Evenin' Campers!
Another eventful day, this time back on the road.
We had one more day reserved at Grant Village but we had not planned to use it. Our plans were to leave this morning. The forecast for a hot day ahead made us consider using the extra day in the relative cool of Yellowstone then somehow making up the lost time in the coming days. In the end, wanderlust got the best of us (which history tells us any form of lust will eventually do and of the various forms we did alright by contracting the wander- type). By 9:45am we were hitched and off to the gas station, dump station and any other station we thought we might need after being parked for four days.
Eastward ho! We too the east exit from The Park (the Silver Cliche' style book says that only Yellowstone receives the double capitalization among parks) toward Cody, WY. Cody bills itself as the gateway to Yellowstone. We drove two hours to get there. This is kind of like Philadelphia billing itself as the gateway to Manhattan... but never mind that.
The drive to Cody was spectacular! We were treated to every variety of western landscape, every color of rock known to man and all types of terrain from flat to 7% up and downgrades lasting miles. (That's the type of slope with runaway truck ramps and where the Burma shave signs are biblical verse in case that's the last thing a person reads on earth... it's steep... very steep). We descended over 4,000 feet from the top of our exit from Yellowstone to Cody. For the first time in about 10 days we were below 4,000 elevation. The air down there was like pea soup. So thick we could hardly breathe it after being so close to the heavens. The high oxygen concentration gave us a sort of euphoria. Our 18 year old Wheaten Terrier asked to get out and run beside the truck for a while (ok... that last part is a fabrication... but we were back below 4,000'). As we approached Cody the road settled into a valley and although mountains still looked around us, there were lakes and the pavement was relatively flat.
Here are some pics from the day:
We reached Cody by 12:30 and set about exploring the town. Remember, by this time we had seen several towns that were labeled "the gateway to Yellowstone" or similar titles including Dillon, CO (fast food center of the ski-Rockies), Steamboat Springs (western resorty feel and oh so organic), Jackson WY (tourist trap!!! Did I mention everything there is fake?), West Yellowstone, MT (genuine looking dusty western mountain town that is the underachiever in the "gateway family") and now Cody. Cody comes across as a nice blend of the others. It clearly rolls out the welcome mat for visitors, but looks like it tried to remain true to itself in the process. It was clean but not in a Disney sort of way, it looks lived in by real folk. I liked it. We did a bit of shopping, had lunch at a Mexican place, topped off the tank on the Tundra and headed east again.
Next stop: Medicine Lodge State Archaeological site. Frequent readers know that we avoid commercial Kampgrounds (friends don't let friends stay at KOA!). What you don't yet know is that we use a variety of tools including ReserveAmerica (the consolidate information and reservation system for most of the state operated campgrounds in the country), recreation.gov (the Feds offshoot of Reserve America and the two systems are linked), Google maps (to see if a site described as "shady" in fact has trees and if "waterfront" is genuinely near a body of water) and my favorite AllStays which is map-based, fast and comprehensive listing of everything from campgrounds to where propane is sold to low bridges and steep mountains. Need a place to park your rig for the night in north central Wyoming? AllStays will show you all of them and with a click tell you more about them. That how I found Medicine Lodge. It is a remote place in north central Wyoming where petroglyphs (drawings and scratchings on rock) were discovered some years ago. These date from somewhere between 2,500 and 10,000 years old (although the graffiti that is on the rock in places dates to the 1970s or later). The Native American tribe that inhabited this area before the advance of settlers were the Shoshone but their culture does not recognize these petroglyphs as their own. It has not yet been determined by whom or precisely when these were made. Cool. Really cool to stand there and contemplate the human history of the site. The park itself was very, very well kept and had everything including public corrals for those who brought their horses. Take a look:
We had a spot reserved for the night and it was very nice. Only two problems. 1. It was close to 90 degrees with hours of sunshine left when we got there. The trailer was hot. 2. The campsites are relatively shady but have no electric, so the only way to run the AC was to fire up the generators, which we are prepared and able to do but it is a chore. What to do... What to do?
We had a plan for just such an occasion. 1 hour 20 minutes down the road (that road being US 16) is the Bighorn National Forest. We were either driving there tomorrow morning en route to the Black Hills in SD or... tonight. Why? Because 1 mile off route 16 at 8,800 feet sit a number of campgrounds operated by the U.S. Forest Service. Medicine Lodge was at about 5,000 feet and near 90 degrees. We know that the earths atmosphere cools at 4 degrees F per 1,000 elevation gained. 90 - (4x4) = 74 degrees at Sitting Bull Campground. That's where we now are.
Oh... one detail. The drive from Medicine Lodge to Sitting Bull was orchestrated for us by Google maps navigation feature. A fantastic tool for the traveler. It picked the shortest route and its save profile asked me if I was ok with highways, tolls, ferry crossings, tunnels and God only knows what else. What it didn't ask about was dust. For almost 20 miles we were on a beautiful, desolate, scenic, well cared for dirt road. We were bombing along at 45 MPH and didn't see another car or truck in either direction. We had Wyoming to ourselves. There was wildlife including (I think and can't verify since we have zero Internet up here) black footed ferrets, snowshoe hares and mule deer (or maybe weasels, bunnies and Great Danes... I'm not sure... But wildlife just the same). You've seen those western movies where the hero heads off leaving a cloud of dust... Right? That was us! I even stopped to take a panorama it was so beautiful out there. Only one problem. When the hero drives off in his pickup truck he usually doesn't have his house behind it. In our case, the windows were completely shut but (given the heat) the two top hatches were open and the exhaust fans were running. Now, if the engineers who designed and built our airstream in Jackson Center, Ohio had wanted to test the trailer for air infiltration they might have closed and latched all the doors and windows, placed an exhaust fan in the trailer to create negative pressure and surrounded the shell with a colored indicator power then watched what happened. We essentially created that experiment for them since me dust on our road was a salmon color. What they would have learned, and what we learned upon opening the trailer door at Sitting Bull was that dust goes EVERYWHERE! There was dust on the floor,, the walls, the counters, the couches. There were dust streamers coming from under cabinetry, there was dust on the ceiling and around any leaking gasket or seal. It will take ages to get the dust out of every crack and crevice it now sits in. We'll look back on this episode one day and llaauugghh! So, to the engineers at Airstream: you designed a fantastic product that is durable, attractive, efficient, rust proof, water proof, etc. but we proved today that it is not dust proof and it is certainly not idiot proof.
We had a nice dinner, and closed up the trailer because it's darn cold up here! I made a dessert from what we had around (the chocolate bars and graham crackers are long gone). I called the new recipe "aw rites". You may have noticed a natural similarity between the diameter of a marshmallow (the big type for roasting over a campfire... not the wimpy hot chocolate type) and a banana... right? Me too. I think nature intended that. If one takes a marshmallow and cuts it in half to make two stubby cylinders, then makes banana slices and smears each slice with peanut butter and stacks it into finger sandwiches that are a "peanut butter and banana sandwich on marshmallow bread" you have a camping dessert. It won't displace the 'smore anytime soon. But I think it earned the name "aw rite".
Here's our panorama of the day. The dusty road -- half of which is now in the trailer.
That it boys and girls. Tomorrow on to South Dakota.
SC
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