Home at last

Like all good things, and most bad things, our trip has come to an end. Thanks for all the comments.

This blog was really an experiment to work out kinks before a much bigger trip to China in the fall. We will also be taking a summer road trip to Canada, and will probably update these pages then too. If you'd like to follow along, either send me your email address, or subscribe to updates. Thanks again…

Dead trees for sale

As you enter the Petrified National Forest, a sign reads "Do not remove petrified wood under penalty of prosecution." At the gate to the park, a ranger sternly warns you that "It is against federal law to remove petrified wood." He then hands you a brochure that adds, somewhat unnecessarily, in my opinion, "Do not remove petrified wood."

The sad irony is that the warnings are not really needed. The vast majority of the petrified wood that could be picked up and carted off is already gone. What remains would typically require a backhoe to steal.

The vandals who did the damage are all long dead. Like many national parks, the Petrified Forest was opened up as a tourist attraction in the late 1800s by a railway company (Santa Fe). The main activity of the tourists was souvenir hunting, and they filled their pockets with so many splinters and sticks that that the area was set aside as a national park in 1910.

Still, there are enough big logs left to make the area very interesting. Millions of years ago, these logs belonged to a jungle. In summertime, they were washed into a flood plain, where tons of silt buried them. Over time, the silt replaced the wood and pressure rendered the logs into quartz. Finally, the land was lifted up, and erosion washed away most of the surrounding sand, leaving the petrified wood exposed. There are three major groupings of these rocks inside the park; all are fitted out with easily accessible walkways.

The main activity of tourists still seems to be the acquisition of petrified wood, however it is done in a slightly different way. Directly outside the park, in every direction, you can find rickety gift shops advertising the stuff. There, the logs sit in vast lots that remind you of auto wrecking yards, divided neatly into sections by size. For a few bucks you can get a paperweight, and for a few thousand, a nicely polished log. Of course, you would need a truck of some size to cart your log away, and a small army of movers to get it situated in your house. But it's a small price to pay for prehistoric contraband.

Cool Taos

(sorry, photos still out of commission, this is the sky in Montana)

Before our trip, we stayed at a KOA over the memorial holiday in California, where the population was decidedly sedentary. Here and there, scattered across the campground, were massive specimens of vacationing humanity. Most of them had their feet up on coolers and were engaged in a non-stop orgy of eating and drinking. One group of four people had even brought a portable oven and gleefully stuffed a 25 lb turkey into it. In these dark days of Atkins diets and 12-step clubs, it's refreshing to see such unapologetic gluttony and alcoholism in action.

As we headed north, we began to find our fellow campers more slender, but occasionally infiltrated by religious cults. In Missoula, for example, we met up with some ex-pat South Africans, whose women who wore bonnets and gingham dresses and sang prayers before dinner. I heard a 12 year old boy explain to his mother that the reason he had taken a bike from another boy was "because he has to learn to be more patient about adversity." I see a great future in politics for that young man.

As you turn south, things change again. The encampments of boy scouts, trout fishermen, and Church of Christ buses give way to vacationing teachers driving their kids across the country in hybrid vans.

By the time you get to New Mexico, everything becomes "cool" again. For a good example, you need look no farther than the upscale town of Taos, whose adobe buildings have all the appearance of having been built out of slightly melted coffee ice cream.

If you haven't heard of Taos, it's because you're not an artist. Its chief attraction is the Taos pueblo, whose adobe houses and church were an object of veneration for Ansel Adams and Georgia O'Keefe. Even today the pueblo is a rite of passage for serious painters and photographers, who come hoping to measure themselves against the masters. Its residents, who are determined to exploit this mystifying stream of artists, open the doors early and charge per camera.

The rest of the town is quite a pleasant, sunny place. Its main square is composed of open air cafes, fair-trade shops, and dozens of "galleries" selling Native American-inspired art. We celebrated our return to this kind of civilization by purchasing fresh-roast coffees, and spending ten minutes deciding not to buy an interesting disk of green glass for $59.95.

But if you are the kind of person who finds it hard to resist a painted headdress or a piece of iron twisted into the shape of an eagle, I'd advise giving Taos a wide berth.

Weeding Kansas

(The photo this post is not from its location. You can find moose in Kansas, but they are almost always mounted over a fireplace. We had a mishap with our cameras and CF cards, and our pictures of Kansas and Nebraska were obliterated. This picture was taken in Grand Teton.)

After reaching the apex of our journey (The Mitchell Corn Palace), we made a swing through Minnesota, Nebraska, and Kansas. The excellent reason for this odd route was that neither of us had ever been to Minnesota, Nebraska, or Kansas.

But it's actually a good thing, because it brought us through God's country. God talks to you a lot in Kansas. "Life is the only choice," He says on many billboards. "Have you read my best-selling book?" He asks. He then reminds you, "There will be a test." Whoever put up that sign—and many similar ones—should reread the best-selling book in question, and particularly the part about taking his name in vain (Deuteronomy 5:11). It does cover such things as portraying your Lord as a smart-ass.

Still, it's good the people of western Kansas have found God, because there's not much else to find there today. It is a desolate place. Every inch is farmed, but typically by mechanized means. You hardly ever see anyone, merely neat groups of stainless-steel silos and parked combines. Years, ago, that wasn't the case. Kansas was dotted with a thriving network of small prairie towns, manned by an army of homestead farmers.

Today, the towns are still there, but many many of the people have gone, and their neat barns and cottages have long been plowed under. Instead you find towns with ghostly rows of brick buildings, abandoned storefronts, cracked sidewalks, and faded signs. It's strange that the heartland of the country should seem so empty.

We'd actually like to come back here some day and poke around some more. Places like this can have interesting secrets.

Kamping

The American institution that has largely supported our trip is Kampgrounds of America, or KOA. This picture is from the first (and in our experience best) KOA in Billings, Montana.

Typically, when we roll into a campsite, we have a time-saving system that ensures that our nights are relaxing and refreshing. We start by unloading our camp chairs. Then, I take one of these, open a cold beer, put my feet up, and undertake the arduous duty of overseeing Nicole, as she sets up the tent, builds a fire, and cooks dinner. In all, it usually takes about 20 minutes from parking to hors d' oeuvres.

For some reason, KOAs have a reputation for being glorified trailer parks. And some do look remarkably like them. The bigger ones always have a number of rough-looking trailers that seem to be permanent habitations. (The chief evidence is that they don't have tires).

But with rare exceptions (Grand Island, Nebraska, for example), KOAs are remarkably nice. Typically, you get a plot of grassy ground, a fire ring, a picnic table, water, electric, and WiFi. If you're one of those people who bathes regularly, they have showers. Their convenience stores are also reasonably priced, and the bathrooms are clean.

The first one was founded in 1962 by a Billings businessman named Dave Drum. By 1969, there were almost 300. The peaked at 900 in the early 1980s, but now number only 450, with some of those in Japan. Even so, trends point upward. With baby boomers increasingly buying RVs, KOA added 13 new campgrounds last year.

A-maize-ing

As the symbolic eastern frontier of our trip, we have picked the town of Mitchell, South Dakota. The reason? In a state full of manufactured tourist attractions (Sitting Bull's Cave, Old MacDonald's Farm, Mt. Rushmore) Mitchell has perhaps the best gotta-see-it of all. The world's only corn palace.

Some people—and not one of them should be allowed to reproduce—will say that the reason Mitchell has the world's only corn palace is because Mitchell itself invented the corn palace. I find this a travesty. We can't blame Mitchell because no other town has ever acutely felt the lack of a corn palace and dared to build one.

Mitchell's citizens came up the idea in 1892 as a way to put the town on the map. It turns out that Lewis and Clark, those bastards, had said that South Dakota was so barren that nothing could ever grow there. Mitchell proved them wrong. Every year, the city buys bushels of native South Dakotan corn, genetically engineered to have different colored kernels, and nails them in hokey patterns all over the building.

It's quite the attraction. 500,000 people will show up this year—including a carload of confused-looking Indian women in saris who followed us there. They took pictures and looked at us very politely, though every last one of them was thinking that America's time on the world stage should pass, and soon.

I would agree with them, except that I think Mitchell is an extraordinary place. It takes a special kind of person to walk up to complete strangers and say, with an entirely straight face, "Have you seen our Corn Palace?" I don't think I could do it. And, yet, the town has so many people who can.

At Wounded Knee

Though the Pine Ridge reservation may have the name of a tract-home development, it has nothing in common with one. We had a few free hours and decided check out Wounded Knee, the site of where the last major "engagement" between the US Army and the Sioux. You can find a good description of it here.

Though the incident looms large in Native American history, you'll find little there to commemorate it. This picture shows the site where the massacre occurred. You'll notice there is no visitor's center, no museum, and no informational kiosk. Up close, you can only find a few swap-meet style tables selling trinkets and a blue plaque explaining the event.

Why so little commemoration? Well, today Pine Ridge is one of the poorest places in the world. Not in the US, in the world. Average income is $3,800 per year. 85% of the people are unemployed, 97% live below the poverty line. Life expectancy for men is 47 years. By comparison, the life expectancy for men in Bangladesh is 63.

Oddly enough, it has plenty of rich farmland and many beautiful horses.

Bad Badlands

We have spent two days at the Badlands. Before we arrived, my sister, a geophysicist, told us about an interesting combination of sedimentary layers found within it. It turns out that in one layer there are lots of fossils, and in the one above it, there are almost none. In other words, it documents a massive die-off in species millions of years—the same one, in fact, that took away the dinosaurs.

But I would like to protest. I am in South Dakota, and John Thune is the senator in these parts. A staunch evangelical Christian, he doesn't believe any of this hogwash about sedimentary layers. To him, the paleontological record at the Badlands shows nothing more than the inventiveness of the Evil One, who is always thinking of new ways to tempt us with the folly of evolution. He's a senator, mind you. My sister is merely a geophysicist. What would she know?

The Badlands are, of course, one of the weirdest landscapes you'll ever find. They rise abruptly out of a grass green prairie like an upside down version of the Grand Canyon. Bands of red and gray sandstone alternate in spired hills, intricate and numerous. One day, we saw a mountain goat framed against the sky as he peered off the edge of a high ridge. What's better than that?

I've included my sister's letter in the comments.

Hunting buffalo

Nicole and I recently purchased two Canon Rebel XTI cameras, a pair of lenses, and several books describing the mysteries of F-stops, shutter speeds, and ISO numbers. Until we met this obliging buffalo, a resident of the Sage Creek Wildlife Preserve, none of it was of any use.

I don't know his name, but I do know he likes to eat huge bunches of prairie grass and could give a rat's ass about who watches him doing it. We grew so excited at seeing a buffalo up close that we followed him around in our car, blasting away with every combination of camera settings we could think of. What we lacked in knowledge, we made up for in thoroughness.

From time to time, he obliged us by looking up as if to say, "Aren't you done yet?" This captures him in one of those moments.

Crazy as Crazy Horse

Fifteen miles from Rushmore is a curious monument-in-progress to the great Sioux warrior Crazy Horse. Who is he? Feel free to ask, but don't do it there. You'll be hard pressed to discover an answer. As with many tributes to the Indian Wars, it's short on detail.

The Crazy Horse Memorial is something of a folly, but a massively interesting one. Its subject was a noted Sioux military leader, who took part in many memorable battles and showed extraordinary courage, cunning, leadership, and the rest. In the West, we often put up monuments to such people. But Crazy Horse was a true Sioux. He eschewed fame, didn't like to have his picture taken, and considered the Black Hills so sacred that it's entirely doubtful he would have liked to see them defaced by his image.

Nonetheless, in 1948, the Sioux chief Sitting Bear became depressed by the fame of Mt. Rushmore, which was located in his peoples' sacred Black Hills. He invited sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, who had labored on the other mountain, to create an even larger sculpture of Crazy Horse to let the world know that "the red man had his heroes too."

A few notes about Ziolkowski as an artist: he is much better than Borglum, the man who created Rushmore. His sculptures, of which there are many examples at Crazy Horse, show an ability to both understand the spirit of a person and render it in physical form. His model for Crazy Horse is not perfect, but it shows a young man, superbly shaped, driving forward in an unmistakably martial gesture. It's darn good. By comparison, Borglum's model for Mt. Rushmore looks like an elderly barbershop quartet. The only thing that saved it was that the project ran out of money before Borglum could get started on the cravats.

Still, the Crazy Horse project is mad. In the first place, it's godawful huge. The entirety of Mt. Rushmore, which took 13 years and government backing to carve, would fit inside the noble warrior's head. What's more, Crazy Horse will be carved in three dimensions, and when finished it will be, by far, the largest sculpture the world has ever known. Nothing even remotely compares.

Worst of all, and perhaps most noble, is Ziolkowski's vision. He conceived the project, and began working on it alone. For the first seven years, he labored each day, by himself, walking up the hill to drill holes and place dynamite. He hated the government and would not accept its money (or interference). It was only over time that private support came.

The project, naturally, outlived him. But his wife and seven of his ten children have carried on. They raise millions every year by charging entrance fees, selling trinkets, and trying to raise donations by funneling visitors to see a dreadful bore of a movie. Whenever they get money, they work, but they have no idea when they'll be finished. Today, nearly 60 years after Ziolkowski drilled his first hole, only the head is carved.

Above all, Crazy Horse is not about the Sioux, who are deeply divided about the monument. Instead, it's about an artist, whose stubborn perseverance and refusal to compromise have inspired generations of his family and others to do the same. One wonders whether to root for them, or call in Dr. Phil.

James K. Polk wuz robbed

To go from I90 to Mt. Rushmore, you have two options: through the historic-now-casino town of Deadwood, or along Route 16 from Grand Rapids, which runs a gauntlet of waterslides, theme parks, and cave adventures. They culminate in Keystone, one of the world's great repositories of false-front stores, fake lawmen, and women who are paid to stand outside restaurants wearing poorly-fitting hoop skirts and prairie bonnets.

The park, which is five miles further on, contains the famous heads, which were carved from 1927-1941. The artist was monumental sculptor and "bully" patriot Gutzon Borglum. While there, we learned that he selected the presidents based on their work in two key areas: preserving the Republic and expanding its borders. Washington was chosen for defeating the British, Lincoln for defeating the Confederacy, Jefferson for making the Louisiana Purchase, and Teddy Roosevelt for the Spanish American War.

Which brings us to an important point: Borglum made a very unfair selection. What about James K. Polk? He was president during the Mexican War, waged largely to give us the great states of Texas, California, Nevada, and so on. Roosevelt only made only minor lasting contributions. To him, we owe the possession of Guam, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and our famous naval base at Guantanamo Bay. Bully for him. Polk gave us Las Vegas and Hollywood. Where is the equity?

The mountain is smaller than you might imagine, and it's been photographed so often, no description is going to add much. However, it has a gift shop that is too little mentioned in history.

The Mt. Rushmore Gift Shop is one of the great wonders of the world. Although only the size of a drug store, it has nonetheless managed to put the four presidents on every possible knickknack imaginable. In addition to spoons, paperweights, postcards, T-shirts, dinner plates, and such standard fare, it has extended kitsch to entirely new classes of commodities. I know what you're thinking. Presidential bobbleheads. It goes way beyond that. There's Mt. Rushmore needle point, paint sets, snowglobe refrigerator magnets, buckskin bags, baseball and bat sets, cribbage games, backgammon tables, stuffed presidential animals, shot glasses, wine glasses, multishot viewfinders, slide shows (who the hell has a slide projector these days?), pens with stone carvings of all four heads, and my personal favorite: the Mt. Rushmore Dig Experience. This toy consists of a piece of sandstone, a hammer, a chisel, plans for carving your own miniature Mt. Rushmore, and a pair of safety glasses. Just what every boy needs.

As you can probably tell, we left Mt. Rushmore in a great mood. Some of you will be receiving Mt. Rushmore tealight-holders soon.

Custer's Last Stand

We've pulled off the highway to examine the interesting but utterly vapid memorial to Colonel George Armstrong Custer, a noted lunatic who led 200 cavalrymen against the assembled Sioux and Cheyenne nations. And paid the price. Throughout the entire battlefield site and museum, you'd be hard pressed to find out a) what happened b) how it happened or c) why it happened. And no one there seems to know either. The battle occurred in 1876, and we heard a park ranger explaining that many of Custer's men were immigrants from Ireland, who came to the US to escape the potato famine. The Irish potato famine occurred in 1846, 30 years earlier.

What you do get is a lot of artifacts, a number of tombstones, and two monuments, one to each side. There is also a remarkable photo of Colonel George Armstrong Custer and his wife sitting in their study. On the walls above them are two pictures. Both of them are photos of Colonel George Armstrong Custer. That gives you the measure of the man.

Custer is opposed in the museum by Sitting Bull, the spiritual and rhetorical leader of the uprising that our vain colonel was sent to suppress. His words are recorded, most are of righteous and justifiable anger. The problem, of course, was that his people did not have the power to back up those words, and that he actually led them into a hopeless and suicidal war.

After the inevitable defeat, Sitting Bull refused to surrender and went into exile for five years. He returned in 1881, and then, in 1885, embarked on one of the strangest career moves in history: he joined Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show. Audiences loved the surly chief, who rode around the ring and roundly cursed them in his native tongue. Cody, who paid Sitting Bull $50 a week for this service, had earlier helped destroy the buffalo on which the Lakota Sioux subsisted. History is not quite as simple as we think!

I've always been surprised that Red Cloud, who was also an eloquent spokesman and the only Native American leader to defeat the United States in war, is less revered.

Hard right

The other night, as we were sitting in a cabin, with 30 mph winds and rain snuffing out the burners on our camp stove, we looked up the weather for our next stop: Banff, Alberta. The best we can say is that the seven day forecast was remarkably consistent. Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, and rain.

We regret to announce to the people of Canada that if that's all they can do with respect to the weather, we'll have to take a rain check. Rain check, get it? Oh, we do know how to have our fun, now don't we?

Instead, we have decided to backtrack and head east where South Dakota's Badlands are experiencing a mild, balmy summer. Expect future posts to cover grassy plains, exotic mountain forms, and presidents' heads carved in stone.

Road to the Sun

Montana is so universally beautiful that it has places you've never heard of that are so remarkable that any other state would send platoons of congressmen to lobby for them to be national parks. Instead, Montana contents itself with only one park, Glacier, and it is a treasure.

Unfortunately, the night we arrived, a threatening sky began releasing large drops of rain, just as Nicole had just put the finishing touches on a vat of corn chowder. We hustled into our tent with books, and were happy until we noticed that it wasn't only raining outside. Years of service and abuse had rendered our tent no longer waterproof. We watched with some interest, perched in the middle of our air mattress, as the water level rose up around us. We grabbed buckets and tried to bail ourselves out, but it was no use. Finally, the captain of our ship—Nicole—declared it was time to head for the boats. We rented a cabin for the night.

The rain, wind, and cold continued for the next three days. Luckily, Glacier is eminently drivable. Its chief visual feature is not, incidentally, glaciers, which are mighty scarce in those parts. I'm reliably informed by a conservative friend of mine that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by enviro-fascists. I tried to explain that to the one shrunken glacier that we did see, but it wouldn't listen to reason. Instead, we had to content ourselves with the brilliant aquamarine water of the glacial lakes they had left behind.

The chief thing you must do in Glacier is the Going-to-the-Sun Road. Montana is not a state to name places with such odd names. Its towns, valleys, and mountains are largely named after people—men, mostly explorers, businessmen, or members of the Jefferson administration. But how else could you commemorate something like that? Going to the Sun is about as good as you can do.

It is, of course, hard to describe physical beauty—the rough slate mountains, the blue green lakes, the torrential rivers cleaving gorges through the rock, the brave little road clinging to the side of the mountains—but you must see Glacier before you die. Only do it in August. It's very cold in June.

Apologies for the photo, which was taken in a freezing rain. Hopefully it gets the point across.

Campground cooking -- Camp bread

For a while we've been planning on giving out some recipes we use at night to ward off hunger and attract wildlife. This is the first, simple one, but we use it a lot. For those of you who live in mortal fear of olive oil, this tasty flatbread can also be grilled.

Before you leave for the campsite, buy premade pizza dough, or do this:

4 cups of all purpose flour
6 ½ tbsp of olive oil
1 tsp kosher salt
1 tsp yeast
1 ½ cups of warm water

1. Dissolve yeast into the water.
2. Put flour and salt into the bowl of a food processor. Pulse to combine. Add 6 tbsp olive oil, pulse to combine.
3. Add the water and yeast. Process it until the dough pulls away in a ball from the wall of the food processor (10-15 seconds).
4. Take a heavy duty 1 gallon Zip-lock bag and add ½ tbsp olive oil. Place dough in bag and seal.
5. Massage the oil over the dough so that it's all slippery. Put in fridge or cooler. Wait one day before using.

The dough lasts about a week. It's a very good idea to double bag it, as it will swell.

At the campsite

1. Put 1-2 tbsp of olive oil into a pan and heat over medium heat.
2. Take dough, break off a piece slightly smaller than a golf ball. Roll into a ball. If you have time, let it rest covered for 15 minutes.
3. Flatten it with your hands until it's a large disk ¼ inch in width. Drop into hot oil. Fry until golden on both sides.
4. When it comes out of the oil, shake salt and pepper over it.

Serve with ranch dressing or cheese sauce. Also good dipped in chile, stew, pot roast, meat loaf, tomato sauce, or just about anything except chocolate milk. This bread is quite versatile; you can even put cinnamon sugar on it as soon as it gets out of the pan and serve it as dessert.

A comment about comments

We've made it so that you don't have to log in to make comments. Google is a gathering evil, but in this case they are providing free space for us.

Not exactly a lake

This is the Berkeley Pit copper mine, whose tailings make a colorful bowl around the town of Butte, Montana.

The mine, which contains one of the largest open pits ever dug, was active between the years of 1955 and 1983. When it was no longer profitable, the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) shuttered its doors and turned off the pumps. Millions of gallons of water flooded into the pit, dragging with them all of the metals from the surrounding soil. With time, the water has become as acidic as vinegar and developed a mineral content so high that several companies have considered mining it.

In 1995 a flock of snow geese landed in the water and all 342 of them turned up dead the next day. Coincidence? ARCO thinks so. They maintain there's no evidence that the geese died because they happened to drink water laced with cadmium. "Perfectly healthy for a growing goose" was their assessment. Others, including the state of Montana, are not so sure.

The real trouble will start if the water level reaches 5410 feet, when it will compromise Butte's groundwater supply, making it impossible to live there. Water sources have been diverted and treatment plants built to make sure that never happens.

Today, the mine has a visitors' center and a viewing platform. Its gift shop, blithely unconcerned with the poison stew nearby, sells copper tea kettles and huckleberry jam.

Personally, I hope the water level stays low. Butte is a such a nice little town.

The best little town in America?

We have a family connection to Bozeman, Montana, an uncle who has traveled to just about every place in the world. He's an immensely popular fellow, not merely because he never lets anyone else buy a drink, but because he has done so many things and consequently has so many stories. My favorite is the time he was arrested in Nogales, Mexico without enough money to bribe his way out of trouble. He suggested to the local police that they take him to his bank in San Antonio, Texas, so that he could pay them off. They agreed, and soon they all piled into a cop car, crossed the border, and entered the bank. There, my uncle promptly jumped over the counter and had them arrested for kidnapping. It is illegal, of course, for anyone but an American policeman to hold someone against their will in the US.

Every March, this man, who can afford to go anywhere in the world, makes his way to the Bozeman, Montana, population 30,000, where he spends the spring fishing for trout and raising hell. (He used to tear himself away every summer to catch the queen's birthday in the Netherlands, which is apparently also a great thing to do.)

Naturally, I've always been curious about it. We arrived late, checked into a hotel in the center of town, and headed out. I was somehow expecting it to be the kind of place where the only drink available is beer, and you can only have it one of two ways: with a shot of Jack Daniels and without. Instead, we found a handsome downtown lined with old brick buildings. The MacKenzie River Pizza Company provided a good microbrew and an excellent thin-crust pizza.

Then, in that late-night light you get in places like Montana, we went exploring. I live in a small town about the size of Bozeman and I felt horribly cheated. Not only does Bozeman sit in a pleasant valley with snow-capped peaks, it has a welcoming strip of shops and restaurants. I was a little surprised to see so many wine bars, art stores, and fair-trade coffee houses, but they were evenly balanced by old-fashioned cocktail lounges, fishing supply shops, and places serving sides of barbecued elk. The folk—calling them "residents" is not proper or even entirely safe—were friendly, but not to a fault, and helpful but not to the point of intrusion. We liked it a lot, and but for the winters, I could see living there.

Jackson, Wyoming should come up to Bozeman and take notes. It's the genuine article.

A command performance

About fifty miles north of Teton—a drive we spent idling along behind a bird watcher hanging his head out the window at 35 miles per hour—we passed the gates of America's first national park. Yellowstone has two major attractions: the first is wildlife. It's easy to see bison and elk, and easier to see a bear, especially if you leave the remains of a good steak dinner on your picnic table and head off to bed. The second is what the park likes to call "geothermal features."

In layman's terms, Yellowstone has more active geysers than the rest of the world combined. There are some in a remote area of Russia, a few in New Zealand, and a handful in Iceland. But even if you travel the ten thousand miles needed to see all of these, you won't see as many steam plumes, bubbling mud pits, sulfurous pools, and boiling hot springs as you can in one hour in Yellowstone. It is a fascinating place to walk around.

Given the general interest of these geologic marvels, you have to wonder at the sheer scale of devotion lavished on Old Faithful. To see the famous geyser, you start at a stadium-sized parking lot filed with vans, RVs, and tour buses. Then you pass through a mammoth lodge with a lobby, a sitting room, a cafeteria, and a fireplace large enough to roast an entire elk—a waste too, given their protected status. There's also a gift store half the size of a Wal-Mart.

It's packed with a regular United Nations of tourists. There are old ladies speaking German, young ladies speaking German, young men speaking German, and even babies babbling out a few words of German.

Everyone is brimming with anticipation over Old Faithful. All around the lodge, you can see a chart with the words: "Next eruption predicted at 4:10." You eat, you drink, you trade opinions on the upcoming match between Dortmund and Schalke.

Finally, the scheduled appearance draws near. The entire mass of people in the lodge head towards the door. They go in a great flood of T-shirts, jeans, baseball caps, polyester shirts, golf shoes, and flip-flops. They have video cameras, tripods, zoom lenses, and disposable Flash cameras. There are even walkers and wheelchairs, and not a few people drunk enough to need both.

Five hundred strong, they crowd into two banks of benches spread into a broad arc around a large white mound with a little trickle of steam coming up from it. Friends are made, phone numbers exchanged, and bottles get passed around. Finally, the steam grows more active, and soon, splashes of white water are seen bubbling over the top of the mound.

Then, the wind shifts, and, lo, a cloud of sulfurous steam powers upward envelops the crowd. Blindly, we flail about with cameras.

"It's erupting," shouts one person.

"Der Geysir bricht aus!" shout the other 499.

The cloud makes it impossible to see and difficult to breathe. But we persevere. Every moment or so, we see a plume of water splash high in the air. For two long minutes, the cloud lingers over us, fogging over our cameras and permeating our clothes. Then, as suddenly as it began, it ends. Old Faithful has turned in another of his world-famous performances. We all get up and turn towards the exit.

Old Faithful, it seems, suffers from the same fate as David Hasselhoff. He's much more popular in Europe.

Show us your Tetons!

The title here is not entirely juvenile. Les Grands Tetons, in French, means "Big Nipples," a circumstance that has brought some academic controversy to the mountain range. Some believe they were named by a French trapper; others by the Teton Sioux Indians. Recent historians tend to fall on the side of the Sioux. The main point in their favor is that if you look at the peaks carefully—or not so carefully-- they look nothing like nipples. Then again, if you were a lonely French trapper, a year or so from your last…. Personally, I'm going with the Sioux.

The park itself has an interesting history. Back in the day—the day being the turn of the last century—the national park movement not only tried to preserve beautiful places, but also animals. And when Teton was proposed, the pressing interest was not the mountains, which were relatively safe, but the elk herds that grazed in the north part of Jackson Hole. The same thing that was attracting the elk—lush meadows--was also attracting cattle ranchers. Soon, Teton was involved in a classic east-west standoff.

The conservationists were led by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and his lovely wife. Flush with cash from the conservationally tone-deaf Standard Oil, they started buying up land in and around the area with the idea of donating it to a national park. The plan was staunchly opposed by the locals, who signaled their disapproval by trying to lynch a man from the Department of Interior who came to explain it.

A compromise of the head-scratching sort was soon reached. In 1929, a bill was passed that established Grand Teton National Park. It included the mountains and the lakes at their base, but it made no one happy. The locals hated it because it made a national park where they didn't want one. The conservationists hated it because it didn't do anything to protect the elk, which was all they wanted to do in the first place.

In fact, it took twenty more years before the elk finally got their preserve. By then, cars had become more popular and roads better. The people of Jackson Hole soon realized that they could make a lot more money if they stopped herding cattle and started herding tourists instead. Wilderness areas were expanded and the elk were saved.

The Ghost of the Howard Johnson Rides Again

Jackson Hole is a valley in Wyoming. Jackson is the resort town within it. The river that runs through it all is the Snake and it is a lovely one: a thick rush of water that eventually empties into the Columbia River, and from there into the Pacific at Portland, Oregon. In spite of legend, Dick Cheney did not grow up here. Casper, Wyoming will have to answer for that.

Jackson itself is, unfortunately, a self-caricature of a western town. Hosting so many festivals must have gone to its head, because it looks remarkably like Walt Disney's Pioneer Village. I've never seen so much log cabin construction and cattle-brand signage in one place. You apparently can't even serve sushi here unless you do so with stump seating, a ten-gallon hat, and a friendly "Howdy, pardner, we just done rustled up some fresh toro. What'll it be?"

Still, we have found something good. We are currently lodged in a delightful old motor hotel, the Virginian. If you've never stayed in an old American motel, this is the 70s revisited: a one-story, drive-up affair with paneled rooms, a cocktail lounge, and a steak house. Even the blue, threadbare carpet speaks to the era where Howard Johnson made a name for himself (and taught the world to love pistachio ice cream).

We have the pleasure of this symbol of Americana because of a rainstorm last night. Normally we prefer to camp, but it's now raining steadily. Last night we put up with it. But though our sleeping bags held, water seeped into everything else, destroying two good books and making it tough to cook dinner. Still, Nicole and I managed to create an interesting hot wine drink (see comments for a recipe), and get some sleep. Unfortunately we woke in a driving rainstorm that steadily worsened to snow as the day went by.

Now, we are thinking of heading over to the cocktail lounge and reliving my parents' heyday in the late 60s and early 70s. Actually, if we were reliving that particular heyday with painstaking accuracy, we'd probably be smuggling in our own gin in Mason jars, but that's another story.

Oregon or Bust

We've been trying find a way to sum up the exceedingly good-natured town of Montpelier, Idaho. We could say that Butch Cassidy once robbed the local bank here, and they put up a plaque for him. That gets near to the point, but the story that ends this post may better explain it better.

Montpelier is a renamed town. Originally, it was Clover Creek, best known in American history as the halfway point of the Oregon Trail. This trail was a highway of Conestoga wagons, especially during the early 1850s, when the US government offered 320 acres to any married couple who would settle in the Willamette Valley. There, you could, according to government propaganda, fish with a bucket and grow pumpkins as big as barns. Thousands of people took them up on it. And you think our government lies to us today.

Nowadays, there is a curious museum there, the National Oregon-California Trail Center. It recreates the entire experience of the Oregon Trail through a group of actor-volunteers, who guide you from Missouri to Clover Creek. You are picked up by a "wagonmaster" who takes you to a gunsmith, a general store—all in remarkable condition--and then loads you in a bumpy Conastoga that takes you to Idaho. There, a blacksmith and his wife greet you. And no matter what you say, the actors never break character.

"Have you seen any animals," the blacksmith's wife asks as soon as you're settled on a stump.

In our case, there was some silence, then an English woman in our party raised her hand. "We saw some caribou," she said.

The caribou, incidentally, is an animal that never leaves Canada without having been shot and stuffed beforehand.

"Must have been a powerful adventurous caribou," says the blacksmith.

Montpelier is a farming town mostly; it's hard to know how it can produce enough un-self-conscious people to man such a museum. In any case, their efforts are infectious, because by the time we reached the end of the tour, they gathered us all around and asked us to raise our fists and shout "Oregon or Bust!" I'm afraid we might have.

Straight as General Pace's Army

From Ely, we've taken Route 50, the so-called loneliest highway in the US. It is nearly 100 miles between towns and there are few gas stations. Cars are rare enough that we wave to each other as we pass.

I'm working, and Nicole's driving. But it's hurting our relationship. In many places, the road only curves slightly every 50 miles or so. Not surprisingly, it's putting her to sleep. So whenever she starts snoring too loudly, I give her a gentle shove. I know it's boring, but she could be a little more considerate. After all, I'm trying to work.

The town that Wal-Mart forgot

Little Ely, Nevada has a proud boast: it is 200 miles from the nearest Wal-Mart, or as the locals like to say, 398 miles round trip. That's a seven hour drive to get cheap Chinese-made applicances. It's actually a rather nice place, 6500 feet above sea level and with 4000 residents, the vast majority of whom live in manufactured houses. Though the "mobile home," as these are mistakenly named, have a trashy reputation in the US, when they are properly kept up, there is something nice about seeing them framed against a mountain. They seem to say, "Look, I'm only here for a while, don't worry."

By contrast, when you build a tract home, you first haul in bulldozers and scrape a square mile of land flat, eliminating all the natural contours and vegetation. Then you ludicrously bring in a pile of new dirt and construct new hills and new ponds. And in a final act of riony , you give it a natural-sounding name like "Forest Hills" or "Crystal Lake."

The double wide manufactured home, perched precariously on its house jacks, is less intrusive and more comforting.

Empty, Nevada

We just left Tonopah, Nevada, population 2000. A relic of the state's silver mining boom, it has a casino and several hotels, but its most notable characteristic is that it is the capital of Nye County. And what a county. On either side of this extensive metropolis (which lacks a supermarket), the roads stretch out across a sagebrush desert for 100 miles in every direction before they actually reach a settlement with enough people to field a baseball team. School buses comprise a large percentage of the vehicles you pass on these roads. They shuttle along, collecting lonely children from isolated farms or, worse, houses which seem to have no purpose other than to serve as a backdrop for an extensive collection of rusty cars and appliances.

But it's not entirely alone. Tonopah has a small, non-commercial airport. A quick check of my laptop revealed that the entire town seems to be connected by free, overlapping wireless networks. It's the other townlets in the county that you have to wonder about.

Gas is $3.61 per gallon. Though beautiful in a lunar sort of way, the landscape here could only make a geologist excited, and the geologist would have to be pretty excitable in the first place.

(For those checking our trip progress, we drove north from Ridgecrest, CA along 395 to Bishop, and then took Route 6. This is the little known Grand Army of the Republic Highway, one of the longest roadways in the United States. It ends some 3200 miles later in Provincetown, Massachusetts at the tip of Cape Cod.)

Departure

Today, at 9:30, after two days of feverish organization, we set off in a car packed with only the barest essentials: 14 changes of clothes, a crate of cooking implements, a tent, two pop-up chairs with cupholders, a quart of homemade salsa, an inflatable mattress with cigarette-lighter operated pump, a side of beef, three pounds of pasta, 16 gigabytes of camera storage, 4 DV tapes, a two burner stove, a backup stove, 4 lamps, 20 books, 40 AA batteries, 3 gallons of water, four bags of Nicole's homemade buttermilk ranch crackers, our passports in case we need to come into the country and don't have tuberculosis, two coats, two pairs of gloves, a 300 volt AC car adapter, two laptop computers, a Samsonite video camera tripod, a lightweight titanium "hiker'" tripod, a Blackberry, cell phones, bug spray, sunscreen, a double size bottle of Tabasco sauce, 15 packets of Taco Bell hot sauce, running shoes, and 144 other items which are too many to catalog.

I think the earliest pioneers of the Old West would have admired our restraint. The image was taken from my front yard in Ridgecrest, CA. With luck, we will not see it again for three weeks.

A note about truth

About 35 minutes from my home town, there is a small canyon, lined with eroded walls, deep red sandstone, and such a generally Martian aspect that it has substituted for the Red Planet in a number of bad Hollywood movies. Its name is Red Rock Canyon.

The canyon is picturesque and somewhat out of the way. As a result, when western travel magazines run out of donkey festivals, chili cookoffs, and second-rate rodeos to write about, they send their reporters out to Red Rock Canyon. The reporters, quite sensibly, don't bother to go.

How do I know this? Because somewhere in every article they write, there is an passage that goes something like the following:

"Next to my boot, about a foot away, coiled and ready to strike, was a small sidewinder rattlesnake. Should I have been worried? Cautiously, I stepped back and said to myself that I'd have to be more careful. This was the Mojave Desert after all."

First point. If you ever find yourself within one foot of a small sidewinder rattlesnake, you should be worried. The bites are horrifically painful. The idea that so many reporters could have come away unharmed from so many close encounters with these snakes is a stretch. An article in that case would have sounded like this.

"Next to my boot, about a foot away, coiled and ready to strike, was a small sidewinder rattlesnake. It struck. My foot turned black and swelled up like a basketball. I nearly passed out from the pain and began to hallucinate. Luckily a ranger found me convulsed on the ground and foaming at the mouth. He administered some antivenom. I lived, but I now have no feeling in my ankle and I walk with a cane. I should have been more careful. This was the Mojave Desert after all."

Second point. I have been to Red Rock Canyon 40 times, hiked around plenty, and have never seen a rattlesnake. There are plenty of places to see them; that particular park is not one of them. It's too public, and they're too shy.

So what really happened? The reporters, on their way north, presumably noticed that if you take a right instead of a left at Kramer Junction, they could go to Las Vegas instead of Red Rock Canyon. Once there, while closely watching their investment in a certain horse in the sixth race, they may have popped on the Internet and downloaded a few stories about the canyon. Those stories all contain a fictional account of an encounter with a snake, and all for the same reason.

It's not their fault. Trips are actually long monotonous things interspersed with a few sights. Nothing ever happens on them. To make a story about one any good, the teller must depart from the truth considerably. So, as this trip progresses, if I happen to mention in passing that we took a shower under Old Faithful or fought off a rabid raccoon with a cast iron frying pan, don't take offense.