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.

Over the edge

Though I left Golden on Tuesday, the adventure really began Wednesday morning when my car almost rolled into a ravine. I wouldn't have been hurt, because I wasn't in the car at the time. This was kind of the problem. If I'd been in the car, I would have been able to put the brakes on. Instead, I was holding the rear bumper of the car, lifting up as hard as I could, to try to bring the rear wheel of the tire up out of the ravine behind me, the one shown in this picture.

I had managed to get the right rear wheel hooked over the edge of this ravine when I backed up from the position you see the car in above, shortly after reminding myself that I was very close to the edge and not to send the car over when I backed up. It wasn't about to fall in, it just couldn't pull itself forward with its anemic front-wheel drive. And I couldn't push it.

So I put the car into drive. At this point I can think of three other gears I should have tried first, but hey, I knew basically what would happen; the car would come up, take off, and I'd have to run after it and slam the brakes on to keep it from heading into the ravine on the other side of the road. And this is exactly what happened. Except for the small kink that occurred when I lifted the car up, the tires bit in, it got going, and I jumped in and got my foot on the brake and then fell out of the open driver's side door onto the ground. So I leaped back up, ran after the car again, jumped in again and slammed the brakes on again (making doubly sure to hold tight of the steering wheel) and the car stopped before anything unfortunate occurred.

This is one of the sillier things I've done in my life, and I'm not going to dwell on it any more, except maybe to ponder that next time I'm left with one wheel hanging off the lip of a ravine I'm going to try putting it in neutral first.

The thing is, I had just watched the sun set on these,


which was remarkable, and woken at five in the morning with no hint of the sun on the horizon and the stars looking as beautiful as I'd ever seen, electric and gauzy. I camped this first night near Hole-in-the-Wall, Wyoming, made famous as the hideout of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, to which Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid belonged.



This place, to which I've never been before, is one of the more visually appealing places I've had the pleasure to witness a 5 o'clock light. Above is a video of me driving in, past the ridiculously profuse wild sunflowers that lined both sides of the road.


I played my guitar for a while before it got dark. I am very fond of this thing, and it improves my mood whenever I take it out.

In the morning, there was a lot of wildlife to see:


A confused-looking young mule deer;


My first pronghorn picture. Though I saw a zillion pronghorn in Arizona and Wyoming last summer, I never managed to get an actual picture of one. Hopefully there will be many more. Silhouetted against sunsets and that sort of thing.

That day I drove ten hours to Choteau, MT, where I camped at the city park campground, which had the virtue of being cheap but the drawback of being next to a large freight yard where large trucks began backing up, beeping, at 6 AM. The day after that, I drove through the last of the plains as I made my way to Glacier.


The colorful blocks above are beehives.


At last! Glacier is a large park; I chose to stay at a site in the northeastern part of the park called Many Glacier, because there was a ranger-led hike to an actual glacier, which I wanted to see. But it turned out to be perhaps the most beautiful of the developed campgrounds. There you can see the Many Glacier Hotel, where the bellhops wear lederhosen. The hotel (from which you can see the view above) was constructed during the winter of 1914-1915. Obviously, folks in those times had different values; I mean that we wouldn't build a hotel in the middle of a national park, of course, but also that nobody these days would be crazy enough to do such a thing in the middle of winter. Though I hear they took a break when the temperature got to 5o below.

It was quite cold the first night in the campground, in the 20s. As I mentioned in a previous post, I am equipped for winter camping, but since the weather forecast that day had said it would be in the 40s that night, I left my cold-weather stuff in the trunk of my car, to which I was disinclined to travel each of the five or so times I woke up during the night from the cold.

Speaking of equipment:


This family has not only brought their mountain bikes and kayaks with them, but THE CHOPPER. I have never seen this before. Yes, that is an actual helicopter being pulled by an RV.

I managed to get a campsite at Many Glacier at about noon; the campground filled not long after. I took my bear spray on a little hike to a waterfall that was not notable in any way except for what occurred after. Specifically, the day later, I ran into a family I'd seen that afternoon on the trail and they told me they had seen both a black bear and a grizzly bear just after leaving the trail, and that the trail had been closed due to bear activity by the time they got back to camp.

I saw the black bear.


I excel at taking blurry pictures of bears. This was taken from the car of a woman giving me a lift... the bear was feeding up on a hillside, indeed not far from the trail.

I wasn't willing to go too far afield on my own, but the next day was the ranger-led hike to Grinnell Glacier. We got on a boat that took us to the end of the lake, and hiked to another lake where we got on another boat.


Above, hikers remaining behind on the dock are approached by a moose.

Once we were in view of the glacier, the ranger handed around photographs showing its historic extent.


Glacier National Park was carved by valley glaciers during the last ice age, which ended some 10,000 years ago. The glaciers we see now are small alpine glaciers that reached their greatest size in the late 1800s. Their natural melting has been accelerated by global warming; where once they might have been expected to stick around through the next century, now they will probably be gone in ten to twenty years.


Here is the view in the other direction, showing the broad, U-shaped valley carved out by the valley glacier that was here in the ice age. There are several erosive agents on the planet... wind, water, gravity, people... but ice grinds rock off mountains like nothing else, creating very steep valleys that tend to fill with long "finger lakes" (or fjords, if they're near the ocean).

I saw more wildlife in the park than I've seen anywhere else, including Yellowstone...


Top, a young mountain goat peers at us; bottom, a ground squirrel (not so wild!) begs for handouts at lunch.


We reached the glacier after lunch. Grinnell Glacier is named after George Bird Grinnell, a conservationist, writer, and (most importantly) paleontologist who is sometimes called the father of Glacier National Park. And it is beautiful. The waters into which the glacier is calving are milky blue, due to the refractory power of all the rock flour that the glacier has ground off the surfaces over which it's traveled.


Above and to the right is Salamander Glacier, which isn't obviously a glacier until you get close enough to see the crevasses in it. To be a glacier, as mass of ice has to flow under its own weight. Crevasses are a sign that the ice has moved. The bottom bits are a little more plastic than the upper bits, which crack as the glacier goes over bumps.


Also note the black stripe at the nose of Salamander Glacier above me... nearly all the rock in Glacier is Pre-Cambrian sedimentary rock; it dates to before the emergence of hard-bodied animals on Earth. But the black stripe is an igneous body; it was magma that spread out along a weak plane between two layers of limestone. The white halo above and below it is marble, a metamorphic rock. It was formed when the heat of the magma baked the limestone into marble.


Here is a very smooth piece of glacially polished limestone, with crescentic "chatter marks" made by rocks being pushed along under the glacier. I have seen examples of this sort of thing in New England but they were not quite so good as this rock that the glacier only left a few decades ago.


Ranger Diane Sine talks about stromatolites, which are the only fossils in the park. They are blobular fossilized colonies of cyanobactera. Our ranger was extremely knowledgeable about geology (and everything else); she had been working in the park for 30 years, and just getting to listen to her answer questions for 8 hours was as enjoyable as the hike itself. I recommend this experience to anyone traveling to the park!

The next day was my helicopter tour, taking off from West Glacier, on the other side of the park. I had booked this tour on a whim... I happened to come across the possibility when doing research a couple days before I left... and decided, why not, I've been wanting to come here for a long time. Why not see it from the air? So I drove through the park before sunrise on Going-to-the-Sun road, one of the more spectacular drives in the country.


Almost no one was on the road with me. Above, a "fog glacier" fills in one of the valleys.


I rode on the helicopter with some people from Texas. I am not sure what to say about the ride other than that taking off was just like the experience of flying in my dreams; that is what struck me more than anything. As for the tour itself, well, it was neat to see those mountains from above--and we flew quite close--but it mostly made me wish I was hiking through the pristine wilderness I saw (with no helicopters around to disturb it!). Nevertheless, some photos from the tour:


Grinnell glacier calves into the lake, this time seen from above.


The knifelike edges of the ridges in the park are truly amazing. There's no way you could hike some of these ridges, because there's no way to go around all the spikes and pinnacles that stick up from them.


Looking up into Canada, the border with which lies partway up Waterton Lake.


Another glacier... you can see just how dirty it is, from the rocks that have fallen from the cliffs.


And a couple videos to give you a sense of flying:




After the tour, I went on a couple more small hikes. I never did see a bear on the trail, but there were ferocious chipmunks.


This one reminds me of the dramatic chipmunk.


This chipmunk (seen here with backpack and bear spray canister) was interested in my granola bar, but the bighorn sheep below are after another treat:


Antifreeze, unfortunately. They were licking it up like mad. It doesn't kill them, but nobody knows what it does do to them. (No jokes about allowing them to survive the cold winters.)

A final couple pictures taken from Going-to-the-Sun road last evening:


This morning was fine but it soon became grey and rainy. I am sitting in a Starbucks in Great Falls, MT, right now, looking at how it's pouring outside. Oy. It's going to take me a couple days to get over to North Dakota... I plan to stop at Makoshika State Park in Montana because I am addicted to badlands. It's a problem. But I've just spent three nights in the mountains, which are beautiful, but also highly vegetated, closed-in, and cold. I am ready for something a little warmer and more open.


Most recent pic taken with my camera: a stray cat sitting on my lap top in the service center where I just got my oil changed.

I expect the next post will be from South Dakota, in about a week, but if I get a chance I'll do one before then! Thanks to everyone for your support... do leave comments or check in on my Facebook page, it helps!