Going to (And With) the Dogs: A Half Century of Travel Across North America

Going to

(and with)

the Dogs

♦

A Half Century of Travel Across North

America

David Laursen

iUniverse, Inc.

New York Bloomington Shanghai

Also by David Laursen

A Capital Place ... Reminiscences of a Sandy Lake Boyhood

ISBN 0-595-22529-2

A Capital Place ... Memories of a Minnesota Life

ISBN 0-595-23973-0

Winter Kill ... A Tale of Survival in the Canadian North

ISBN 0-595-38327-0

Going to (and with) the Dogs

A Half Century of Travel Across North America

Copyright © 2008 by David W. Laursen

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ISBN: 978-0-595-51750-3 (pbk)

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Contents

PROLOGUE

PART 1

TRAVELS WITH YOUNG

CHILDREN

PART 2

THE CABIN YEARS-

1971-1987

PART 3

CROSS COUNTRY TRAVELS

WITH SOPHIE

PART 4

CANOE COUNTRY TRAVELS

WITH SOPHIE

PROLOGUE 

I must state at the outset that this is not a dog story, despite the mention of dogs in the title. But when one travels for 50 years and thousands of miles across the wide sweep of North America with dogs in tow, they do enter the story from time to time without really getting in the way. Unlike the children. If truth be told, the dogs were always better travelers than our children, and we traveled with both so there was plenty of time to compare. The children didn’t bark at night but that was about the only irritating behavior they failed to conjure up.

But back to the story. Why did I write this book? Well, I didn’t really write it. It kind of sprung unbidden from the detritus of my life like a mushroom that might rear its head unexpectedly from a patch of well rotted compost. One day I hefted my travel diaries and miscellaneous written musings and decided that this heap of paper scraps and half-filled notebooks weighed enough to make a book. But that doesn’t really explain why I took the trouble to saddle my children and their descendants with a book that someone, someday, might just shame them into reading.

So I will make clear my reasons. There were several. The first, of course, was simply vanity, the reason people, until they age too much, enjoy looking at themselves in a mirror. Another was to share an opinion or two. All of us believe that we have an intelligent idea once in a while and want to pass it on. We also want to share our peak experiences—what we thought and felt on a perfect summer evening when the moon was just rising and the waves could be heard gently lapping on the rocks below our campsite. During years of wilderness canoeing there were many such nights, and days too.

Other reasons for this book are more practical, and even selfish. I wanted to remind our children of shared travel experiences which they may have been too young to remember. But in this I need not have worried. They remembered everything I remembered, and even more. The selfish reason was that I wanted the travels of Katherine and I during our empty-nest years to put down some trails that our children could follow if they someday chose. This book documents some of those trails, and the trails lead far and wide—from the Atlantic Outer Banks to the wild Pacific Coast, from the Gulf of Mexico to Vancouver Island and the Canadian Rockies, through the Inside Passage to Alaska and by canoe through the Superior-Quetico wilderness. And this book gives the reader more than just trails. It names towns, highways, portages, lakes and rivers along the way. And it does more. It tells you how the weather was that day, and the shape of the clouds, and the direction of the wind.

This desire to record the mundane details of one’s travels has a long and honorable tradition. Thoreau did it when writing A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. The explorer Simon Frazer did it in his journals describing his harrowing journey across the Canadian Rockies to the Pacific Ocean down the mighty river that now bears his name.

The travels of Katherine and I do not record momentous adventures, but they do leave a series of clues to some worthwhile destinations. These clues won’t lead to the Holy Grail, or to the gold of the Knights Templar, but they are clues nevertheless. And so, dear reader, if you one day stumble upon our tracks on some windy beach or mountain pass, look sharp, and listen too, for we can’t be very far ahead.

PART 1

TRAVELS WITH YOUNG

CHILDREN 

The travel bug hit Katherine and I early, though we had to grow up and leave home before we were able to do it. There were good reasons for this. Katherine grew up on a hardscrabble dairy farm which had cows that needed to be milked twice a day. If you were fortunate enough to travel anywhere you had to be home in time for evening chores. My own case was slightly different, though we too had cows for a time. But the main reason our family did not travel was that father had traveled halfway around the world—all the way from the island of Denmark—and by the time he reached Minnesota he must have felt that he had traveled enough and seen whatever needed to be seen. Any further travel would be redundant. Father had seen the oceans—the very thought of which would make him seasick—and he had no interest in seeing the mountains. Coming from Denmark, a flat country, father was a true flatlander. Indeed, any change in elevation higher than a boil, he saw as an obstacle and a nuisance to be knocked flat. And he did not hesitate to act upon this prejudice. There was a small hill between our store and our lake cabins which father found particularly offensive. One day he hired a man with a bulldozer to chisel a road through the hill so he would never have to climb it again. Father was happy with this decision and I suppose others were too. Only hikers and other fools prefer climbing hills to walking on level ground.

Father was just as contemptuous of unnecessary travel as he was of mountains, so this might explain why I never got to travel very far from home as a child. There might been other reasons too. My childhood took place during the war years and gas rationing. There was a big sticker on the windshield of our old 1935 Ford that asked, in big letters: IS THIS TRIP NECESSARY? Perhaps father read that windshield sticker once too often and it laid some groove in the brain that he couldn’t shake.

Towards the end of his life father may have changed his mind about travel, or at least realized that there were interesting parts of the world that he had not yet seen. Mother had lobbied for years for the two of them to take a trip to Hawaii, but father scoffed at the idea. Hell, he grumbled, I grew up on an island with ocean all around. Why should I want to see Hawaii? Eventually, though—retired and out of excuses—he finally agreed to go. The great irony here is that father loved Hawaii, while mother was disappointed. Perhaps father saw Hawaii as a prettier, warmer Denmark, where beautiful women could walk topless on the beach without suffering hyperthermia. I wonder if he regretted stopping quite so soon on his westward jaunt around the globe. He could have settled in a warmer Denmark rather then the cold, flat prairie of Southern Minnesota.

But father in his youth must have had the travel bug also. What else would have possessed him at age 21 to abandon his family and homeland to travel halfway around the world to settle in a strange land where the natives spoke in a strange tongue. I suspect that his later cynicism was the result of profound disappointment—the discovery that the world and its people were about the same everywhere, at least in the western world.

Regardless of where my travel urge came from, Katherine had it too. Her ancestors, like mine, had traveled across the Atlantic to reach the United States, and nearly as recently as my father. Her mother’s relatives came from Germany and still spoke German. Her father’s ancestors were French Canadians—Voy-ageurs perhaps—who were some of the greatest travelers of all. So the urge to travel was undoubtedly in our genes and we could hardly wait to express it.

For the first two years of our marriage we were too busy and too broke to think of traveling very far from our Duluth apartment where we were living while I completed my last two years of college. But there was still much new country to explore along the North Shore of Lake Superior and up the still wild Gunflint Trail. When baby Donald was only a few weeks old we drove up the Fernberg Trail out of Ely and camped beside a remote lake in our 1950 Mercury sedan. This car had a small ledge above the rear seat which was just large enough to comfortably hold a sleeping infant. Baby Donald seemed quite happy there and got his first taste on that trip of both camping and travel, the two about as inextricably linked in our future lives as the horse and carriage. Without money, camping made our early travels possible, and we also learned that it was the most interesting way to travel.

When we moved from Duluth to Shakopee following my graduation from UMD, my Editor job at Honeywell kept us too busy to think of travel much beyond driving home to McGregor on occasional weekends. During our two years in Shakopee our daughter Laurie was born and we were both too busy and too broke to seriously think of travel or even taking a vacation. Instead, during this time—perhaps as a way to kill time on a Sunday afternoon—we took up hiking along the bluffs between Shakopee and Carver overlooking the Minnesota River Valley. We found that we loved it. It cost us nothing, we could carry baby Laurie, the views overlooking the valley were splendid (to us), it was great exercise, and we found that walking improved our mental state and was good for the soul. Our opinion has never changed in that regard.

A short time later we moved into our first house in the small community of Glen Lake, saw a used Chevrolet Suburban in a Hopkins used car lot, and this story of travel really begins.

WESTWARD HO

When our serious travels began, we had three young children. For them—and for us too—these first trips were exciting, character building, and even life changing. Our son Donald’s decision to move west after graduating from high school was a direct result of our trips to the Grand Tetons and the Olympic Peninsula. The travels made daughter Laurie strong, determined, and able to work through adversity. They taught our younger children—Scott and Nicole—a love of travel and the natural world, and also how far mom and dad could be provoked before meting out punishment. This was obviously an important lesson because the two younger children somehow managed to avoid punishment altogether, possibly to the envy of their older siblings who were forced to discover those painful boundaries on their own.

The trips were character-building in the sense that they were less vacations than an annual boot camp lasting two or three weeks. Hiking became the family hobby. And not simple walks in the park but eight or ten mile tests of endurance. When the children were too small to walk this far, Kathy or I carried them in a homemade backpack jerry-rigged from a plastic car seat. This backpack was heavy and uncomfortable but it sufficed and there were no commercial backpacks to be purchased in those days. Those children who were old enough to walk were forced to walk whether they liked it or not. Usually not much forcing was required. Laurie quickly learned that protests were useless, though that did not stop her from protesting. She protested all the way in, and skipped and played and sang all the way out. These marathon hikes made her strong and capable and persevering. Donald would hike without complaint if we convinced him there was a trout stream or mountain lake to be fished at the end. Scott, even at three years old, would climb any mountain if we suggested that there might be a bug under a rock at the top of the cliff. Nicole loved to hike, and did so without complaint once she was old enough to walk on her own.

So these trips were an essential part of our lives—a time of family bonding, a time of testing our physical and emotional limits, a time for shared adventure, a time of great joy and the making of memories. Many of these trips took place during the ten years I worked at Honeywell. Of those ten years, the only events that really stick in my memory are these family vacations with Kathy and the children. All those days, months, and years spent sitting behind a desk in a cubicle—despite the deadlines, panics, and overtime—have disappeared almost without a trace. Perhaps it is true that the time you exchange for pay does not belong to you, but to the company, and the company owns even your memories.

But those family vacations were another matter. Those memories remain, almost as vivid as yesterday. And they began quite by accident—on the Sunday we happened to see a used Suburban in a Hopkins used car lot. I had previously driven Suburbans many miles during my years as a DNR employee and knew what a useful vehicle they were. They were not then the family sedan they are today.

The following Monday morning Kathy drove to the used car lot and bought the Suburban after some serious dickering (she was a fierce negotiator even in those days). That purchase literally changed our lives. The Suburban became our mode of power, our sleeping quarters, our prairie schooner, our bed for the night. It freed us from freeways, motels, and a planned itinerary. Best of all it allowed us to travel with hardly any money, which was in short supply at the time.

Our first camping trip—a shakedown cruise so to speak—took us to Whitewater State Park in the bluff country of southeastern Minnesota. We camped in a green valley beside a trout stream, with bluffs all around. There were hiking trails leading to the top of the bluffs which provided magnificent views of the valley below. This trip made hikers out of us, because frankly, there was not a whole lot else to do. The bluffs also presented a challenge to us, and it was a challenge that we could never afterwards ignore. If there was a higher point anywhere in sight, we had to climb it and check out the view. This obsession cost us much in blood, sweat and tears during the years to come. After this trip we were like junkies who had to climb higher, go farther, see further into the distance, until—in the Bighorn Mountains—we were so high that the valley below and the horizon merged and disappeared in a yellow mist.

Returning to our Whitewater campsite after our hikes we discovered that we enjoyed the rhythm of camp life: the shrieks of playing children, the bonfires, the Frisbees and footballs flying, the friendliness of neighboring campers, with whom—though we might never exchange a word—a kind of bond developed. When they departed after a day or two you felt inexplicably sad, their happy campsite now a lonely, empty place. These feelings might have been fall-out from my days at the resort, when your only companions were strangers, who you nevertheless missed when they left.

So I found the dynamics of a campground interesting, and even comforting. You were alone but not really alone. Your neighbor’s lives were lived in the open for you to see. You became each other’s entertainment, but only incidentally, without obligation.

After this trip to Whitewater we considered ourselves confirmed campers and our circle of travel continued to widen—to the Black Hills, the Bighorn Mountains, the Rockies. We also got better at it, and developed a system that we continued to use in future travels. The back of the Suburban held four main items: a rolled-up mattress that we had taken from a rollaway bed, a large steamer trunk that held our sleeping bags, pillows, and warm clothes: a wooden box that held our camp stove and cooking gear, and a cooler containing our food. After finding a campsite for the night, we lifted out the wooden box with our cooking utensils, unloaded the trunk containing our sleeping beds, and unrolled the mattress. In the span of a few minutes we were ready to cook, and ready for bed. Donald slept in the front seat, Laurie slept in the second seat, and Kathy and I and little Scott slept in the rear on our large mattress. And we also slept in great comfort and security, which wasn’t insignificant considering that the parks where we stayed were usually crawling with bears.

This mode of travel was the ultimate in efficiency, and I never envied those fellow campers driving RV’s pulling cars or trailers, or those cursing as they wrestled tents large enough to contain a small circus.

Black Hills-1968

Our second trip after Whitewater State Park was a week-long excursion to the Black Hills, which none of us had yet seen. Scott was ten-months old at the time, and already quite a chunk to carry, even with the plastic car seat I had rigged with straps so that I could carry him on by back. Kathy’s sister Jo Anne, who was living with us at the time, accompanied us on this trip.

We arrived in the Black Hills just at sunset and camped in a cow pasture somewhere in Custer State Park. Taking a short walk before bedtime, we could hear the cows bellowing in a nearby valley. Imagine our surprise the next morning when we discovered the cows were not cows, but irritable-looking buffalo, who were now grazing on every side of our parked truck. We had somehow managed to camp in open range beside a buffalo wallow. We hurriedly threw our gear in the back of the Suburban and beat a hasty retreat, without bothering to either pee or have breakfast. We were not familiar with the behavior of free-ranging buffalo, but they were larger than farm bulls, and did not strike us as being particularly friendly. That experience taught us to make a greater effort to seek out established campgrounds.

We immediately fell in love with the Black Hills. To us flatlanders from Minnesota, these rocky peaks and ponderosa-studded hills were majestic mountains. One evening we drove to the top of Custer Peak, one of the highest points in the Black Hills at 7000 feet. We arrived there quite by accident and found a narrow road ascending the mountain in ever-tighter spirals. Up and up we went on this narrow, rock-strewn, one-lane road, our tires only a few feet from the edge of the precipice. I prayed that we would not meet some other idiot driving down and berated myself for being idiot enough to drive up. It was near sunset and totally silent. Not a breath of air stirred. The skull of a deer lay beside the rocky trail, for by now it was hardly more than a trail. I got the impression all of a sudden that we were in a sacred place where we did not belong. This was an Indian cemetery, or a church, and I fancied that I could feel the presence of strange spirits. Perhaps I did. I read many years later that this was the mountain where the Sioux medicine man, Black Elk, had been carried in a vision and seen the tragic future of his people.

By the time we reached the top of the mountain, we were all thoroughly spooked. On the very top stood a tiny building no larger than a Minnesota fish-house. The children were peeking though its darkened windows when suddenly a loud voice rang out from inside. The children yelped and took off running. The ghost of a dead Indian? Closer inspection solved the mystery. The shack held a short wave radio which had coincidently come to life as the children peered in.

But we had had enough. Perhaps it was the altitude, but my legs trembled and my heart was pounding. I backed the truck around near the edge of the cliff and started down the mountain. It felt almost like an escape. But escape from what? What had frightened us so? The dizzying height? The rarified atmosphere? Probably. But it seemed at the time that we had been trespassing on sacred ground, and had been warned off.

What a relief to arrive in the warm green valley at the foot of the mountain. We arrived at that precise time at sunset when the deer had come into the meadows to feed. As we drove across the meadow there were literally hundreds of deer bounding off in every direction. We had stumbled inadvertently into a Happy Hunting Ground where vast herds of deer grazed beside the ghosts of the Sioux Nation I had the continued feeling that we had somehow accessed Sacred Ground, and had surprised both the living and the dead. The white flags of the bounding deer soon vanished, and darkness settled over the valley.

One morning as we continued are exploration of the Black Hills we stopped at a Visitors Center built 40 years before by WPA workers. This old building, constructed of logs and stone, was a work of art, and I decided I would have a cabin just like it some day. There were animal and geological displays inside which I briefly looked at before going outside to take pictures of the exterior. The pictures would be used for reference when I built a cabin of my own.

After twenty minutes or so we returned to the Suburban and continued our journey. Some 15 or 20 miles down the road someone asked: Where’s Laurie? I hit the brakes and turned the truck around. Yes indeed, where the hell is she? How could you three people in the back seat not notice she was missing? Worried and fuming I drove fast back to the Visitors Center. That was the last place we had stopped. But had she been with us then? I couldn’t remember. How was it possible to lose a child? Particularly Laurie? I should have noticed when the rear seat seemed unusually quiet and peaceful.

We screeched to a halt at the Visitor Center and all ran in. There was Laurie sitting primly beside some kind Park Ranger, the two of them deep in conversation. I believe she was enjoying some treat which the Ranger had given her in compensation for abandonment by her parents. I believe she was enjoying the attention, and didn’t seem particularly surprised to see us. Or particularly worried. Apparently she had been in the bathroom when we left. But after that we counted heads both arriving and leaving. We only had to count to four so it wasn’t difficult.

A day or two later we were camped on Sylvan Lake, a tiny jewel of a pond lying at the foot of Harney Peak, the highest point in the Black Hills. Since Harney Peak was there, we naturally had to climb it, though I was in no mood to carry Scott the three or four mile hike to the top. There was a stable nearby with donkeys to rent. That, I thought, was the answer. Let the donkey do the heavy lifting and pack Scott to the top of the mountain. For once I would be able to enjoy a walk without that crushing weight on my back. Donkeys were born to carry. They probably loved it. Let the donkey pack the boy up that 2000-foot switchback.

The journey began uneventfully enough, with Scott hanging on for dear life on the donkey’s back and me leading the beast by means of a short rope. Donald and Laurie skipped on ahead, followed by Kathy and her sister JoAnne, and me and the donkey bringing up the rear. The trail was not steep at first, angling gently upward through the Ponderosa forest. This was living. The way the old gold prospectors used to do it. A donkey carrying everything.

The donkey had apparently made this trip before because he needed no urging from me to keep moving. Quite the contrary. I couldn’t get the bugger to stop or even slow down. Perhaps the donkey knew that there was a bucket of oats waiting for him on his return to the stable. Or maybe his owner had trained him to make the trip in a hurry so that he could carry more fares in a day. Or maybe the donkey just had a perverse sense of humor.

At any rate, this urgency on part of the donkey was not a problem while I was well rested and the slope was gentle, but once we broke from the forest and began ascending the steep switchbacks blasted from the side of the mountain, it became very unpleasant and even difficult to keep up. Kathy and the kids had to step aside to let the crazy beast pass. I wanted to stop and rest but the donkey wouldn’t hear of it. Nor was the back of the donkey, where Scott was now truly hanging on for dear life, any longer horizontal, but as steep and slippery as a ski jump. The donkey strode on and upward, as quick and surefooted as a cat climbing a shingled roof. Scott was now whimpering in fear. My breath was coming in noisy gulps. JoAnne caught up and ran beside the donkey, attempting to keep Scott from sliding off, or to catch him if he did.

Finally, the summit was attained, the nightmare of the last few hundred yards forgotten. What magnificent vistas in every direction. The sky was the clearest blue. Fleecy cumulous clouds rose on the horizon like puffs from a Sioux peace pipe. It was said that one could see three states from this height. Beyond the hills and valleys one could see the plains of Wyoming to the west.

A magnificent stone building had been built on the summit by early WPA workers and we climbed its dozen or so stone steps for a higher perch. To our great surprise—on the rocky ledges below—a family of mountain goats grazed on the sparse grass at the edge of the cliffs. The goats posed while I took pictures, and we learned later that we were very lucky to have seen them.

On our way down the mountain, only Laurie was courageous enough to ride the donkey, its head now pointed down and its rump skyward. Laurie dug in her heels, leaned back and hung onto the reins, giving the appearance of a rodeo bronc buster, or one coming down a hill on a Toboggan. I was now happy indeed to carry Scott, and never again did I make the mistake of substituting a donkey’s back for my own.

While this trip up Harney Peak had its humorous aspects, there was nothing funny about our next adventure. We had driven south to Custer State Park and decided to take a forest road into the higher elevations. The road was solid, mainly rock, and we continued for several miles without any problems or any concerns. We finally came to a fork in the road which had a forest sign notifying us that the highway to Custer was 12 miles away. We had the choice now of either driving back the way we had come, or taking the 12-mile fork to the Custer Highway. There seemed no reason to backtrack.

As we started down this fairly steep road to the Custer Highway, the nature of the road underwent a surprising change. It was no longer solid and rocky, but soft and muddy. And not just any mud. This was that orange-colored, clay gumbo which is as sticky as glue and as slippery as ice. Slipperier even. So slippery that the truck was hardly steerable. The wheels slipped and slid until at times I was going down hills practically sideways. And I dared not slow down because I needed some momentum to clear the next rise.

This was one of the most terrifying rides of my life. We were slipping and sliding down the mountain, almost out of control. We were miles from nowhere. If we went off the road who would find us, and how would we get our truck out? Down and down we went, mile after mile, slipping and half the time crosswise in the road, as terrified as I have ever been while driving. Ice-covered Minnesota roads in a blizzard were a cakewalk compared to this.

Finally we could see the highway. There was a small knoll to climb before we reached it. I gunned the engine and prayed we could climb that slippery slope, the truck fishtailing all the way up. Then we were out. I got out of the truck and nearly fell down in the gumbo. There was a four-inch layer of gumbo stuck to the tires, which hardly allowed the tires to turn in the wheel wells. I found a pointed stick and hacked away at the mud until I got most of the gumbo off the tires. This took a long time. My cloth shoes had two-inches of gumbo stuck to the soles, and the rest of the shoe was mud too. I threw the shoes away and drove away in my stocking feet, the remaining mud on the tires ripping loose as I accelerated, creating a staccato of hammer blows on the undercarriage.

During the remainder of our Black Hills adventure I stayed on roads that showed indications of recent—or even occasional—travel. No off-road exploring for us. I had learned my lesson—at least for this trip—though it was a lesson I forgot soon enough.

But there was enough to see on the main highways. We drove up the spectacular staircase highway to visit Mount Rushmore, and marveled at tunnels blasted through solid rock along the Needles Highway. We also took the long drive through Spearfish Canyon and explored the shops and gold mines of Lead and Deadwood. We were also among the early visitors to Crazy Horse Mountain, so named because a sculptor was planning to reshape the mountain into a stature of the famous Sioux warrior and medicine man, Crazy Horse, much like Borglum had done on Mt. Rushmore. The sculptor had a small gift shop on the site with a scale model showing what the finished Crazy Horse would look like. It was a magnificent scale model showing Crazy Horse atop his horse, with hair flying and one arm extended as though leading a charge. There was a telescope available where one could look at the mountain side where blast crews were said to be working, and if one looked close enough, you could purportedly see some part of Crazy Horse emerging from the mountain.

When I returned to Crazy Horse Mountain some 40 years later Crazy Horse was still locked in the mountain. The gift shop and scale model were still there as before, the promise to free Crazy Horse from his mountain prison apparently supporting the sculptor and his descendants all those 40 years. I came to the obvious conclusion that the mountain itself would move before Crazy Horse appeared. Not so, they told me. Real progress had been made. If you looked closely enough through the telescope above the jumble of fallen rock, you could see the extended arm of Crazy Horse pointing towards the west. Perhaps so. I would have been happier to believe that the arm of Crazy Horse was bent at the elbow, his index finger pointing skyward, in a gesture of profound contempt for the gullibility of tourists who planked down good money every year to see how far Crazy Horse had emerged from the rock.

Crazy Horse was an honorable man and a great leader who deserved better than to draw bored tourists into a bathroom stop. Borglum, the remarkable creator of Mount Rushmore, would have had Crazy Horse riding atop his mountain years ago.

THE SHINING MOUNTAINS

Yellowstone Park and the Grand Tetons—1969

After camping in the Black Hills and climbing Harney Peak, our appetites were whetted to see real mountains. The next year, for the first time in my working career, I took my full two weeks of vacation and headed west with the family to the Shining Mountains, so named by the early mountain men, or possibly Lewis & Clark. Or perhaps this was a description that had come from the Indians.

Our first night’s journey took us to the Black Hills, where we once again stayed in the primitive campsite on Sylvan Lake. The next day, sometime in the afternoon, I saw what I had long been anticipating—a smudge on the western horizon that might have been a storm front, but looking more like scoops of vanilla ice cream scattered haphazardly atop a purple cloud. The mountains, I said. The Bighorns.

My passengers were unimpressed, which was not surprising. As yet they were only mountains in the mind, and it was many miles before that purple smudge arranged itself into real mountains. And even then it was simply a wall of great height stretching north and south as far as eye could see, a monstrous barrier. What a fright this apparently endless wall must have given those early pioneers attempting to cross the prairie in their covered wagons.

We passed through the town of Buffalo and began our ascent. Up and up we climbed, breaking free of the pine-studded slopes from time to time to see the town and Great Plains to the east. Once on top, the feeling of being in the mountains disappeared. The hills were modest, the meadows gentle, the streams tiny and sparkling. We were simply a mile higher and life went on as before.

We camped beside a stream in a meadow, had supper, and took a short hike before dark, somewhat disappointed. This gentle landscape was not quite what I had been expecting of the mountains. However, the next morning, as we began our descent down the western flank of the Bighorns, we had excitement enough. From the western edge of this gigantic plateau we could see the prairie stretching away to the west so far below and miniaturized that we might have been observing it through the windows of an airplane. Then we started down, switchback after switchback, the truck in low gear, one narrow hairpin turn after another. Down, down, down we went and sighed with relief when we reached the valley below.

We found ourselves now on an arid plain which stretched as far as we could see towards the western horizon. We discovered later that we were in a wide valley, between the Bighorns and the Rocky Mountains to the west. The Bighorns, then, had simply been—like the Black Hills—a prelude of bigger things to come.

We were fortunate, on this first visit to the Rocky Mountains and Yellowstone National Park, to take the northeast entrance into the park via Red Lodge and the Beartooth Pass. To flatlanders like ourselves, the Beartooth Pass is spectacular and somewhat frightening. We were to traverse scarier passes in the future—such as Independence Pass into Aspen, and the Going to the Sun Road in Glacier National Park—but these passes were scarier only because their switchback roads were narrower and in a more crumbling condition, barely allowing two cars to meet, much less RV’s and eighteen-wheelers.

The Beartooth Pass, on the other hand, was a fine, wide road but high—very high—over 10,000 feet. From the summit you could stand at the edge of the highway and look straight down and see five highways—the same highway—zigzagging its way up the side of the mountain from the valley below. A look over the side of the road would give a mountain goat vertigo, and this was certainly true of Kathy, who ascended the pass with her head between her knees and praying in tongues. On this first trip up the Beartooth Pass in mid-June, sunburned skiers were schussing down snow-covered slopes.

Once on top, we were in the alpine country typical of northern Canada or Alaska. We drove through uninhabited country of spruce forest, rocky peaks, and small glacier lakes which sparkled blue in the alpine meadows. We stopped often to take pictures. Now we did indeed see the shining mountains. Off in the distance were the sharp, snow-clad spires of the Absoroka Range stretching north and south from horizon to horizon. The south-facing slopes, where the snow had vanished, were ablaze with tiny flowers of every color. Mountain grouse strutted unafraid under the ponderosa pine.

Halfway between Red Lodge and Yellowstone Park is the picturesque little town of Cooke City, wedged in a valley so narrow that it seemed like the gods had split the mountains with an axe to make room for a town. I suppose the first settlers in Cooke City were looking for gold, but now the town serves as a jumping off point for sportsmen seeking moose and elk in the roadless wilderness all around.

Once in the park, we set up base camp beside a swift-flowing river and remained there for two nights while we drove around and took in the nearby sights, including the beautiful waterfall on the Yellowstone River, and the Hot Springs at Mammoth. On our first or second night in this campsite I witnessed one of the most ridiculous acts of human idiocy I have ever encountered. A middle-aged couple driving a large RV pulled into a campsite next to us towing a trailer carrying two large motorcycles. After getting settled, the pair decided to go for a ride on their motorcycles. We watched as they spent the next 20 minutes donning their riding outfits: leather jackets, colorful neck scarves, chaps, shiny black boots, helmets, leather driving gloves, and so forth. They spent another 20 minutes uncinching their motorcycles from the trailer where they were trussed down from every direction like Gulliver bound by the Lilliputians. Eventually, they managed to wheel their bikes down a gang plank onto level ground, and mount, looking every bit as serious and impressive as Evel Knievel about to leap the Grand Canyon.

With a simultaneous roar, which shook the peaceful quiet of the campground, they gunned their engines and sped off. To my absolute amazement, within two minutes they returned. They killed their engines, wheeled the bikes onto the trailer, cinched them down, and did the whole dressing scene in reverse. Off came the helmets, the gloves, the scarf, the jacket, etc, etc.

Were these people nuts? I had all I could do not to laugh out loud, but managed somehow to keep a straight face, though it did hurt. I wanted to roar, to bellow, to do a primal scream. Had these people done this for our benefit? What a performance. What goddamned fools. But I suppose they were making a point. There were not so many big RV’s in those days. I suppose owning one, and motorcycles too, was a mark of affluence, and a way to show us poor fools sleeping in tents and in the back of station wagons a thing or two about traveling in style.

Yellowstone is in sulfur country, with boiling mud puddles and stinking mist rising everywhere. It all smells like rotten eggs, and Laurie, in particular, was offended by the smell. She said it made her gag, and proved it at every stop. At Mammoth Hot Springs, at Old Faithful, the ritual was always the same: