Oh Oh Oh

Hello from the laundromat in Basin, WY, where for some reason I can get an internet connection... I think it's coming from a nearby house. This is the same laundromat we used to do our laundry while at field camp. I went here for the same reason I have come back to the Big Horn Basin at all; I know where there are fossils to collect here. They may not be the best sites, but the fact that I know where they are means less time spent researching and driving around and more time spent actually collecting. Likewise, this may not be the best laundromat in the world, but I know where it is and that it works, and I did just wash and dry a load of clothes for $2.25.


Me, just now.

I stayed five nights at Badlands National Park, partly because the campground was free, partly because the weather kept being nice. I met a young man named Josiah there; he is also traveling (around the entire country, which is too much for me!) and has a blog, at http://goldfishmafia.blogspot.com/, on which he will probably post about me.



We traded food the first night (my jerky for his chocolate) and a couple mornings later we made Johnny Cakes, a traditional Rhode Island recipe, from the package of genuine Rhode Island Kenyon's cornmeal I had. You are supposed to have them with syrup; thankfully, Josiah had pure New York maple syrup. He is from New York state.

It was at the end of this meal that we noticed the buffalo, which we climbed up to a high point to photograph.


If you click this picture for more detail, you may see how they are heading toward the campground, which is in the upper-left. At this point we decided to go back to the campground. But I didn't think they were going through the campground. In fact, I didn't realize it until I looked up from stuffing my sleeping bag into its sack and noticed they were all around me.


So I managed to get over to my picnic shelter without being charged by angry buffalo, and sat in my hammock wishing I had grabbed my book from my tent. Tourists kept driving up... I suppose one of them had told the park rangers where the buffalo were, and they were telling other tourists... and soon I became an attraction, the crazy girl relaxing in her hammock in the middle of a herd of buffalo. I was afraid to move from it, though. Someone took this picture of me:


It took them several hours to go through camp. I actually had to get creative at one point because I was afraid to go through the herd to get to the bathroom. Mostly I just sat there feeling irritated with the buffalo.

Flies like beer!

That evening I went backpacking in the badlands. It's funny, at Glacier they have whole backcountry trip planning offices where you go in and go over everything with the rangers. At Theodore Roosevelt, I had to listen to a list of warnings and fill out a permit. At Badlands, the ranger just said, "Okay, remember to bring your own water." And it was much milder here. I know the badlands can be over 100 degrees in summer and below zero in winter, but for the most part I ended up finding both the terrain and the weather to be thoroughly manageable, even boring. The terrain was very open and it was hard to get lost. Large sections of the park are simply grass. My backpack was very heavy, though, at first, as I brought in three gallons of water. I left it and my tent and most of my stuff at this base camp.


The next day I went exploring from here with just a day pack. I was hoping to find fossils. In fact, they were impossible not to find. I didn't realize how rich the Badlands area is for fossils; I've never seen anything like it. Many items of literature tell you to "report fossil finds to park authorities," but I gave up on the idea as soon as I realized you couldn't walk anywhere in the park without tripping over them. These fossils are around 30-40 million years old, by the way. Ancient hornless rhinos, saber-tooth cats and small ancestors of the horse. Some of the nicer things I found:

A pile of bones weathering out of the ground

...something...


A section of jaw with teeth


Another, from a different kind of animal


Something... a turtle skeleton? weathering out of the side of a hill


A very small vertebra

There were also other things in the badlands, like, well, grass, and some cacti. And this:


which was very cool to find. The rest of the skeleton was scattered nearby.


Above, a game trail winds through the badlands. Some of these were quite prominent and easy to follow.


More buffalo!

Yet despite seeing so many fossils during my 2-day backpacking trip that they had become totally boring, I still wasn't satisfied. They were all mammal fossils. I know (from visiting the visitor's center!) that the park also contained exposures of the Pierre Shale, from when the area was covered by the Cretaceous Interior Seaway. There were supposed to be lovely ammonites and baculites in the park--distant relatives of the nautilus--so well-preserved their shells were still covered in pearl. But I hadn't found any Pierre Shale anywhere. Until I drove back to the campsite and saw a dark grey shale exposed where the creek had cut into a hillside.

I wanted to go explore immediately, but I had to wait a good while for the bison to leave the area. I had really had enough of them by now. But as I kicked around downstream, waiting for them to leave, I found a river-abraded chunk of baculite and knew I was on the right track:

And sure enough, once I was able to get up to the shale exposure, it was worth all the waiting. Falling out of the hillside were many huge concretions, mineral growths around a central seed. No one is sure exactly why concretions form, but they often seem to accrete around organic matter--say, a dead animal that fell to the sea floor. And, in fact, inside these concretions were fossils.

Above, a little shell, with a crystal-encrusted concretion in the background


A bivalve shell bigger than my foot!


A chunk of concretion with ammonite and baculite shells in it


A baculite, with the pearl still on its shell, and lovely calcite crystals inside

The size and number, and level of preservation, of these fossils was amazing. It made me want to buy a plot of land near the park so I could have my own.

When I got back to the campground it was hot. I lay in my hammock, which was partly shaded by the slats above the picnic table, but I couldn't concentrate on my reading and when the thermometer still read 95 degrees at 4:30, I decided to drive over to the other end of the park (an hour away) to go to the evening program.

On my drive I saw the source of a mystery I'd already forgotten about. On my hike down into the badlands a couple days before, I'd seen smoke billowing on the horizon, and figured there was some kind of fire. Once I crossed into the west side of the park, I saw that the ground was black as far as the eye could see. A huge section of park had burned. Finally I found a park volunteer to tell me that it was a prescribed burn, set to rid the park of fuel (dead grass) before it could build up to a level that would make a fire unmanageable.


The evening program was great... it was on astronomy. We learned many interesting facts about the heavens and then, once it got dark, the ranger used laser pens with a five-mile range to point out constellations (which are more than five miles away, as you know, but the strong light shone effectively off the dust in the atmosphere and seemed to be pointing right to them). There were also three very large telescopes set up and we looked at double stars, galaxies, nebulae, star clusters and planets. I saw the four large moons of Jupiter. The really interesting thing about the program, though, was that while I wandered around the amphitheater looking into the telescopes and talking to people, the area was kept completely dark, and I never saw the faces of anyone I was talking with.

There were three women from Connecticut... from the town just south of where I'd grown up, in fact, and who had also been in Glacier at the same time I was, and who had followed my route across Montana and down from North Dakota... another couple, and the park volunteer Chuck (who called me "Science Girl")... whom I conversed with for hours without ever knowing what they looked like.

I didn't get back to my campsite till almost midnight. The next day, I did some sightseeing in the Black Hills.


Finally, Mt. Rushmore, which, yes, is a bunch of faces carved in some rock, and takes about five minutes to fully appreciate;


Crazy Horse, in progress as it has been since 1948, I think... you can see the head of his horse sketched out on the lower-right side of the mountain, just above the bus that says "Lamers," which I think is the best part of the picture.

I drove into Buffalo, WY, on my way to the Bighorn Basin and thought it looked interesting so I stayed a little while. There is a great old hotel there, which you can look around:


Bottom-most, the library; middle, the room you first enter into. I love that the windows say "Oh Oh Oh."

Then I drove up into the Bighorns where I could camp for free on Forest Service land. My view this morning:


When I looked back, the town of Buffalo below was covered in cloud:


I have just poked a little bit around the Bighorn Mountains and the east side of the basin today. The only other thing I found worth taking a picture of was this:


There was a truck pulling a horse trailer, which passed me going up a hill. Immediately after passing he had a blowout in the left tire of the trailer, rubber flying everywhere. And he just kept going, driving on the rim (painted white, as you see, above) at 70 miles an hour. He eventually pulled away from me and was soon lost from sight. I never did come upon him stopped by the side of the road. (There was no reaction from the horses, either, as far as I could tell.)

So, I ought to head out now so I can find a new campsite before dark, but I will leave you with the sunset from Badlands a couple nights ago.

Hello buffalo

It was cold and windy after I left Glacier. I stayed for a couple nights at a free campground at Fort Peck Lake in eastern Montana… it was miserable weather, I was tired and unhappy, and I wrote and played guitar (in my tent) and wandered around for long hours. Oddly, there were seagulls here. Also, apparently, a really big dam, which I did not actually visit, despite the exhortation.



The next day I went to Makoshika State Park, the largest of Montana’s state parks and a very nice place with fossils, cool trails, and a good museum that had many of the things that can be found in the park on display:



I hiked around for a while… or fooled around…




Of course, I had to look for fossils. And I found some. I just have no idea what they are. I didn’t take them, I mean, I just took pictures of them…



The park contains something known as the K-T boundary, which marks the division in the rock record between the end of the Cretaceous and the beginning of the Tertiary; in other words, when there are dinosaurs and when there ain’t. It is a much-studied section of earth history.

After Makoshika I traveled east and made camp at the Buffalo Gap campground just over the border in North Dakota. This little campground, recently built by the Forest Service, was tremendously luxurious, with well-groomed sites, flush toilets, sinks, and pay showers. It was the cushiest place I have ever stayed for $6 a night.

Gratuitous snake!



And the next day I went to go backpacking in Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Backpacking is a way of doing three things, primarily:

1. Seeing the heart of a park; getting under the skin of a place, or getting it under your skin, or all over your skin, depending whether it’s been raining and the place is particularly muddy
2. Getting to photograph wild places at sunrise or sunset without having to get up at ungodly hours
3. Camping for free.

Since the campgrounds in national parks are often $15 or more a night, the last had a certain amount of appeal to me. I got a backcountry permit at the North Unit ranger station and gathered my gear, which included a gallon and a half of water as the water in the park is mostly no good… dissolved salts, I think.



After hiking into the wilderness area for an hour or so, I came across a prairie dog town. These animamls are remarkably social and entertaining, obligingly interacting with each other and their environment as you watch.



After another hour of hiking I came to a stream I couldn’t jump across. I am perpetually lazy about taking things off when I hike… I don’t like to take off my backpack when I rest, I just stand in one place for a while with 30 pounds on my back… and I certainly didn’t want to take it off and take my boots off then put everything back on after crossing. That would have taken at least five minutes. So I found this tree that had been chopped down by a beaver, which I crossed, ridiculously, shimmying over it and dragging myself up the branches with that huge backpack on.



The trail was marked here and there with posts, which bison had rubbed to a high sheen. There was bison hair sticking to some of them. Nevertheless, I kept losing the trail. I had a map and would eventually find it again. The biggest detour, though, came toward the evening, as I happened upon a whole herd of bison grazing on a ridge:


I got close enough to see that they were basically all around me and I would have to go way out of my way to get past them… I watched them do bisony things for a while:



…until at one point I realized they were all looking at me. It was as if I had said a particularly stupid thing in class. Though I was several hundred feet away from any of them I decided I was probably too close and began to trek around the herd. It took me an hour to get around them and by then the sun was setting.



I was hopelessly divorced from the trail. I wandered through the badlands until it got too dark to see my footing, then made camp. As I was cooking supper something ran under me. It was a scorpion. No one told me there were scorpions in North Dakota! The park brochure warns explicitly against rattlesnakes and ticks, not scorpions. Find the offender in this picture (with supper for scale):



When I woke up it was very wet. Foggy and misting. As I was packing up my soaked things, I noticed I had camped next to a petrified stump that was still standing upright in the side of a hill. Very cool.



Walking out of the badlands, traillessly, in the soaking mist, proved intensely annoying and fun. The whole landscape was gullied with steep ravines, and there was simply no way across some of them. I spent a lot of time backtracking, or happening upon places where the buffalo had worn a path down into them that I could follow. It was also very muddy. I have spoken of bentonite in previous posts; it is that clay that swells greatly when wet. It is very slippery. There have been varying amounts of bentonite in every badlands area I’ve visited; there was some here, enough to make walking around a muddy pain. I fell on my rump, once, and looked back to see that the skid mark my boot made before my butt hit the ground was about five feet long.

But boy, does this sort of hiking make following a trail seem boring. To have to scout routes and keep looking at the map is much more engaging than simply placing one foot in front of the other for hours. I forgot how much my body hurt, minded the wet less, and in general actually had a great old time finding my way out. (Well, finding the way out was not the hard thing… the road was to the south, all I had to do was go south until I hit it. It is finding a reasonable way out that doesn’t take three extra hours and leave you completely coated in mud and plant matter that is the thing.) In short, I had an absolutely amazing time. Tremendous fun.

I found some cannonball concretions in the wilderness… nobody knows how these round knobs of sandstone form.



I finally hit the road and hiked for a while along it to get back to my car. And then, buffalo again. And another long hike around them. Here, again, almost all of them stare at me as I walk past several hundred feet away.



When I was done I was probably the worst combination of wet, muddy and smelly I’ve ever been. I took a sort of a sponge bath in the visitor center bathroom and began to drive toward South Dakota.

I had wanted to go to Makoshika and TR partly because I nearly ended up there at one point in my past… a grad student at URI was going to be doing her thesis work out here, looking for signs of environmental transformation that may have occurred after the proposed dinosaur-ending meteorite hit the earth, and she had said she would be happy to have me as a field assistant. But then I didn't hear anything for a while and ended up applying for that paleontology internship at Petrified Forest instead. Which I got, and then my professor informed me that a student named Katie was going to be doing her thesis work at Petrified Forest, and that we would be going out together and I would be her field assistant. This seems a bit outrageous to me now, but it's what happened. I was a bit put out by all of it, frankly, I had wanted to travel by myself and go where I wanted and do what I wanted. And I wanted to do paleontology and not spend all summer holding the other end of the tape measure for some woman I didn't even know.

Katie, of course, who is below, became the dear friend I spent all summer and then every weekend for the next two years with, and with whom I am lucky enough to be able to travel with next month. Our acquaintance has changed my life in so many ways that it's hard to imagine, now, what would have happened if I'd taken the other job. For instance, without Katie, I would never have become an alcoholic.


Okay, I'm not really an actual alcoholic. (I haven't had a drink in a week and a half... it's been too chilly for me to want a beer with supper.) But, anyway, the point is that instead of all that happening two summers ago, the petrified forest and the phytosaur fossils and the cold beer, I could have been out here.

Anyway.

I finally came to Badlands National Park… the badlands here are very different, as you can see. And each badland area I have been to has a different look… different colors, different roundedness or sharpness, openness or closedness.


There is a very nice free campground here.


And more of these guys.


But right now I am in Wall, SD, where long ago (May of last year, in fact) our geology field camp vans drove by on the highway, past a hundred billboards for Wall Drug, which Katie had told me I had to visit and which was now sadly receding into the distance. So now that I am here I had to visit.



This place is in fact a tourist trap, but it does have a remarkable story behind it. In 1931, Ted Hustead bought a drug store in the middle of nowhere town of Wall, SD, named after the wall of badlands hills separating the "upper prairie" from the eroded, lower-elevation "lower prairie" below it. Predictably, nobody came to the drugstore. One summer day, after five years of poor business, his wife decided travelers heading across the hot plains to places like Mount Rushmore and Yellowstone would probably welcome a glass of cold water, and so Ted put out signs advertising free ice water. The first takers were already being served at the drugstore before he even got back from putting up the signs. The next summer they had to hire eight staff to help out, and now Wall Drug has grown to draw up to 20,000 people on a summer's day.

Some of this has got to be from the billboards; they are simply everywhere. As I finally approached Wall I noticed I could taken in twelve of them with one sweep of the eye. And in fact I was seeing them just a couple hours out of Denver, just north of Cheyenne. The billboards are all over the west and, apparently, in other countries too. It makes you want to visit; it makes you wonder what all the fuss is about. In fact it is just some shops (where you can still get free ice water). They are mostly selling the same tourist stuff, but there is a good shop with many sundry camping items, where I got some straps and a super light cutting board.

I am going backpacking in the badlands here tomorrow night; then I turn west again. I am in a hurry to finish this blog entry, so I apologize if it's especially slapdash; I am actually writing from my car, parked outside the Sunshine Inn, which offers free (unsecured) Wi-Fi. There are so many things I want to say but haven't the time.