Black Hills of SD.

We had decided during the planning stages of the trip to stay two nights at Custer State Park in South Dakota. This would give us a chance to rest during the long drive, and for Carole to see Mount Rushmore. I wasn't that high on seeing Rushmore, but Carole has always wanted to see it, so it was on the list of stops. Now that I have seen it, I am very glad that we did take the time to go. This is the way it usually is with places Carole wants to see--initially I am either reluctant to see them, or only mildly interested. But like other National Monuments, this one was spectacular, educational, and inspirational.

The biggest reason I am glad that we stopped at Custer is because it's the only place we got a chance to see big animals. Bighorn sheep, bison, mule deer, elk, mountain goats. Custer doesn't have bears, though. The big predator in the park is the mountain lion which a ranger told us is fairly common; but we didn't spot one.

Custer State Park straddles the highest of the Black Hills, which is a pretty darned impressive mountain range. The highest summit in the Black Hills (Harney Peak) is in the park (it's also the highest peak in South Dakota). So the terrain was a lot more rugged and imposing than I had figured it would be. The weather was unseasonably cool while we were there. It rained heavily during our entire journey through the state, so we figured we'd see a lot of rain in Glacier National Park, also. Alas, it was not to be. The rain we experienced in South Dakota would have completely extinguished the fires in Montana. Alas!

We would all like to return to Custer for an extended stay--maybe a week or so. That way I could see more wildlife and could have the time to hike some of the many miles of trails in the park.

More Black Hills photos and details tomorrow...

As soon as we entered the park, there was a bison jam. Traffic stopped for the big critters. Most of these seemed to be licking the mud along the roadside. I will assume that there is salt residue there from spreading of road salt during winter storms.

Our campsite at Custer. Power hookups, but not for water. They had bathhouses with hot showers. Andy forgot to completely zip up the door to his tent and during the night when a rainstorm struck he had to come inside and sleep in the trailer.

The bison herd in Custer State Park is at about 1300 animals.

We spotted pronghorn, also.

Andy in a cave from which a big spring emerges.

The aptly named Needles. This is where it was first proposed that the carvings that eventually became Mount Rushomore should be built. I'm glad this area was spared.

There are two tunnels like this in the park. This is why you have to be careful which roads you use if pulling a travel trailer or driving a big motorhome.

"What you lookin' at, human?"

A baby Mountain goat with its mother.

Continued tomorrow....

My Favorite Section of Yellowstone

One of my stitched panoramas of the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone National Park.

My very favorite section of Yellowstone National Park was the Lamar Valley. I wish we'd been able to spend more time there, but because of the schedule we had set, we only spent part of one day at that location. The next time I go to Yellowstone I hope to have my travel trailer and if that's possible we'll stay in the campground in that part of the Park.

For just sheer scenic beauty, it was the most breathtaking part of the area. The mountains are grander and the tree cover is greener. We didn't see quite as much wildlife there, but part of that was just luck (or lack of it). We saw the only pronghorn that we spotted inside the park there, so that was a bonus.

I know we'll return for another visit to Yellowstone, so Lamar Valley is at the top of the list for an extended stay.

The only pronghorn that we spotted inside the Park. We saw plenty more outside of Yellowstone, but only one while we were inside the Park.

The herds of bison in Lamar Valley were lower in number than elsewhere, also.

Extinct geyser in Lamar.

These were the kinds of mountains I was hoping to see. Real mountains!

We ended up spending a lot of time on the banks of this river enjoying the scenery and waiting for wildlife to emerge from those dense forests. We'd heard that the area was good for moose and for wolves. We saw neither.

Andy took this one of me.

Another mountain waiting to be climbed.

Supposedly good griz habitat in that direction. So I'd go the other way.

Looking upriver.

Real high country.

More Yellowstone Memories.

Yellowstone's wildlife is amazing. It's everywhere. The only place I've visited where there is more wildlife on display acre-for-acre is Florida. Everywhere we drove and everywhere I hiked I encountered all sorts of animals. They call in "America's Serengeti", and I suppose that's true. And with the return of the wolf to the Park, we have our chief top predator back in the mix.

Wolves were about the only thing we never saw when we were in the Park. We did visit Lamar Valley, where sightings of wolves is most common, but we never did see one. The closest we came to seeing a wolf was a coyote--and that was a young, shy one who hid behind a big evergreen tree and wouldn't come out where I could take a good photo.

My main goal was to see a grizzly bear while we were in Yellowstone. And I saw two of them. Both were from a distance, and one was fast asleep. He was taking a nap along the collapsed banks of the Lamar River. I took his photo from a very great distance, which is the way I always want to see a grizzly bear.

If you look in the center of this photo, you can see the griz asleep in the dirt.

Here's the cropped version of the photo with the sleeping bear.

The true emblem of the faded Pleistocene: the American bison.

I expected to see a lot of pronghorn, but we saw very few of them in Yellowstone. This one, like the griz above, was in the Lamar Valley.

When I go back to Yellowstone, I hope to spend most of the time in the Lamar Valley. It was, to me, the prettiest part of the Park. It was also the least crowded with humans.

There was a trail leading to the top of this peak. I plan to hike it when I return.

To illustrate how fragile the thermal features are in the Park, here is a geyser that was active in the early history of the Park, but which is now cold and dormant.


It took this panorama from the high ridges of a 10K-foot peak (Mount Washburn). It's the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone seen from thousands of feet above the rim of the canyon. The air was hazy in that part of the Park that day because of some forest fires (that quickly faded out by the next day).

Animals We Encountered

One of the main reasons I went to Yellowstone/Grand Tetons was to view the wildlife. It's one of the finest relatively intact set of ecosystems in the lower 48 States. We were not disappointed. We witnessed more wildlife roaming free and essentially wild than I have seen since I cruised around the Okefenokee Swamp some years back. We experienced more large wild native mammals over our days in the Parks than at any other time in our lives. Here's a brief accounting of only some of the creatures we were able to photograph.

This was the only black bear we saw on the trip. It was high on Signal Mountain. Everyone thought it was a griz, but it was actually a brown-phase black bear. I think it was in the midst of shedding its summer coat and growing in its winter one. It never raised its head the whole time we were watching and was intent only on eating the berries growing all around it.

Click on this stitched panorama. It was taken of a set of bison herds in Hayden Valley. The bison are quite a lot of fun to watch. One must be careful, though, for they can be very temperamental. We went during the rut and a lot of the males were highly aggressive.

We saw several baby grouse as we were hiking out of the forest near one of the geyser basins. They were intent on feeding and seemed oblivious of the humans standing over them.

This was the parent of the grouse chicks. Unlike the young, she was very upset to see us arrive.


This was the first of the Grizzly bears that I saw. This one was in a field some distance away as I was getting ready to hike to the summit of Avalanche Peak in the eastern side of Yellowstone. This bear did not want anything to do with us and it vanished into a ravine before I could get any really good photographs. Good Grizzly bear!


I photographed this osprey with our old pocket camera as we were rafting down the Yellowstone River out of Gardner Montana.

I think Carole took this one. She got caught inside a herd of elk that was crossing the path to get across the road at Mammoth Springs.

This is the only bald eagle that we saw on the trip. It was flying around a high butte on which we were standing above Lake Yellowstone.

I could watch the bison all day. This one was rolling about in a wallow, kicking up the dust.

I took this one because the ravens in the Park are just so damned huge! This particular bird was walking around eating the bugs out of the grills of automobiles in the parking lot.

This bull elk had the best rack we saw on the trip. Still in velvet, he was very careful not to let his antlers touch the pine tree limbs as he walked beneath it.

These were bighorn sheep--ewes and kids on Mount Washburn.

I really wanted to see Pronghorn antelope. We didn't see one until we hit Lamar Valley, which was my favorite part of the park (which I'll explain in a later post).

This osprey family had its nest on a rock pinnacle in Tower Canyon. The mother had delivered a big fish just before I took this shot.

Carole wanted to see a moose more than any other animal. On our next-to-last day we finally saw three of them. Here are two of the three. They were really chowing down on the green stuff beside the Snake River.

Overview of Yellowstone National Park (My 1000th Blog Post)

OK.

We've been home for a whole day, now. Thank Jove I took today off, too. Just to recover from that long jet ride back to Charlotte! Going out wasn't so bad, but then I wasn't run ragged from hiking every single day.

What I'll try to do right now is get down my basic impressions before I get into too much detail.

First of all, I can see why so many western hikers/rock climbers/backpackers/kayakers that I meet are so smug about the South and the East. In a nutshell, what constitutes a state or even National Park here in the East is what's in most people's freaking back yards in the western states. I can understand their attitudes about our natural areas here. I always understood that it was different in the west, but now that I've experienced it I can see where that air of superiority comes from.

The western wild lands are vast!!!

That's the feeling you get almost everywhere you go. It's Big Sky country, for damned sure. It really hit home to me when I got up above tree line on my hike to the summit of Avalanche Peak (10,568 feet above sea level). I've hiked tougher peaks here in the South, for sure. I've hiked many such peaks that have far more elevation between base and summit here in the east, too. What was different was that once you're on the top of this 10K-foot peak, you are surrounded by miles and miles and miles and more miles of other such peaks. Above timberline terrain in almost every direction you look. And far away you can see peaks that loom to 11,000 feet and higher, on up to 13K+ feet!


It's amazing!

And the other thing about Yellowstone is its size. It's enormous. And the variation from one section of the park to another was also surprising. Each quadrant was so much more diverse from the one before. I didn't know what to expect as I drove from one corner of the park to the next--every bend in the road and every walk into a valley or onto a summit brought a new kind of ecosystem to view. It was breathtaking.

I have to mention, of course, the wildlife. It was everywhere. And it's the only place I've ever been where large mammals are commonplace. With no fences or manmade barriers (other than roads) to hinder their movements. Of the large animals in the park I saw many. A brief count:

2 grizzly bears
1 black bear
8 black tail deer
1 coyote
3 moose
8 bighorn sheep
dozens of pronghorn antelope
scores of elk
thousands of bison (yes, thousands!)


We saw many birds, including Sandhill cranes, osprey, a bald eagle, huge ravens, trumpeter swans, and others.

Only the grizzly bears seemed disturbed by the presence of human beings. Of the two grizzlies that I saw, one left as soon as it became aware of me, and the other was fast asleep and at a great distance. Everything else we saw were creatures who appear to be only mildly suspicious of humans. It was nice to be able to photograph these animals at relatively close range. But we obeyed all Park regulations and did our best to keep our distance from everything we saw.

I can understand why the geyser basins and the thermal features are so fascinating to most park visitors. There's nothing like this in the Eastern side of our continent. Almost everywhere you drive or hike there are all kinds of active volcanic formations. Geysers are around, as are hot springs and mudpots and fumaroles. It was both exciting and frightening to stand before gaping caverns that literally roared, belching sulfurous hot fumes and expelling boiling water. You have to see this. The nation is lucky to have such a place. I am glad and happy and satisfied to have finally seen so much of this magical park.

Later, I'll write some details of our trip. We hiked every day. I doubt a single day passed where I failed to hike at least three or four miles, although I don't think I covered more than eleven at the most in a single day. We took a long raft trip on the Yellowstone River that was a great experience, too.

The only negative thing I have to say about the Park is that some of the lodging centers and geyser basins are just too goddamned crowded! We stayed two nights at Old Faithful Lodge Cabins and I sincerely wish that I'd booked rooms elsewhere. The huge numbers of human beings in that place are just too much to tolerate. I'd been told that I could have avoided these crowds by booking our trip for the early to middle part of September, but I was getting stir crazy from the lack of hiking time this year and I couldn't bear to wait any longer. Plus, I wanted to be sure that the weather was still going to be warm enough for rafting trips and dips in the rivers and lakes.

If you make it to Yellowstone and want to stay in the park, my recommendations are these:

Canyon Village Cabins. Great little cabins with good facilities.
Mammoth Hot Springs Lodge. (Don't use their cabins unless you enjoy staying in places where you can hear everything your neighbors say through paper-thin walls.)

No lodging in the Park was really bad...but some places were less than desirable for various reasons. All of the lodging at Old Faithful was tainted by the almost endless, horrid crowds and heavy traffic of everything from bicycles, motorcycles, cars, trucks, RVs, and tour buses and freight trucks. Go see the geysers early in the day and otherwise avoid this area during peak tourist season.