The video. It's done.

It took a few weeks for this to get made. 

The way the trip worked out the last place we visited was Wounded Knee.

So our ending is not that!

Play the vacation video.

Best and Worst of Vacation 2018

Our 5 state adventure is drawing to a close.  As always when you visit National Parks and Monuments there is awe and gratitude.   The awe for what you see.  The gratitude for policy makers set it aside for future generations to appreciate.

Outside the parks there are some winners and losers on our trip.  Here they are:

Best Meal - Wyoming's Rib and Chop House.  It happens to be a chain, but the food and service were the best on the trip.

Best Server - Marissa at Wyoming's Rib and Chop House.  Points awarded for the ability to write your name upside down.  She was attentive and efficient.  Also pleasant.   Her manager did a great job too.

Worst Meal - Badlands Pizza Parlor.  The food was lousy.  Using frozen crust doesn't work in a restaurant that brags about their pizza.  The nachos were horrible.  Cheese Whiz on stale chips.  Bad!

Worst Server - We don't know his name.  That's how infrequently we saw our waiter at Badlands Pizza Parlor.

Biggest Surprise - Town wide, superfast, wifi in Medora North Dakota thanks to the Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation.  Runner up goes to the discovery that the man who made and marketed Mr. Bubble was the TRMF's largest benefactor.

Best Road Systems - Nebraska.  We were only passing through but the roads were well maintained, wide and were governed with sane speed limits.

Worst Road Systems - Wyoming.  Narrow back roads with unrepaired frost heaves sometimes carried a speed limit of 70.  Their interstates were 80.  They also display little crosses at the spot of each traffic death.  There were many.

Scariest Potential Disaster - Wyoming and their hydrofracking.  I just don't see how burying the toxic sludge will end well.  Runner up is North Dakota.

Friendliest State - Colorado.  Everyone greets you.  Even strangers.

Unfriendliest (or most introverted) State - South Dakota.  People were either afraid to say hello or did not want to greet strangers.  Actual bumper sticker: Now you've seen our state.  Go home.

Next adventure: Hawaii.  Coming January 2019.

Cheyenne, Wyoming (again)

We are making our way back to Denver.  The last long drive of the vacation took us from Cedar Pass, Badlands, South Dakota to Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Jan put our Marriott Rewards Club to work and we are staying in a Town Suite.

The desk area is blog central.  There is a full kitchen off to the right of that.  It also delivers a full size closet, king bed and large bathroom. Nice digs.  

On the way here I added another state to the checkoff list.  Nebraska.  Never been in the state until today.  Acres and acres and acres of farm land.  It also keeps a first rate road system for its motorists.  It is far better than South and North Dakota.  

Our route took us past Wounded Knee.  We stopped.  

Near the sign there are some artisans that are gentle souls trying to eek out a living.  The cemetery and massacre site is up on that hill.  I did not take my camera up there.  It was suggested that doing so is disrespectful but while we were visiting some members of the Lakota Sioux Nation toured and they took pictures.  I suppose it is their memorial.  If they want to take pix and tell me not to do so I am ok with that.

Back on the road after that quick stop and into Cheyenne.  That completes our long driving days.  We had a couple of 5 hour plus driving days.  Today was the last.  Tomorrow we head to Boulder.  It's under two hours away.  Another Marriott property.  Final stop is in Denver near the airport.  

BTW - This Marriott provides a salt water, indoor swimming pool for guests.  Jan is so ready!

Badlands National Park In The Heat

Isn't it always in the heat?  It was warm before we arrived.  Now it is hot, but as planned, we were out exploring early and back to our cabin by Noon.  For a semi-arid climate it is a bit humid. 

You can hike into the park pretty much anywhere you want.  There aren't lots of defined trails.  You are advised to watch your footing.  The number one cause of injury in this park is falling.  The buttes are not terribly stable.  The surface is soft and it moves, especially at the edges.

You are also cautioned to wear hiking boots, not only for the footing, but because there are rattlesnakes throughout the park.  We did not see or hear any.  The snakes enjoy crevasses or tall grasses.  We decided not to wade into either. 

Jan noticed that the colors of the topography "popped" when she put on her sunglasses because they polarize light.  DOH!  I own a polarizing filter.  I twisted that onto my lens and rotated it a bit.  Bingo.  Colors in the rocks emerged.  It also helps to take the pictures as near sunrise as your body will tolerate while on vacation.  Ideally, an hour before or after sunrise works best.  Same at sunset.  The filter allowed me to stretch the light a bit further.

Getting internet access is less and less of a challenge.  You can find it if you look.  In Medora, the Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation wired the town.  It was Google Fiber fast.  I can shoot up to 200 pictures in an outing and I could dump them all into my cloud space in two minutes.

Inside Badlands National Park there is WiFi at Cedar Pass, where we are staying.  Everyone who travels through the park stops at Cedar Pass.  For most of the day the WiFi signal is just too saturated.  I am able to get a 4G signal.  Not really inside the cabin, but on our back porch.

I use "tethering" to share the signal to my laptop.  The back porch is also our clothes dryer on this trip.  We hand wash in the sink and then put them on the backs of those chairs.  Most of the clothes dry in a few hours.  Sometimes the socks are stubborn.  We put those on the back ledge, beneath the rear window of the car.  That works very well too.

The Badlands (Badlands National Park)

Extreme temperature swings.  No water.  Inhospitable terrain.  Just a few of the reasons the Lakota people called the region "mako sica" or land bad.  Yet there is something beautiful about it, especially when you carry your own water and the car is climate controlled. 

The heat from the east coast (and west now too) made its way here.  When we arrived in late afternoon we hung out in the cabin until about 7.  Then we did some touring.  The light is better for viewing and for photos.

The plan is to get up early on Saturday and tour until it gets hot.  It might break 100 tomorrow.

Mount Rushmore

Pulled up stakes in Custer and headed to Mount Rushmore.  It is not very far.  Just 35 miles.  Xanterra runs the parking concession at the National Monument.  There are two, large parking garages.  Currently, there are people in what looks like a toll plaza to collect money for parking.  Soon they will be replaced by the same parking system used at Saint Peter's.  We hope it works better!

Listening to people is often as instructional, in a completely disappointing way, as opposed to simply ignoring them.  Things I heard said:

"There is enough room up there for a fifth person."

" With laser blasters they could add a new face in minutes."

It's granite.  The nose of one of the presidents is about 4 times the size of LeBron James.  There is enormous planning that goes into mountain carving.  The people doing it must create access for their equipment.  The first thing they carve is a road.  That can take a year or more.

This project took decades and it is not even finished.  Nor will it be.  The artist created a sculpture first.  Notice in the picture below each of the presidents had bodies.  Not simply heads.

Much like the Crazy Horse Memorial the original artist on this project died before its completion.  His son finished the task.  There are no plans to "finish" the monument.  There are also no serious plans to add another face, nor should there be.

We'll give TR a little Mount Rushmore love for having the foresight to create a National Park System.

Wind Cave National Park

Some of you may know Howe Caverns.  Others probably checked out Luray Caverns in Virginia.  Wind Cave National Park is not like those.  Howe and Luray are commercially operated.  They are wider and more brightly lighted.  Wind Cave is more cave-like.

On a normal tour you walk on paved paths put down by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Depression.  There are tours where you can crawl into small spaces with a light on your head.

Tour sizes are relatively small.  During the summer there are 11 regular tours a day.  We did some quick math and estimated that no more than 500 people a day get to go into the cave.  Tours are first come, first served.  The park opens at 8 and if you want to see the cave don't get there after 9 AM.

On the normal tour you walk down 150 steps into the cave.  To get out you ride an elevator.  While there can be bats in the cave, according to the Park Service the bats seem to prefer the elevator shaft.  If they go into the cave it is only for a short period of time.

The cave network is vast.  There are multiple layers or floors.  The normal tour walks through the bottom layer.  There are no stalactites or stalagmites.  There are interesting crystal formations that look like intricate lattice work.

After our cave exploration we checked out Custer State Park.  It has enough acreage to support roaming wildlife like Bison and Elk.  In fact we saw some as we approached the park entrance.  We believe these may actually be part of a rancher's herd.

Whether they are wild or part of a ranch the animals stopped traffic in both directions.  There is a large herd of Bison at Wind Cave.  We saw some of those too.

There is a cloud layer over us today in Custer.  The park is 2,000 feet higher than the town, but we managed to get in a hike around Sylvan Lake.  We pictured it as a typical, all access, loop path.  Not so much.

Top picture shows Jan testing out her new hip.  Bottom shows you what we climbed over to make the circle.

The Crazy Horse Memorial

I won't see it completed in my lifetime.  Matt and Jesse won't.  Maybe the grand kids might.  When it is finally completed it will be the largest memorial ever made.  Mount Rushmore fits on the head of Crazy Horse.  It is taller than the Washington Monument.

Invited by Chief Standing Bear to carve the memorial, Korczak started the project, alone, in 1947.  He married and his large family began helping him when they were old enough.  He is dead.  His wife is dead.  His oldest child is dead.  Other children are now too old to work on it.  His youngest daughter, some of the grand children and nieces and nephews now work on the site.

It is a pretty big complex.  It is not a state or federal monument.  It is private.  All the money to make it happen comes from entrance fees and sales in the gift shop.  The carvers are now working on the head of the horse.  Why does it take so long?  It is granite.  Solid granite.  The sculptors must make precision blasts and then use jack hammers and finally chisels.  It just takes a long time.

There is a college inside the grounds for Native People to attend.  It is not yet accredited and cannot offer degrees, but regional universities will accept credits earned by students who attend and count them towards programs they offer.

A medical school is also planned.  As the late Korczak liked to say, "never stop dreaming."

The marble sculpture is what the memorial will look like when completed.  If you visit you are permitted to take rocks home.  In fact, they encourage it.  All of the roads within the memorial grounds are paved using what is blown, carved or chiseled off the mountain.  One of the buildings is constructed using boulders.

There are other sculptures displayed here as well.

I don't know when it will be finished and neither does the organization which runs the site.  They do not deficit spend.  Someday it will be completed.  Meanwhile, when you visit, they are up there carving.

On our trip to this memorial we stopped a couple of other places.  One of our first stops, unless you want to count gasoline and "pit stops," was in Deadwood.  If you took Maryalice's genre class on Westerns the name of the town may be familiar.  We visited the cemetery where Wild Bill Hickok and Clamity Jane are both buried.  

We also stopped at the Pactola Reservoir Recreation area.  

Jan shot some interiors of the place we are staying the next couple of days.  I will get some exteriors to go with it tomorrow.  It is peaceful.  Although it is only a few minutes from "downtown" Custer it is nestled in the woods.  

On our way here we also noticed that there is quite a bit of gas and oil exploration going on in North Dakota.  The state's officials like to brag they are the number two producer of petroleum in the country after Texas and ahead of Alaska.  I also notice there is never any drilling infrastructure where there isn't electricity.  Some of the farms in rural parts of North Dakota use generators.  If the oil prospects look promising the production companies pay to bring in electricity.  Mobile phone towers follow quickly.  

South Dakota is dipping its toes into the same waters, but we didn't see as many wells.  

Theodore Roosevelt National Park - The North Unit

The North Unit.  The South Unit.  And Painted Canyon.  The last one sounds like a national park name.  The first two sound like robotics plants. 

Overnight we were treated to nature's version of a North Dakota fireworks display.  About 1 AM a bolt of lightning struck within a half mile of our location.  It caused the emergency lighting in the hotel to kick on for a couple of seconds. In addition to the pyrotechnics the storm produced a "gully washer" of a rainstorm propelled by strong winds.  

A tree outside our room window grows for these conditions.  It bends and doesn't break.  Unfortunately, it kept bending into our hotel window with a loud slapping noise.  It lasted about 30 minutes and that was the end of it.

This morning we drove the 75 minutes to the north part of the park.  Speed limit on the interstate in ND is 75 and on the state road it was 65.  The North Unit of the park does not receive that many visitors.  There were times when we had the park to ourselves.  

I am guessing that this is what the prairie looked like to settlers centuries ago.  It is a gift to find it again in a national park.

The rock features are similar to the south but not identical.

The above picture is courtesy of Jan.  The area is referred to as the Canon Ball basin.  I think they look more like rock mushrooms.  Either way it is curious.

There are fewer Bison in the North Unit but they also have less area to roam.  Therefore, it is often easier to find them.

I posted a video of a bull wandering off from the herd as they are prone to do.  This bull had someplace to be and decided to use the park road.  The driver safety course did not precisely cover which of us needed to yield the right of way when a Bison wants to merge into traffic but I am think the animal gets to go wherever it wants.

Whether you visit for the wonder of the vistas or the smell of the wild grasses pass along an appreciation of the parks to future generations.  They need your interest and protection to survive.  It is the only park to represent the name of a person.  Theodore Roosevelt signed the antiquities act of 1906 to create a park system in this country.  In his words: "We have become great because of the lavish use of our resources. But the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil, and the gas are exhausted, when the soils have still further impoverished and washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields and obstructing navigation."

Sunset at TRNP South Unit

Calling it the South Unit seems so antiseptic but it is the official designation.  Here's something odd.  The North Unit, where we are headed tomorrow, is on Central time.  Medora and the rest of North Dakota is on Mountain Time. 

Sunsets bring out different color palettes to paint the topography.   

These are not chronological.  I am starting with the last shot I took. Then the next three are in order.