Travels in the West II

After a week in the friendly, home-like ambiance of Whitefish, the rafting and chairlift riding and alpine sliding and swimming, we left south down the Rockies for places known and unknown. A one-day drive to Yellowstone turned into two as the lure of hot springs and culture intervened in our arrival at the granddaddy of National Parks.

Above Garnett with the ghosts

For culture we detoured through Garnett Ghost Town where well-preserved buildings hastily abandoned in the high mountains above the Clark’s Fork River provided us with a rich sense of the past along with a scenic, winding drive and pleasant, forested trails. Once at the parking area, we walked down the trail, below the sparse, park-like stand of pines and into the former mining town. We walked up to the third floor of the hotel, still solidly standing. Bella was a bit creeped out by the old furniture still sitting about in the hotel with no guests. An array of small houses and workshops with their little stories of newlyweds and hastily abandoned cats were spread about the now grassy town site. A small forest service-run gift shop in the old tavern provided Bella with a digging kit for fool’s gold, which she eagerly looked forward to excavating. Just for kicks we walked off into the forest down a trail towards a meadow before we had a meal on a picnic table and journeyed on down the dirt road through a steep gully back to the Clark’s Fork and the Interstate.

In standard fashion, we arrived in Bozeman after dark for a stay at the KOA and hot springs there. The campgrounds pool was closed for the night (though not the neighboring pay-per-use hot springs). We read some Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and went to sleep with a big wind howling through the trees. The next morning we awoke to beautiful sunshine and calm air. We were the first ones in the pool at ten AM. At KOAs, tent sites have a low demand (unlike the RV sites), so the management didn’t mind that we overstayed checkout time to swim and frolic.

Dinosaur cowboys in Bozeman

The Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman had been at the back of my mind as a potential stop on our trip. When I mentioned its top-notch collection of dinosaur fossils, Bella was quite enthused. So another cultural stop was made. The dinosaur fossils and reconstructions, many of them found in surrounding fossil beds in Montana, where truly impressive—big, complete skeletons and a number of colorful, full size, recreated models. Those, and the kid’s play area were big hits for Bella.

Camp in the Paradise Valley below Immigrant Peak

As we aimed for the northwest entrance to Yellowstone at Gardiner and Mammoth Hot Springs, we drove through the aptly named Paradise Valley of the Yellowstone River, south of Livingston, Montana. Amazingly, we made camp well before sunset, below Emigrant Peak on the shores of little Daley Lake at a little used state recreation area. And not so amazingly, another hot springs was twenty miles away.

One of my little quirks or passions, if I get to a campsite at a reasonable time, is to head off on a cross-country walk, ideally in some sort of loop. A small ridge above the lake provided this opportunity. I told Bella, “OK, our goal is to walk up to that ridge and walk along it for awhile.” She assented, and we were off. Before long we came upon prickly pear cactuses, which found a home in this dryer, sparsely treed valley below the pine slopes and big, jagged buff peaks of the Absaroka Range. Bella was utterly amazed that we should encounter cactuses on our travels. We talked about where and how they grow and she insisted we dissect one or two, which we did.

Sage, lupine, and larkspur under the big sky

The low moisture high valleys below the big mountains also are ideal terrain for sagebrush. I’d been collecting boughs of it to bring back with me to the Midwest for incense. A couple of times on the trip we’d been driving through a high, sage-covered valley when rain came down. The ensuing smell of sage after a rain is brilliant and invigorating with its sharp green citrus tones, as if the sage was celebrating the infrequent rains of its biological niche. The frosted, pale green color of sage has its own visual allure. Often at this time of year in mid-summer, lavender or purple flower spikes of lupine would be mixed in to the fields of sage, creating a beautiful pastel palette of ground cover. Or perhaps the bright red Indian paintbrush might dab its color in, along with the round yellow petals of cinquefoil. This relatively moist summer meant many lovely displays of wild flowers; from the blue, close to the ground gentians and yellow carpets of glacier lilies just emerged after the receding snow on Logan Pass in Glacier, to the large, delicate columbines and purple asters in the high country of Colorado.

The sky too, provided beautiful contrasts to the Rocky Mountain landscape. Montana’s nickname of “the big sky state” is fitting. The large valleys and scattered mountain ranges mean sweeping, distant vistas and with its sparsely populated and built upon landscape you get the feeling of being under the dome of heaven. The big valleys sometimes held in mists and slight hazes, coloring the blue to gentle paleness. Traveling through Colorado, the sky seemed a deeper, rich blue, contrasting with the dark clouds that scudded and swirled about the abrupt, pine-sloped peaks that jutted rocky and bald into the sky.