear Spray for allowing me to hike alone in bear country but I am sure it gave me a false sense of security. They say don’t run when you see a bear. Hah!

My Prius has been one slam dunk of a fine car. I averaged 49 mpg, fully loaded and doing flat and mountain roads.

The trip allowed me to hear and see nature and view wildlife, birds and flora and fauna that I had never experienced before.

I appreciate all the phone calls and email contacts from my friends along the way. They kept my spirit up. And especially want to thank all my benefactors who helped out with the trip. Without you it would have been very rough!

Motel 6 is a great low cost motel chain that has been around for 50 years. Bed, bath and internet. No tissues, radio, or blow-dryer but who cares! Clean and adequate and perfectly spaced for mo purposes on the way home!

The western part of the country has great roads and they seen to have gotten all of the Recovery Act money to put into their roads. Really on the ball with projects funded and in the works.

Benjamin F. Richason PHD was my geography professor and I have him to thank for grounding me in geology, geography and physiography so that I could better understand the landscape through which I was travelling. All this some 45 years ago!

AAA maps are spot on with their green dotted scenic routes and their regional as well as state maps.

My trusted Garmin Nuvi 200 guided me the whole way and made it so easy for a single driver to negotiate the US road system. Without “Lorraine” talking to me it would have been so difficult to navigate alone.

With the exception of hay fever in Kentucky I have stayed in good health. Being out of doors 24/7 for weeks at a time is a nice thing but it wears thin after a while and I feel very weary. Not tired of what I am seeing, as that is exciting but bone weary from the stress of dealing with the everyday living in a tent and everything that that implies. I loved seeing the wild lupines blooming in Sequoia. As I moved along with spring I kept seeing wild lupines and when I crossed the Bighorns yesterday, I ran into lupines blooming again and all I could think was “those freaking things again.” So I knew it was indeed time to head home. I will miss the Frank Lloyd Wright designed buildings I had planned to see outside of Chicago but I can see them when I go out for my 50^th college reunion.

I will be coming home to one less cat, as my beloved Lynx (a lynx point Siamese) escaped from the sitters about a week after I left and has not been seen since. I dream that he will have made his way to Manchester and is sleeping on the chair cushion of my porch furniture. He used to take week long walk abouts and find his way back looking very healthy and never hungry, so I am hopeful that something of the kind has happened.

 There are a few good shots still in my camera that I will download as my last blog entry.

One of four arches of Antelope Antlers in Jackson

Mormon Barn with Tetons in the background. Motif #1

Reflections of the northern Tetons

Hot Springs next to Yellowstone Lake

Who knows how deep

Edge sediment patterns

Algae like the weird waters

Lone Star Geyser

Me at Lone Star Geyser

Erupting on time

Moms and calves

Fields of fuming things

Hot spring

Erupting

Love the colors

Most famous hot springs but you have to see it from the air to get it all into view

Funky shapes and colors 

The winter coat is starting to come off. They rub up against trees and roll in the dirt to get it off.

What you don't see is that I was hiding behind a Toyota Tundra

More patterns

Yowee Yellowstone

Just when I had thought Yosemite beat everything, I saw the Grand Tetons and now Yellowstone.  Each is so spectacular in different ways.

Yellowstone Park is basically a huge caldera from an ancient volcano (640,000 years ago) and my campsite was near the western rim of the caldera. The whole park is still an active “Hotspot” as evidenced by all the geysers, hot springs, fumaroles, mud pots and travertine terraces.  There are lush green valleys with winding streams, waterfalls, and some raging rivers full of spring runoff. The 1988 forest fire devastated great swaths of the park, but after 24 years the trees have reforested themselves and are standing 20-30 feet already.

In one area there were some local earth quakes. The trees withstood the earth quake but then the ground heated up so much that the trees died from the ground temps. As you drive along you can see things steaming or blurping or hissing or rumbling. Some of the features have wonderful colors as certain algae thrive in the fuming waters, so the palette of colors is amazing. Mammoth Hot Springs, with its travertine terraces, was the only bummer as the day I was there only 2 little streams were running and all the other terraces and features were dry.

I have seen bison everywhere and when they get on the road, major traffic jams occur as the animals don’t seem to mind cars. I also saw a coyote trotting next to the road. One bison crossed a wide trout stream and scared some fishermen and then decided to chomp on grass in the mid strip in a parking lot. A Bull Moose created a huge traffic jam as a bus even stopped for photo ops. I have also seen the aftermath of two major car accidents and this is only June. I cannot imagine how crazy the place must be in summer.

I carry my canister of bear spray, which is only good for one shot. The first day in the park I hiked out 5 miles to a remote geyser. It erupted right on schedule and I was very privileged to have been there for the eruption. They say there are over 10,000 hotspot features and I think I did a good job of covering many! Spent several days hiking at every spot marked on the maps.

The rules about the bears are crazy. These bears do not know what coolers are or break into cars to get to coolers. So instructions are to keep all food, coolers, cooking utensils, stoves, water, and personal care products in your car. We had rain and thunderstorms on and off all week and then snow yesterday. What are you supposed to do about cooking if it is raining and they don’t provide shelters? They also would not let you pour any dish water on the ground. You had to wash dishes in a community sink with cold water.

The park now does a good job of providing boardwalks and paths to keep tourists off the sometimes thin crust surrounding some of the features. My mother’s brother was killed at Yellowstone as a young boy by falling into something. My mother was born in 1910 and both her brothers were younger than she. One was blind and hit by a car and died and the other one was killed at Yellowstone. In the old pictures on display, you can see people standing up close to things erupting. Gerald Ford was also a park ranger there in the 30’s.

The drive over the Bighorn Mountains on my way to S Dakota was very interesting. The Bighorn Forest Service has posted signs describing the age and names of the strata through which I was traveling.  The foothills were really old stuff but very interesting to look at. Finally out of the Rockies I was back to beef and irrigated fields and that is when I put a CD in! I hope to make Devils Tower and Mt Rushmore tomorrow and then on to Wall and the Badlands.

The Grand Tetons

Western Tanager on Mary's deck railing.

Statue of elk outside the National Wildlife Art Museum.

Mother Moose is just relaxing alongside the trail.

Mormon Barn with Tetons. this is the classic view seen on every postcard of the Tetons. Life Motif #1 in Rockport, MA.

Elk on a hillside. They are sleek and have lost their winter coats.

Mary and Catherine by the side of Jenny Lake in Grand Teton National Park.

Relaxing on a hike despite the snow covered rocks.

Bison in a herd next to the road. they are trying to shed their winter scraggy coats.

The Grand Tetons on a cloudy day.

The Grand Tetons don't have any foothills which makes it very dramatic to view them.

Bison Stampede

Buffalo Stampede

There is magic in Jackson Hole! You can’t call it a valley. A “hole” was the term used by pioneer explorers and mountain men to describe any open valley encircled by mountains.

We had snow and rain for a few days which gave me time to recover from the cinders of Craters of the Moon. But we ventured out driving many of the roads in the Park. Going north out of Jackson is the National Elk Refuge, a huge expense of land where they encourage the elk to come down out of the mountains in the winter to feed them. Then the National wildlife Art Museum is a gem with paintings indoors and a new sculpture garden outside. Here we saw a special exhibit by a wildlife artist Bob Kuhn.

On our drives we have encountered herds of bison (buffalo to the uninitiated), moose cows sitting very close to the trail and out along the Snake River, Pronghorn (antelope) grazing in small herds or mom and her one year olds frolicking in the grazing land, Marmots dodging in and out of their holes, a variety of geese and ducks such as the Horned Grebe, and Common Merganser, as well as several bald eagles. On her deck, Mary has nailed several oranges along the railing. The most beautiful Western Tanagers and Magpie have come visiting. We have seen a Mountain bluebird here and I saw a Western Bluebird in Zion. The elk are starting a new set of antlers, as they drop their antlers every year. They are very powerful looking animals and quite majestic.

Even with rain clouds and snow the mountains present a very breathtaking view. They are the newest mountains in the Rockies and are still rising while Jackson Hole is sinking. There is a major fault running along the eastern edge of the mountains. The mountains were uplifted and have very old rock forming the mountains and there are no foothills. The “hole” is sedimentary rock and just tilted slightly. Through all of this the Snake River is carving a wide swath. On the other side of the “hole” are the Gros Ventre Mountains and the Gros Ventre River flows west into the “hole” also. I took a morning float trip down a section of the Snake that is parallel to the Teton Mountains with phenomenal views. Just as I have way too many pictures of Upper Yosemite Falls, I have way too many of the mountains in all of their many presentations.

There are hundreds of miles of trails and we did one which required taking a national Park shuttle launch across Jenny Lake. Then we climbed to the Hidden Falls and Inspiration point. There are also miles of bike paths running through the “hole” just as there were in Yosemite and Zion valleys. There are also some decent rocks for rock climbing and of course two ski areas. Teton Village has a huge tram that runs year round to the summit of Rendezvous Mountain.

Downtown Jackson and Teton village have trendy shops and art galleries. My heart sinks every time I see a Sotheby’s office, because it means I can’t afford to live where they have an office.

On one of our drives we were viewing a herd of Bison and decided to take a side road to get a better view of the herd. Mary is very skittish about getting out of the car when Bison are around because they can run 35 mph and jump high fences from a stand still. As we were cruising slowly down the side road we were using binoculars to watch the bison and some pronghorn, when all of a sudden a Bison jumped out of the bushes and flew across the road in front of us. It was so huge. They can get up a really big head of steam. It was quite dramatic. Then today I had two Pronghorn jump out in front of me and cross the major highway. The Pronghorn are very gazelle-like and very graceful. The bison have been rolling in the dirt to get off their winter coats.

Yesterday I got a canister of pepper spray so that I don’t have to use Mary’s supply. Mary claims she sees bear every time she goes out, but of course not with me along! But there is still Yellowstone!

We leave for Yellowstone on Friday and Mary has a wonderful camping trailer called a “Scamp.” Sleeps two or three and we will use that until she comes home and then I will use my tent. There are over 10,000 geothermal features to see at Yellowstone. I am not quite sure how I will see them all! Pictures to follow.

Snow squall and tent with lava anchors

The Snake River with the foothills of the Tetons in the distance

Jackson Hole

Large Lava Tunnel

800 ft long lava tunnel

Snow sage brush and rail fence

On the range