Our first stop on today's adventure was about 65 miles to Devil's Tower National Monument. It was so early, we weren't even interested in breakfast. We wanted to get here, get some pictures, and get to movin. It didn't quite work out that way.
You know when you see Crater Lake in pictures and you are like "<sigh> that looks so pretty" and then you actually go to Crater Lake and you are like "Holy sweet mother of jeebus! This is fucking amazing! I can't believe that this is the same place that I saw in pictures! Why do all photographers suck so amazingly bad?!"? Devil's Tower is exactly like that. It is stunningly beautiful. It is geologically fascinating. It smells like earth must have smelled a million years ago. Being there on a Friday morning in early May, we weren't sharing this beautiful place with many others. A sign said "Devil's Tower Loop" and even though we knew we had a lot of ground to cover today, we couldn't resist.
Along the way we met a new lady friend. She was pretty.
After finishing our hike we loaded ourselves back in the car. We had a surprisingly delicious breakfast made by some very friendly folks at a tourist stop just down the road from the monument. We set our sights for the Badlands of eastern Wyoming and Western South Dakota.
We entered South Dakota, our 6th state on this amazing journey. She was to be a doozy. The Black Hills are mid-America mountains at their finest. If I were blind I would want to go to the Black Hills so that I could smell that I was in the mountains. If I were blind and had no sense of smell, I would still be able to hear from the way the wind brushes the pine needles and from the call of birds in the distance that I was in the mountains.
On the eastern flanks of the Black Hills is Custer State Park. In any other place, this would be a National Park. It's just that South Dakota is spoiled with beauty. If I were North Dakota, I would wanna beat that pretty grin right off of that bitch South Dakota's face. Well I would at least take a little private joy in her forest fires. She wouldn't have so many forest fires if she didn't let so many people play in her slut forest!!
Custer State Park is FULL of wildlife. We shared the hours we spent here with more wildlife than we did people.
As we left Custer we were greeted by a wicked thunderstorm. We were on 16A - Iron Mountain Road. One of the most beautiful roads in America. We weren't about to let a thunderstorm keep us from enjoying this, so we pulled over and waited it out.
Iron Mountain Road leads from Custer State Park to Mount Rushmore National Monument. It travels through a series of tunnels, each created to provide the traveler with a perfectly framed image of Mt Rushmore. It also has what they call pigtail bridges where you climb up on a road almost like you are in one of those big water slides. It's a really cool road. Willow and I talked about how America has lost it's public creativity and ingenuity. We used to be a nation that took pride in what we could accomplish. Now all we care about is keeping the other side from accomplishing anything. This road is a great example of what tax payer money could and should do. It's also a road that is impossible to capture in pictures just how cool it is - perhaps from a helicopter.
We get dumped out into what is honestly the most disgusting of all National Monuments. It's a parking lot with some flags and a mountain that has been carved. This place actually makes me feel the opposite of patriotic. I appreciate the talent it takes to sculpt faces into such an enormous canvas.. but that's where my appreciation ends.
As we left the parking lot that we paid $11 to park in for about 4 minutes, we headed through Keystone, another place that makes me sad. This is such beautiful country. Why destroy it pandering to the few dollars that the white trash that come here save for all year long? They have New Jersey. Let the Buffalo and the Antelope and Big Horn Sheep and the Wild Turkey have this place!!
Not far south from here, the Thunderstorms faded and we were greeted with a grand rainbow that seemed to invite us into The Badlands
I have been so excited about The Badlands. This excitement wasn't matched by my level of research or planning. When mapping a rough route from Portland to Peru, NE, I saw a road that went along the western edge of The Badlands and then turned sharply and headed all along the southern edge. This route looked the best to me because it served two purposes. It covered the most mileage within Badlands and it continued our southeastern push towards Peru. Weeeeellllllll... We certainly spent a lot of miles bordering the park... The problem is, for 90% of our drive, we couldn't see it. The other problem is that for 70% of it we were on a deserted dirt road. I ran over more dead snakes than I had views of the Badlands. In typical Joseph style, we made the most of this adventure and every opportunity to take in this bizarre and beautiful landscape.
Relieved to be back on pavement, we headed south towards Nebraska. We stopped off at a little roadside memorial to the tragic and heartbreaking Wounded Knee Massacre. While there, we were approached by a giant Native American named Jerrod. He was a terribly nice and gentle soul. He told us stories of finding the bones of children after a hard rain, of meeting the Dali Lama, the Pope, and more significantly Patrick Swayze. He spoke of finding cavalry weapons from the massacre some 120 years ago. He told us how the native people in the area suffered... mostly from the ills of poverty and alcoholism and how despite this they came together to chase big oil off their sovereign land. We sat there for 45 minutes enthralled by Jarrods words, this history lesson he was providing us. All that came to the culmination that we expected from the moment he began walking toward us - "Hey can you guys spare some gas money, We're gonna take these boys to play some baseball and we're out of money, and we just want the boys to have something to do besides terrorize their neighbors... we just need a little money for gas". Those few words erased 125 years of history in our heads. The whole story was suspect! Parts of it might be true, but certainly not all of it. The bones of children... seriously?! come on! We appreciated the stories, true or not, so I gave him $7 bucks and we headed towards Nebraska. This trip is about the people that we meet. It is sad that these beautiful and proud people have been reduced to panhandling gullible tourists filled with white guilt.
By the time we finished with Jarrod, it was nearly dark. We were in panic mode to find a hotel. We made it to the first town past the Nebraska border, Gordon. It was a sad little place. No hotel that I would feel comfortable laying my beautiful Willow's head down in. So, even though it was dark, we headed 95 miles to the east to a little town called Valentine, NE.
We're off to Peru, Nebraska today. There we will get to spend a couple of days with Willow's dad, step-mom, and sister. We are very excited!
Ciao for now!
Don't forget! There are more pictures on my Smugmug gallery!!
(SmugMug Lesson: Once that page loads you can use your arrow keys on your keyboard to scroll through the pictures. The first picture from day 2 will load, so you can use your right arrow key to scroll through that days pictures. You can also use your mouse to click on the picture to open up the gallery and look at picture at will)
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