Welcome to Thunderdome

Don't go near bears or heat.

I hope Gordon hasn't been eaten by a bear, died in the extreme heat, or burnt his dick off trying to fuck Old Faithful.

Hey Gordo, if you run into a guy named Michael Harding out there he works with me. Say hello. He'll be taking a lot of pictures, especially if there's a train. He's one of those weirdos that LOVES trains. He's even a published train photographer and speaks at train conventions. (He's genuinely a really good photographer.)

Saw an old timey train in Keystone yesterday.

Home now.

Funny happenstance:

We had to hit a Cabela's in Mitchell, SD on the way west because my idiot child forgot to pack hiking shoes.

On the way out I go to customer service and ask where's a good local place to get a burger.

She says "Culver's."

JFC.

It's not the worst of the fast food burgers, but yes, it's a sad statement about food options in 2023 U.S.

We found a place on Main Street overlooking the Corn Palace where they press the burgs by hand.

Delicious and I only got diarrhea a little bit.

Saw a lot of motorcycle groups out that way, in numbers from 3-20. Maybe a dozen times a day. Some of them were good at cutting you off in traffic and using hand and arm signals to each other, as if to say, "I slowed down the passing lane, now y'all get in front of me." They would also signal "hi there!" to each other as they passed. It all looks very goofy and stupid.

I propose we call a group of motorcyclists a "jackass." As in, "Oh, here comes a jackass of motorcycles."

Seconded.

Ok here's a weird thing that happened.

Once we hit South Dakota, about half way there, every other billboard was for the Marines. My kid noted it, said "apparently we're in military country. They're trying to get all these people who want out of South Dakota." Probably, right?

Anyway, we get to Cody, Wyoming. Hitting the grocery store for provisions. I was wearing the next t-shirt from the top of my pile, it happened to be a Camp Lejeune, NC one. On the way in, some dude strikes up a conversation. Long story short, he was a helo pilot, and was on the same boat as me when I spent 6 months in the Med, in 1992.

IN the grocery store..... a different dude, "Semper Fi, brother." We bump into each other 3 more times in different aisles, he'd kinda chatty, I find out after bootcamp he was assigned to one of the shittiest posts for a full 3 years. I expressed my condolences.

In the self checkout on the way out, there he is again. A bit more chitchat. I go to the bathroom before we leave, and suddenly realize this guy looks familiar. I do my bidness, go back out, he's still at the checkouts. I say, "Hey, does your last name start with W?"

Yep.

I was in bootcamp with this guy in 1991.

Small world.

Weirdest thing is that we tried going to the walmart in Cody, but power was out on that side of town. So we went to Albertson's, up the hill. That's where these encounters happened.

Because the power was out and no one knew why.

GORDON wrote: Wed Aug 30, 2023 1:07 pm Because the power was out and no one knew why.

You're welcome.

We hiked up a mountain and had a snowball fight on July 19, 2023. This is some random mountaintop next to the Beartooth Highway, Montana/Wyoming. Not sure exactly where we were that day. My phone said the elevation at the top was about 10.8k feet.

Funny side note to the high-altitude day:

The truck was packed, it's better to keep the food in the truck with the metal bed cover, cuz of bears.

So there was an unopened bag of potato chips in the back, hauled in from 600ft altitude Ohio.

The base camp at 7k feet, they were inflated, but fine.

At 10.5k feet, the bottom of the bag blew open, in the back of the truck.

We took a few days to drive out there, and stopped at Devil's Tower along the way because the kid was too young to remember last time we were there. That post some other time.

The route took us through the South Dakota Badlands, which is another story for another time.

But we drove a long way through Montana to get to our first campsite, which was in a National Forest north of Yellowstone. There were like 8 spots here, and I didn't see any kind of "host" on premises but there must have been one somewhere, as my name was on the site I reserved.

The last 2 miles was unfinished road, and there was a river crossing. At first I thought GPS fucked up and wanted to take me over a pedestrian bridge.... but nope. River crossings for back roads are a little 1-vehicle bridge. I had about a foot of clearance on either side of my F-150.
River was about 30 feet wide, and wild as hell. All white water upstream and down, as far as you could see.

And, it was about 30 feet from our tents. It made for amazing sleep white noise.
The lit-up tent was the one we were sharing, the 2 smaller ones were our back-country hiking tents. We set them up the night before so we could spray them with anti-tick stuff, and they'd be dry by morning.

The campsite was in a valley, through which that river, and the only main road, ran. For about 4 hours a day the sun was behind either the east, or west, range. I had it timed when our campsite would lose the direct sunlight.
We spent 3 days at that site, and it ended up being our fave of the trip because it was so quiet. And a grizzley with 2 cubs wandered through one day when we weren't there.... we came back that evening to find our neighbors, a young couple, packing up. She couldn't deal with tent-camping with bears (what did she expect, there?), they were heading in town to a hotel, and the dude looked pissed.

We were like, "Damn, we missed it."

Speaking of town, Red Lodge, Montana was 5 miles up the road. So we pretty much hiked around all day, then hit the town at night for burgers and beer. It was a pretty good spot.
There was a realtor in that downtown, with listings posted: the small ones started at about $400k. I don't know how people do it.

One of those days from that campsite, we hit a 7 mile hike about 20 miles further into Montana, the Weatherman Draw Trail.


On the way it was neat when the main road turned down a gravel road. But then after 2 miles of gravel, the road went through a cattle fence and turned into a dirt trail/road. We were well and truly on wild, BLM land. There was about 10 miles of this, and yes, there were cows. The kid was quiet, as if contemplating what his father was getting him into, this time. I think I had a constant smile on my face.... I love shit like this.



We were the only car at the trailhead. And the sign said this trail had the greatest concentration of petroglyphs known, in North America. Neat.

Problem is.... every one of these locations had a little sign, "Stop desecrating these, they're thousands of years old, and they're our heritage." And most of the spots were scrubbed clean. I assume they got graffitied and cleaned. People suck.

But there were still some things to see here and there.

Interesting thing about this trail: We didn't see a single blaze the entire length. And the problem is, it's an active, eroding gulley area, the trail is basically a narrow game trail, and there are branches all over the damned place. We were making trail guesses every ten minutes, and we learned at one point that the widest trail wasn't always the correct one.

So at one point we'd gone up the wrong draw, and I had to make some guesses, and I decided to take us off trail, over some rocks, and my guess was that the proper trail was on the other side. So we scrambled up a steep hill, and got to the top.... and realized we had a nice view, and a patch of shade, so we stopped for lunch. We were 3 miles in and it was close enough, so fuckit.
I'd gotten some MREs off amazon, and we each had one.

The other day I had a semi-annual physical at the VA, and when they take my blood pressure I close my eyes, slow my shit down, and think of a calm moment so I can drop my BP 10 points and they don't trip out. When I was putting myself in my happy place, I realized it was right there, on that arid hill, having a trail lunch with my kid.

We finished up, went over the hill, and found the trail.

About a mile later we were again, pretty lost. It was hot, I was privately becoming aware we were at our half-water point, and we'd lost the trail about a mile from what we estimated from the end. We were literally saying, "Ok, I guess we gotta call it," when my kid saw the cairn half way up a finger. If you don't know, they're typically used to signal "this way," on hikes.
We had a water discussion, he told me to stop being a pussy, and on we went.

A few more twist and turns, but all the correct turns, this time. We found ourselves in the home stretch valley, passed a very large, very fresh pile of bear shit, and finally got to the end.
It was the only spot of shade we'd seen the last mile, so we stopped and took a breather, and drank another couple bottles of gatorade. The sun really doesn't play at 8k feet of elevation. It was a pretty cool spot, a sheer face of rock going up maybe 80 feet. Se we couldn't see a thing to the west, from there.

After about 15 minutes a small cloud was peeking over the top of that cliff, just in the right spot to block the sun. As we put on our packs I quipped, "I hope that little cloud follows us all the way back to block the sun."

I asked, and the universe delivered.

As we left that tight valley, and had a view to the west, and our truck, we saw a storm was in the process of moving in, in that direction.

We actually stopped to consider this.

Half the trail was down in the large, main gulley. And at the bottom of it, at the trail head, was a mud marsh, suggesting the area does get rained on sometimes. And we had 4 miles to go, and my gimpy legs can do about 2mph, over rough terrain like this. We'd had almost no cell signal the entire hike, except right there where we were, when we got a little more elevation. So we had a choice to make... call 911 now, or wait until we get down in the rain, and in the gulleys, and in danger of flash flooding.

We decided to not call. I almost did, just to say we were out there, and if we didn't call back in 4 hours, we were stuck. But I didn't. "If it starts to storm on us, all we have to do is scramble up 10 feet above the water, we can hunker down under this poncho behind a boulder and wait it out. We'll be fine." And that's true.

So the kid and I headed back, and during the rush back he mentioned, "I don't think I've ever seen you move this fast before," heh. I told him "This is my 3 hour pace. I can do this for three full hours, but then I keel over." He chuckled.

It's interesting to be in the middle of nowhere Montana, surrounded by arid, mountainous desert, and be in a lightening storm with spits of rain and wearing two leg braces and have a kid you'd give your life for and no idea if you're going to be spending the night out there.

We could see the heavy rain before the next ridge, a mile farther west. We were saved the heaviest of it, we got back to the truck barely wet. The 7 mile hike was about 8.5 miles, after all the wrong turns.

It was a hell of a great day.