•Glendo State Park
Our home on wheels for the next two weeks was our mini-motorhome on a 1986 4-cylinder Toyota chassis. Some refer to it fondly as “Tonka”
for its small and underpowered stature, an aging David among hundreds of
younger more powerful 8-cylinder, turbo-charged Goliaths that flew by us
throughout the trip. But the race is not always to the swift, and Tonka
managed a steady 55 mph as we headed up I-25 toward a Wyoming campground
north of Cheyenne. We aimed for a spot on the shores of a reservoir on the
North Platte River at Guernsey State Park. Within biking distances are historical
sites that honor paleo-Indian cultures, the Oregon Trail, and, at Hartville,
the the state’s first mining boom. A good choice we thought. Alas, a week
before we got there, the state parks folks drained most of the water for
downstream irrigation and left a wide mud hole waiting to be refilled when
upstream Glendo State Park reservoir opens its floodgates to refill Guernsey.
We drove the 35 miles up the road to Glendo where we discovered half the boaters in the state of Colorado had converged on the 14-mile long aquatic highway for jet boats, water skiers, fishing boats, and muscle boats that tore mindlessly (it seemed) from one end of the lake to the other. Campsites were an unidentified, unorganized, every-camper-for-himself free for all (“Just the way we like ’em,” said a Wyoming resident who heard our description a few days later). We muscled Tonka into a flat area lakeside and we all (Sophie and Bella included) enjoyed swimming in the lake to cool down from a beastly hot day of driving.
We’ll go back to the quieter park at Guernsey another time. It’s a short three hours from home and a less frenetic option for Coloradans without boats.
•DouglasOur next stop up the highway was an unexpected pleasure: Douglas, Wyoming, home of the fabled rare and elusive jackalope. We definitely wanted to see for ourselves if the stories and postcards were true, or if this unlikely cross between a jackrabbit and an antelope was fiction. We had, of course, seen in the grasslands throughout our trip many likely jackalope parents: antelope fathers on the lookout for potential jackrabbit females with whom to mate. But we cannot verify a definite sighting of a jackalope in the wild. Perhaps their numbers are being depleted as taxidermists continue to demand more and more for commercial gain. (I confess that we helped the taxidermist cause by purchasing a handsome specimen mounted on a piece of native cedar.)
Douglas, we learned, is also the home of the Wyoming State Fair which we missed by one week, and the location of one of the finest public campgrounds in the country. For no charge, you can have a grassy, shaded site on the banks of the North Platte River with clean hot showers open 24 hours. The path along the river is perfect for biking and running. There’s not a posted limit on the number of nights’ stay permitted. Our only disappointment is that we were not able to join the throngs of folks who used the park as a put-in spot for tubing the river, the perfect antidote for the day’s heat. Our compliments to the citizens and local government in Douglas for maintaining such an attractive facility for those visiting their town. We’ll come back.
•Devils Tower National Monument
Due north of Douglas, along 100 miles of state highway 59, is the Thunder Basin National Grassland. That’s all we have to say about that.
Finally we reached Gillette, touted as “the ideal stop between the Black Hills and Yellowstone.” After the two hours of treeless, featureless monotony broken only by the “town” of Bill, Wyoming’s 4th largest city did look pretty good. In addition to gas and oil wells surrounding the city, the length of the many trains we saw hauling exclusively coal from area mines measured a mile or more.
We stopped for gas.
Another hour east and north of Gillette, rising 867' out of the land
between the Black Hills and the prairie grasslands, stands Devils Tower,
our first National Monument dedicated in 1906. (Teddy Roosevelt applied
the new the Antiquities Act to ward off commercial exploitation of the tower
and destruction of the beauty of the surrounding area. What a concept—and
he was a Republican.) Formed by an igneous intrusion of magma from the earth’s
center and the erosion of the sediments from the ancient ocean that once
covered our country’s midsection, the lava formation overwhelms its surroundings.
N. Scott Momaday wrote, “There are things in nature that engender an awful
quiet in the heart of man; Devil’s Tower is one of them.”The name came from the ignorant or superstitious imagination a 19th century US Army officer. But to the native Americans, it has more mythic importance. Several versions of the same story describe seven girls/sisters who were threatened by a bear. They ran to the safety of the stump of a tree (or a large rock, depending upon which version you hear). As the bear approached, the girls sought help from the Creator/Great Spirit/or the stump itself. The tree/rock began to rise in into the air. Each time the bear climbed the children were just beyond his reach. His claws scored the tree (or rock) and the girls were borne into the sky becoming the stars of the Big Dipper (or “the seven sisters” constellation, Pleiades). Either version seems an improvement over the “tower of the Devil.”
The tower is a formidable climb, though the day we were there we watched a small guided party that included a 16-year-old descend from the
top. The top was first reached, as far as history records those events,
in 1893 by two men who used, for part of their ascent, a 350-foot wooden
ladder which can still be seen wedged in one of the crevices. Over 5,000
climbers attempt one of the 220 routes each year, though not all reach the
top. Our friend and traveling companion, Alan Higham, recently climbed to
the top and returned with the photo on the right of his ascent.We bicycled from the quiet of the park’s campground three miles uphill to the visitors center at the base of the tower. Lots of folks went no further, choosing to sit on the benches at the base and stretch their necks upwards. There is a paved path that encircles the base for a little over a mile. The view is, to the untrained eye, essentially the same on all sides: columns of lava standing side by side like gray rock logs poking the clouds. The better view, for those not climbing, might rather be from a few miles away in order to grasp the magnificent presence of the tower quietly surrounded by trees and bison munching on grass.
Our campsite in the park was excellent: quiet and shaded, great cottonwoods blocking much of the heat that continued to dog our travels.
north as rapidly as Tonka could safely go to avoid the annual gathering
of half a million motorcyclists converging on nearby Sturgis, South Dakota.
We saw hundreds of bikers nearly every day, most headed for Sturgis, a
few going in an opposite direction (lost or avoiding the crowd?). We joined
with the latter few and headed north of the Black Hills up US 85 along the
western edge of South Dakota, past the geographical center of the US and
across some of the dreariest landscape in the country (no place for a car
to break down) into southern North Dakota. Another 100 miles of what Rand
McNally fraudulently identifies as a scenic highway we were in Medora, the
gateway town to Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
We spent three days in Teddy Roosevelt, relaxing in the shade with the books
we brought, hiking and biking and horseback riding, attending excellent campfire
programs in the evenings, and seeing the scope of the park from the 32 mile
loop road that showed off the grasslands and some dry creek beds. We did
see small groups of bison and wild horses, but none of the park’s elk herd,
and no jackalopes (though park rangers didn’t say we should expect to see
them in the park). We ventured one day back to Medora, a “cute” little town
spruced up with look alike tourist stores with look alike merchandise. A
notable exception was a newly constructed bookstore that had a fine selection
books on native American and western themes and cowboy music CDs. We had
our first dinner “out” at the Cowboy Cafe: tasty chicken fried steak (for
Hughes) and chicken caesar salad with blueberry pie a la mode for Judy. A
fine treat and no dishes to wash. We chose not to attend the “world famous”
Medora musical, something we’ll have to live with; we promised ourselves
that we’ll go when we come back next.
We stopped for the night in the town of Forsyth at a nearly deserted state
park on the Yellowstone River where the fishing is pretty darned good according
to guys lining the banks in the evening heat. We “bathed” at the water faucet,
cooling off in the process. We turned on the interior lights only to find
that the secondary battery was dead. No light, no water pump, no 12 volts
for the refrigerator. We biked into town to see how we might remedy that
in the morning. Along the main street we talked for a while with Jack and
Susan Wolf (with their son and Judy on the left) who own the old bank building
from the former town of Vananda that they had moved 18 miles to a corner lot
in Forsyth. It sat up on beams ready to be placed on the newly poured foundation.
It will become a store featuring their handmade jewelry. Quite an undertaking
and investment in a town that closed its last restaurant a short time back.
They urged us to see the interior of the restored movie theater in the next
block. It was closed that Thursday evening, but the owner was there and he
proudly gave us a tour of a beautiful theater (with a balcony) that was out
of the 1940s. He said that the next night, when “Pirates of the Caribbean”
opens, folks will be lined up around the block to get in. I hope he’s right.
the cause they believed in. We had the same feeling of disillusion as when
we saw Plymouth Rock for the first and only time. We didn’t stay long there
either.
There was an attractive arts and crafts show on the state park grounds with
live music when we arrived. It was a nice diversion during the obligatory
two-hour wait between trips to the free hot springs baths. In the evening
we also attended the annual pageant romantically commemorating the “gift”
of land and the hot springs to the US government by the Shoshones and Arapahos
in 1896. In fact, the government “persuaded” a chief from each group to
sell 10 square miles of land which included the hot springs in exchange for
cattle and food supplies. Local history says that Chief Washakie stipulated
that a portion of the waters remain free to the public (though I wonder
how long it took for any of his people to gain access to the springs). Hence,
the springs in the state park have always been free to the public. The pageant,
written by a local woman in the 1920s, re-enacts this “Gift of the Waters”
using local Anglo women theatrically costumed as “Indian Princesses,” a
singing of the Lord’s Prayer, and narrated by a member of the Chamber of
Commerce. Surprisingly, the pageant includes the participation of Shoshone
men and women dancers in authentic traditional dress. It was a strange event
to witness. (Can you pick out the Indian princesses in this photo?)
The fires are contained now, and should be out soon and the park reopened
completely.
