Apologies for the late posting of our travels after Yellowstone, we’ve been hosting Marie and Shaun for a week and between laughing, drinking and Shaun’s obsessive birding I’ve had no chance to write this piece.  Alex will have more news of travels with M&S (the other acronym is even funnier of course) later.

After Cody, we decided to drive the scenic route back to the eastern entrance of Yellowstone along the Shoshone Canyon.  This drive was described by Theodore Roosevelt as the most beautiful 50 miles of road in the USA, so no pressure on it to meet expectations.  It was very beautiful, another example of why simply driving through the landscape can be so rewarding.  Being the Bradburys we couldn’t drive along a scenic route without stopping to walk through it and after a false start along a trail to a creek that was raging and too high for us to cross we walked along Elk Ridge Trail in the Wapiti Forest.  As a second choice, it couldn’t be beaten, it was a really stunning walk with a creek below us, a series of hoo-doo rock features above and snow-capped mountains in the distance.  We saw two horse riders and two other people on our three hour walk, otherwise it was quiet away from civilisation with only birdsong to break the silence.

We spent the night in Greybull, another small town struggling in the west, the KOA owner greeted us with two cold bottles of water and turned out he was Dutch but had lived in the US and Mexico for the last 25 years, although he still has a strong accent.  We walked around the town which after the closure of its main manufacturing industry was hanging on with a couple of fertilizer plants and the railroad.  We drove from Greybull up through Tensleep Canyon, another scenic drive in Wyoming, and spent the night at Keyhole State Park, we camped by the marina on a reservoir created by yet another dam.  We meant (well Alex did) to go for a walk through the park after arrival but a severe thunder storm and rain put her off the idea and we simply hunkered down for the evening.

The next day was far brighter and we set off early for our destination, The Devils Tower National Monument.  We hadn’t heard of the Devils Tower (we learnt that the apostrophe was lost a while back in translation!) until our waiter recommended it on our anniversary.  It was strangely familiar to me and after we were told of the evening’s film it was clear why, it is featured in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the 70’s film directed by Stephen Spielberg.  The tower is an example of igneous rock (look it up) that hardened underground and has been exposed by the erosion of the other rock surrounding it.  It is formed from predominantly hexagonal columns of stone in the same fashion as the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland.  It is incredible both in the distance as it is visible for miles around and close-up where many columns have collapsed, although none in the last 10,000 years.  We spent the whole day walking around it and went to two ranger talks on its geology and history of human interaction.  The Native Americans regard it as holy and several tribes have myths around its creation, while later arrivals have been awed by it and it was created the first National Monument in the United States.  We went for a run along the road beside it the next morning and discovered that a large number of prairie dogs also call it home as we saw dozens of them standing sentry over their burrows along our route.

After breakfast overlooking the tower we drove on towards our next recommended destination, Belle Fourche, and stopped en-route in Sundance where the Sundance Kid took his name after being incarcerated for 18 months.  Apart from their one major claim to fame there wasn’t much else to Sundance apart from a very muddled museum of local curios.  They’re moving the museum to a much more imposing location and perhaps this will revive the town again.

Belle Fourche’s claim to fame is that it is the geographical centre of the United States, one that we found difficult to understand as it’s in South Dakota, however if you include Hawaii and Alaska, it seems it’s true.  We spent two nights in town, on the first day we went up to the local recreation area (another dam) and spent a wonderful afternoon kayaking in beautiful sunshine across the sparkling reservoir.  In the evening, we went to the towns ‘Downtown Thursday’ where they have a band, street food and most importantly a beer stall!  We had a marvellous time listening to ‘Ruckus’ a local country and western band, drinking beer, eating pizza and watching a large proportion of the local population come out and chat and dance with one another.  It was the night of the UK election so it took our minds off the drama unfolding back home.

Strangely we awoke with somewhat of a hangover, non-the less we needed to be up and on to our home for the next five days so after a reviving breakfast of stodge from the local café we took our laundry into the local laundromat and then drove south again through Spearfish. I had my hair cut in a traditional barber’s shop where the talk was all about fishing and hunting with photos of client’s successful hunts on the walls.  Alex came to pick me up and was particularly taken with the fact they had vacuums they ran across people’s heads after their haircuts to pick up the loose hair, an unusual sensation and one she suggested replicating with our Dyson hand held vacuum in Reg (hmmm, not so sure myself).

We drove on through Deadwood (home and death place of Bill Hickock) to Custer, deep in the Black Hills of Dakota.  The scenery is canyons of red sandstone and hundreds of square miles of pine forest, populated by bison, pronghorn deer and a fair number of RV campgrounds, one of which was Custer Gulch, outside the town of Custer named for the yellow haired loser of the Battle of the Little Big Horn.  Custer led a surveying mission through the black hills that discovered gold, this led to a rush of prospectors who didn’t respect that the government had designated it an Indian reserve, which strangely upset the local Sioux and Cheyenne tribes and coming full circle resulted in Custer being defeated by the tribes at the battle, which is actually located in Montana.

We spent Saturday cleaning Reg inside and out and planning for the next week.

M