Real West Again

 

John's old Garmin handheld GPS continues tracking us as we follow our noses west from the Missouri River's Big Bend Dam...

...to find ourselves suddenly on an Alien Planet!

Debbie had driven us westward along I-90 from the Missouri River while John slept in the passenger seat. Approaching Wall, SD (home of Wall Drug!), she turned left for five or six miles and life changed.

The Buffalo Gap National Grassland is the location where the buffalo still roam while the deer and the antelope continue to play and pioneer sod home roofs are cut from turf that is, at places, feet thick. We parked the coach close (but not too close) to the edge of a precipice along the free camping US Forest Service Road #7170 and went to bed.

The morning showed us at the very abrupt edge of a new day.

We recall the sharp surprise we both had found when we had trucked our three kids into here back in '92. Nothing –nothing– in our previous lives had prepared us for seeing this stretch out before us.

Debbie wondered aloud what it must have been like for the pioneers, crossing days of grassy plains, to suddenly run into this end of the world wall. Maybe that's how the town was named?

Well before the last dinosaurs died, this area had been a seabed for dozens of millions of years,

accumulating all the layers of organic debris that swimming and walking life sent to the bottom. When geologic forces raised this part of the world and drained it –and then erosion happened, too– the various layers of sediment took on colors depending on what bits of whatever had formed them.

We weren't really looking for fossilized dinosaur left overs although several signs remind you not to steal such things, but report them to the paleontologists who might find possible valuable clues to the universal question of Why We Are Here.

On the grasslands themselves we found it was nearly Autumn. You can tell where the creeks are by following the aspens, which are pretty much the deciduous trees that take to this 3,000 foot elevation. We found Pronghorn and the Bighorn Sheep in abundance.

 

These guys greeted Debbie on her morning 

walk near our coach one morning.

The Badlands has two obvious loops you can tour in your car, stopping

at turnouts to see vistas or even walk among it all. Each takes less than a couple hours to complete. Or more, if you stop to study and marvel. One is paved, but the westward loop, along Sagecreek Rim Road, is an unpaved washboard. Our civilized suburban Honda survived while John continues to miss his old Jeep. Also, we dropped into one prairie dog village where Debbie stopped to chat with a community guardian.

She also perched atop a less-than wild Jackalope, a fictional creature of legend: a jack rabbit the size of

an antelope. It's apparently as well known in the West as the Jersey Devil is back East where John grew up, but we're not sure they named a hockey team after this creature. Then again, we're not sure anyone in South Dakota knows how to skate.

You've heard of Wall Drug. Pretty much, it is the town of Wall, SD. It grew to fame before Eisenhower built the Interstate system and the only “main roads” in the country were the US Highways that ran through the 25mph Main Streets of every small town in the way. There are myriad numbers of tourist trap store fronts along Wall's main drag and you can find many, many ways to part from your dollar. That's not a bad thing if your eyes are open. Debbie bought a T-shirt and the quirky side of John parted with two

bucks at a selection of Trump stickers because the middle of America is filled with practical, Conservative grown-ups to whom Black lies and loud Liberals' outright disdain of anything sensibly traditional or patriotic do not seem to matter at all.

A couple side notes:    

John didn't notice this last year when he featured the Junior Ranger field vests

and uniform boonies hats we'd found at Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks. (Find the paragraph A not-quite apology to our Number Two Son here.) John assumes someone at Badlands NP didn't get the memo about the school boards railing against prejudicial stereotyping of gender assignments. Or maybe customers still drive the markets in Mid America, in spite of the coastal Socialists' rants.

Also, driving long miles between waypoints out West tends to turn a person introspective. The state of Wyoming has historical points of interest along the road way, such as this one, installed in 1954 along US-26 west of Douglas at a

roadside pullover. The text reads:

Three men named Sharp, Franklin and Taylor and one unknown man were killed by Indians July 12, 1864 where the Oregon Trail crosses Little Box Elder Creek 2½ miles S.W. of here. They are buried 4 miles S.W. by the grave of Mary Kelly who also was killed July 13, 1864.

Having grown up on Hollywood Westerns, we thought such death was a recognized part of the settling process in our history. However, seeing the prominent highlighting of this one seemingly innocuous incident could make one believe it was unusual? Almost makes you want to want to visit the scene to learn more.

But we're on our way to Jackson Hole.

...after Gillette, WY to wash some clothes and empty the black- and gray water tanks that are nearing their brims. Once that is accomplished, the plan is to stop one night at a Harvest Host. A farm, this time, not a winery. Greg and Kathleen Jarvis manage a lot of acreage in Hidden Valley,

which is near Shoshoni (proper spelling –for this town anyway). They'd done Harvest Host for ten years but plan to call it quits because of the floods of people fleeing their West Coast governors who are at least as bad as Michigan's in promoting the Political Pandemic. Nevertheless, the Jarvises were congenial and pleasant, offering whatever we wanted to pick from their smaller vegetable garden between our coach and their huge fields of alfalfa. We enjoyed several grape tomatoes and a few ears of corn on the cob that John liked very much. We also made friends with Ellie the Dog.

Kathleen and Greg are a wonderful, believing couple, and Debbie had a great time speaking with them about God's Word. Kathleen mentioned that her church was having a women's retreat that started on Friday evening and invited Debbie to go with her that evening. It was an offer too good to pass up; Debbie had a great time meeting some of the other women attending the teachings on James 1. The teaching that night was about how we are able to grow and mature when adversity comes our way, and triumph over the circumstances with the great promises of God's Word.

While Debbie was there, John took advantage of a great 4G signal for his bi-weekly game night. Our second night on the farm was exactly the second Friday since Duluth. If you're curious, John's Warlock did not suffer near mortal wounds in the battle with Orcs trying to ravage a village that our band of adventurers had under its protection. And we Leveled Up at the end. John's character gets an additional Spell in his inventory and an Invocation; he chose Agonizing Blast. Wonder were he'll play from in two weeks?

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