Idaho to Wyoming via Montana

Posted On September 4, 2020

We have to force ourselves to leave Montana, but we’ll be back.

The 23rd found us among the wild hills of Lolo NF, camped along the Thompson River a few miles from where it joins the beautiful Clark Fork River, boondocking on the side of very dusty gravel road somewhere up Big Hole mountain north of Thompson Falls, Idaho.

Our goal in Idaho was Couer D’ Alene and it was stunningly beautiful, but it was our destination simply because it was the closest hotel. World-class boats and marinas to check out, however, and the place was hopping on a Sunday, with boats trying hard to stay out of each other’s way.

A ranger just stopped by our humble campsite to ask “had we been dipping a line” and I had to lie and say no, because it would simply have been too ironic for me to be found guilty of illegal fishing. I can’t fish to save my life, TBH, but I had, again TBH, just been trying out my trusted Zebco rod minutes before he showed up.

Fish are jumping like nuts here, and I was watching a fingerling emerge from his rocky cover to pounce on a fly that looked roughly like mine, but of course my line was tangled after ten feet so my two casts were embarrasing, to the fish I mean. (Where are you when I need you, Gallagher?)

The notable part of this is just how happy Karyssa and I were to be interrogated by an OTL; I was all too eager to tell him of my lack of fishing skills in my hometown on the Gulf of Mexico, and K pressed him on details about the roads in the park as if he were the last person living after a zombie apocolypse. We’re just starved for human to human and face to face and human face to human face interaction, OK?

On August 24th, we swung by the “historic” mining town of Murray this afternoon, but the term “historic” seems to be thrown around in these here parts, as it amounted to a collection of ramshackle buildings clinging on the side of a hill.

Wallace is a better deal, and well-known and so we can highly recommend the Pulaski Tunnel Trail, which tells you all about the forest fires of 1910, which burned over 2,000,000 acres and prompted the Forest Service to begin suppressive fire management, which took a generational shift to be replaced by today’s preventative burning, which by the by the Native Americans around here had learned many moons ago.

It leads you to where Pulaski himself, in saving the town, saved most of his men by ducking into an abandoned mineshaft, which are everywhere here, while the huge fire roared over them. A badass Oedipus (i.e., m-f-er) indeed.

We started the day with a kingfisher on the creek and then a hike on a randomly chosen trailhead on Rt 200, walking a mile or so up Munson Creek Trail to an old well (or whatever you call it when a ranch or town sticks a pipe in a stream somewhere higher than them, wraps it in filter or screen of sorts and calls it a well). The smoke from California’s historic wildfires cast a weird pallor over the views, and promises to only get worse over the next few days.

The National Bison Refuge was today’s highlight, as we got to see, on a 19-mile driving tour, buffalo doing their thing in their natural habitat, including fighting among themselves for dominance. Why don’t cattle share this agro gene, or how did we breed it out of them? To see such herds managed on Native American land is encouraging.

This is definitely BNSF land and they’re everywhere. We swung by Missoula, but the museums and library were closed and so did mundane shopping and some internet. (The internet includes some financial shit that y’all are in no ways interested in, but the point is that the ordinary world doesn’t stop turning just cuz you bought a van; you still have to try to maintain yo shit, despite an address. This is going to be a recurring issue, but for now we both have living parents who love us and have addresses they are willing to share.)

The cowboy town of Missoula that Nick recalls, has been replaced by a hip boomtown. As with so many small cities we’ve visited, from Kenosha and Sun Prairie in Wisconsin, to Whitefish in Montana and Couer D’ Alene in Idaho, recent, sudden, and unplanned-for growth is obvious, and will obviously change going the front range going forward.

As I write, in the eternal present tense, we’re now perched on the side of a mountain, back in Lolo NF, but obviously in Montana, listening to some rancher’s peacocks wail like cats one-thousand feet below us, where the Clark Fork yet meanders. A few miles upstream it squeezed through a fall, a crack, a vee, or what have you, but here it spreads across a silted valley.

One of the virtues of slowing down and getting off the interstates, we’ve found, is that state roads and highways like Rt 200 follow rivers, as commerce and culture always has, and thus you see a social history of the land, along with its geology/hydrology/what have you.

Stumbling upon the Grant-Kohrs Ranch in Deer Lodge, expecting to stay a few minutes, dump some trash and pee, we ended up being there through lunch. Don’t miss it, if you’re ever in the hood.

It’s a Nat His Site, so is staffed by rangers and volunteers, but they were gifted the resources of two families that held onto one of the largest “open range” ranches of the original cowboy, cattle drive period, which actually only lasted from 1865, the end of the civil war, when vets returned to Texas to find their herds huge, their grasslands over-grazed, and the price of beef back east skyrocketing, until the turn of the last century, when barbed-wire was invented and railroad lines expanded and governmental regulation ended the wide-open ranging practices that G-K and others had mastered.

[Karyssa Writing – the following is what we learned either at the ranch or were prompted to look up due to the ranch

We learned of this one guy, Teddy Abbott (who wrote a book that seems worth a read, “We Pointed them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher”). So there was this night that Abbott and his team of cowboys were out on the fields. Mind you, these fields were often covered in prairie dogs holes and hidden banks that could easily trip up a horse.

Anyway, a storm was approaching, and they were concerned about the cattle taking fright, so they all got on their horses and got in position to keep them from stampeding. Well, they totally failed. Despite the chaos of it all though, eventually they got the cows “in a mill” (which I interpret as walking or running in a circle, one following the other – similar, I assume, to the way sardines do).

Come morning though, Abbot and his team realized they were missing a member. They went searching for him and found him along with his horse “mashed into the ground like a pancake. The only thing you could recognize was the handle of his six-shooter.”

Abbott continues, “We tried to think the lightning hit him… but we couldn’t really believe it ourselves. I’m afraid his horse stepped into one of them holes and they both went down before the stampede.

“…(T)he awful part of it was that we had milled them cattle over him all night, not knowing he was there. That was what we couldn’t get out of our minds.”

Can you imagine?! I suppose you wouldn’t want to. But still, just wild. Combine that with the fact that these cowboys got minimal sleep, at best. Here I am, not functioning without my 10-12 hours, and these guys slept from 9:00PM to 3:30AM, which was interrupted by a 2 hour shift of keeping guard. Fuckkk thatttt! No thank you. Please leave.

Y’all. Listen. And then there’s this frigging guy, Bill Pickett, who was even more extra! This guy frigging invented the move of – and listen to thissss!!! – jumping off a horse, ONTO A MOTHER FRIGGING BULL, LITERALLY GRABBING THE BULL’S MOTHER FRIGGING HORNS and WRESTLING SAID BULL!!!! WRESTLING!!! …A BULLLL!!!!! Did you guys hear me?! Did you even frigging hear that shit?!!?!?! He said he got the idea from the way bulldogs would subdue a bull. And y’all. I’m not even done. Pickett would BITE THE BULL ON THE LIP! ASKJFKDJS:LJDSKJFLKDJFSLDKJ!!!!! Like, who is this wild genius?! This mastermind?! This biomimicry man?! Bill Frigging Prickett. Smdh. These cowboys were frigging wild. 😀

It’s also worth mentioning that Prickett was a black man, because most people don’t realize (due to Hollywood) that 1/4 cowboys were black.

During the civil war, while the ranchers left to fight, they would leave task of taking care of the cattle and land to the slaves. So, the slaves learned about cattle rearing, herding, etc. Unfortunately, they also learned the work of breaking horses, which was the most dangerous work, and later became the work given to them the most often when they became cowboys – because racism.

At the same time, because the cattle in Texas were left with more freedom than usual, they bred more than usual. That left Texas with a supply and demand problem, so much so that they would walk their herds to Boston and New York. This led to a higher demand for cowboys, which led to more black men being hired, and it is reported that during the times of transport (which could last nearly half the year), black cowboys felt on equal terms with their team members. (Yayyy?)

When the Kansas railroads were built in the 1860’sssss, I thinkkkk???, the trip lasted two months. The trip would take so long because they would walk the cattle so few miles. They didn’t want them losing any weight, which makes sense.

However, Grant (bringing us back to the ranch we were at) found that he could take advantage of his location, being so close to a trading post. He would take his nice, plump cows and find ranchers who were trying to trade. And he would trade his one fat cow for two of the rancher’s thinner/weaker cows. He would then fatten them up and repeat! He went from having like 30 cows to having like hundreds of them. He was one smart feller… or was he a fart smeller…? <3

End Karyssa Writing]

While the open range, i.e., no fences and no property rights, only lasted a short time–1865-1900–it has shaped our perception of the west in inordinate ways, and that is the main take-away we got from several of the rangers at G-K Ranch.

Butte is a beaut, is all I can say, and is obviously ground zero of the mining industry past and present. There are are miles and miles of mine passages, running vertically and horizontally beneath the city, some 49 miles under Berkeley Pit itself.

Montana Tech’s campus has an amazing mineral museum, with really informative displays and striking samples of every stone, gem, and gemstone from the area. The city leaves some head-angles as a memory of its mining past, but the amazing productivity of the mines here makes them still profitable today.

Apparently the sedimentary layers that we saw in Glacier as being 60-80,000,000 years old are here 1.5B years old, and when volcanic activity moved under them, it resulted in “contact metamorphosis,” where sands and silicas were scorched into the minerals and glasses eventually exposed in the Rockies we get to mine today. The Berkeley Pit’s constant cannon booms, interspersed with weird electronica sounds were finally explained as bird-deterrent, as the lake that has filled the 1,500″ for-profit-pit is so poisoned with arsenic and the like that the mine has to prevent wildlife from landing on it. It has the acidity level of a coke, the company sign suggests, as if to reassure us?

Then on to Bozeman for drinks and a phone chat with Molly and a fine meal without the dogs…it’s been a while. A gust of wind the likes of which only accompanies a line of T-storms in FL greeted us as we checked out Main Street, but it was still cute, and we bought a cute shovel at a cute ACE hardware store, and we were just adorable in general.

The T-storms finally arrived, hours later, as we settled in at a really odd camp of homeless and vanlifers near a Lowe’s on the outskirts of town. Everyone is hoping that this rain will alleviate the CAL-fire smoke.

We slept on the side of a dead-end road in Bozeman, one of the saddest I-Overlander sites to this point, with a few homeless peeps in their cars, I suspect (in part because a woman came up and distributed meals, and then fed the magpies).

Still, we loved Bozeman, and we were blown away by the dinosaur exhibit in the Museum of the Rockies (MOR) the next morning (Aug 26).

I thought I had been relatively well-informed about dinos since my love of them as a kid, but I had no idea that:

• they were undoubtedly warm-blooded, which is partly why they grew so fast
• their bones were extremely porous or gappy, which is partly why they grew so fast
• their teeth were replaced on average once per year, like shark (and you have to wonder why we lost this really neat skill)
• they grew fast, sometimes to incredible scales, and died young, others stayed small and burrowed in tunnels like prairie dogs
• soft-tissue and dna has been recovered from a broken femur fossil, casting doubt on the what we know about the entire process of fossilization
• re some sauropods–think “brontosaurus”–their heads were so small relative to the rest of their bodies, that we still don’t know how they fed themselves
• while the colors of their feathers are still unknown, their location and thickness has been well-documented, and the speculative results are bizarre:

• we are thinking of non-avian dinosaurs when we think about dinosaurs, as the avian dinosaurs are still with us, and much of the physiology and even behavior of dinos is still seen in birds, such as bone structure and brooding over eggs
• the fossil collection here includes five different species’ embryos–unhatched dino eggs, that is to say — out of the nine or so species that are represented by their embryos
• the MOR researchers recently concluded that a particular T-rex fossil was a female that had recently ovulated, by a comparison with the bone structure of a living ostrich
• a surprising portion of our current flora and fauna was around in the Jurassic and other “dino” eras, such as ferns and pines, turtles and dolphins.

So, let me lay it down for all of us. Snails. Okay? Frigging snails, as a species, are over 500 million years old. While everyone else is over here evolving and shit (like the squid and the coral) into their next stage, snails are taking that Pikachu route and being like, “Naw, we good. We’re exactly fit to our environment (which is everywhere); why ya tryna change us, mannn?” I thought that was pretty cool because they’re so little and unassuming that they’d never hit my radar as a species that already had their shit together 500 million years ago.

We also saw this super cute ancestor of the modern day chimera (which I did a project on in high school due to having heard of the term “chimera” (also called ghost sharks or rat fish) on Full Metal Alchemist – which as anime watchers know was not cute at all and was in fact horrifically depressing). Anyway, it’s called a holocephalan and what makes it even cuter than the now chimera is that it had antler-like scales on its head! <3

And, it wasn’t a dinosaur! In fact any flying or swimming reptiles were not dinosaurs! So the plesiosauras? Not a dinosaur. The pterodactyl? Not a dinosaur, mannn. They’re just swimming and flying reptiles. Frigging righteous, amiright?

Why aren’t they dinosaurs? Because they’re just reptiles, mannn. Ya digg? Dinosaurs are a group of reptiles that have a socket in their hips which allow them to walk upright, providing them with more stamina and quicker speeds than other reptiles, which have their legs out their sides and thus walk in a swaying motion. Who knew?!

So then, where the heck do the dang birds come from? Yo. Check it. The dang Archaeopteryx, which I did not see featured in the museum. This thing was no bigger than today’s raven. It had teeth and a bony tail. Scientists don’t know if it could fly or if it was more of a glider. But, if it did fly, it was likely clumsy in comparison to modern day birds.

They also had some seemingly random reptiles. We’re not too sure why they had them, as they do not exist in the Rockies. But they were cute anyhow (though Nick forewent them in protest of an entire exhibit having nothing to do with the Rockies (but also because he was worried about having left the dogs in the car)).

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We dropped down to West Yellowstone next, and got oriented to the place. Crazy off-road driving by K got us to our shitty site in the Custer National Forest…does that dude have any redeeming qualities, we wonder? I’m sure his Mom loved him, but.

We woke up the 27th at 4 to beat the rush into the NP, expecting a Glacier-like scene, but we had time to spare at the Lodge waiting on Old Faithful. We got to see to see it erupt twice, as we walked around the neighboring geysers, hot-springs, fumeroles (steam/gas vents, basically) and mud pots for about an hour and a half, and it erupts these days on a ninety-minute schedule, faithfully.

One of the geysers we saw, the beehive geyser, had a plaque informing us that the cones (the white sediment forming around a geyser) are silica being dissolved from volcanic rock and slowly forming around the area of spew-age. The deposit itself is called sinter, and the whole inner channels of geysers are lined with it.

So as with other posts and places, all y’all will have to research this yourselves for greater details, but we are driven to do on the fly here because we simply can’t believe our eyes! Like “how, what, and WTF” force us to read everything within reach about what we’re experiencing.

Basically, Yellowstone NP shares certain geological features with one or two other places on the planet. (Remarkably, some individual members of our two respective families recently met, coincidentally, at one of these: Iceland.)

These are: a volcano, or a relatively thin earth crust sitting atop a mound of magma supplying heat; a mineral-rich and sedimentary crust, in this case limestone; and, finally, a lot of precipitation providing surface water.

The Yellowstone volcano has erupted three times that we know of, the last time being some 600,000 years ago, when it cast an ash blanket from here to Texas. It was a huge event, and on a scale where Mt St Helens is a one, and Krakatoa a 10, it was a 9 or so. Its replacement cone is now being monitored for how fast it’s rising, and some signs suggest we’re due another blow up, but for now we have a caldera, a sunken recess of earth roughly fifty miles across and as long as it is wide. This caldera makes up about half of Yellowstone Park, the oldest in the country.

We simply had to see Old Faithful first, but the Grand Prismatic Spring seems as popular a destination, although it’s hard to get a perspective on such a huge feature.

The amazing colors of these springs are created by bacteria mats of different thermophiles, which just means a heat-loving organism, but trust me: the variety and the interplay between these bacteria is behind the hues you see here. Some ingest sulfuric gas and turn it into oxygen, making it possible for others to hang out, while others thrive in superheated H2O, while others again decompose like angry white men.

These mats act like their own ecosystem in which the top layer of microbes use photosynthesis to survive, while the bottom layer uses chemosynthesis. The bottom layers gets the chemicals it needs to survive from the chemical exchange the upper layer undergoes. Then, the bottom layer sends up decomposed material for the upper layer. So they’re like this whole living community in which each microbe relies on each other! And isn’t that just the sweetest thing? <3 Yellowstone referred to them as “Miniature Forests,” and I think that is a great way to understand them.

They also are a food source for flies! Say whaattt? These annoying bugs can hang out along the extreme temps of thermophile microbial mats?!?! Yup. Well, sorta. They can’t hang with the hyper hot mats, but they still manage to eat away at the regular hot ones.

Interestingly enough, when the springs dry out or, more directly, the microbial mats die out, they create fossils! Anddddd!!! Guess the frick what ancient microbial mat fossils are called?!?!!? Go on… I’ll wait. 😀

Stromatolite!

Wait… maybe that’s only exciting if we talked about stromatolite in our last blog post, and I can’t guarantee that we did. …Okay, well, in case we didn’t, guess where the friggin heck you can find stromatolite?!? FRIGGING GLACIER NP!!! We saw some on our High Line hike! And now, here, at Yellowstone!!! We’re seeing its evolved form!!! But alive! Is that not the coolest frigging thing? (It is. Just go with it.)

There were few places we were allowed to take the dogs, so we tried to show them a little of what we were leaving them in the car to see. Daisy, especially, was interested in one of the vents that sat near the parking lot. Meanwhile, Frida couldn’t care less.

Shoshone and Bannock people collect these minerals to make white paint, which is oddly rare in nature and difficult to make. Here it’s made by hot water making weak carbon acid, which dissolves the calcium carbonate in limestone and then deposits it on the surface as travertine (a different kind of sinter – specifically calcareous sinter, as opposed to the siliceous sinter discussed in the making of the geyser cones we talked about earlier). These white ledges are visible for miles in any direction, and underlie the grasses and trees of many hills that no longer stick out as white.

The strangest aspect of all this is how quickly these hills and features appear and disappear, submerging groves of trees and threatening buildings, some designed or at least inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Prairie School.” (There he is again!) Some terraces become wetter and more productive (meanwhile destroying all vegetation that once lived there), while other diiminish, due to earthquakes and the like.

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I purchased a fishing license for the park, just to “fish” guilt-free, only to discover that the regulations here are such that I have no idea how to fish. Thanks, Obama! Seriously but seriously, no lead weights? It’s all good tho as any day spent on a river named “Firehole,” let alone “Yellowstone,” is bound to better than most. I am tempted to buy a fly-fishing rod, but am not sure I have the time to learn all that the cutthroat trout has already forgotten.

There are still scars on the landscape from when I was here last, in 1990, maybe, but the lodgepole pine has serotinous seeds (fire-dependent, that is) as any, and needed the fire, and is now twenty feet high after naturally re-seeded whole valleys.

It’s August 28th and we promised ourselves a week here, as we are still learning to stay still, and our second day in Jellystone showed how easy it would be. Yes, we booked a horseback ride for next week, and a half-day rafting trip down the Yellowstone River, but even without these, every road through the park offers a crazy array of environments and ecological niches.

Where we are now, for instance, near the Northern Entrance at Gardiner, is known as a “cold desert” where as yesterday’s western entrance was warm and wet.

We’ve driven and walked through such a variety of landscapes in the last couple of days that it’s hard to believe we’re in the same place. From the obsidian, that is volcanic glass reminiscient of Hawaii’s Big Island, of the Gallatin Range in the west, to the granite boulder-fields and glacial erratics of the central plateau, which remind one of Arizona around Flagstaff, to the basalt columns–similar to the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland–and then the travertine ledges of Mammoth in the northern portion; it all together seems otherworldy, and apparently NASA agrees, as they are studying extremophiles here in preparation for Mars.

Amazing hike this a.m., the 29th of August for those of you still caring about calendars, to the Hellroaring Creek on the northern edge of YNP, though we never quite made it to the creek itself.

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We did make it to a suspension bridge over the “Black Canyon” stretch of the Yellowstone River, built for feet and hoofs. The “Demon Bridge” I helped build for the FL Trail Association over the Alaqua River has a similar design, but I’d love to know how they built this monster out here.

We couldn’t go further because we had a raft trip planned with Wild West Rafting here in Gardiner, and they were such a stereotypical outfit manned by college-age kids and just having a blast (whilst prolly being exploited). We drifted 8 miles down the river, getting soaked with every rapid. Elk actually stopped munching and stared at us as we drifted by.

Our guide Chris told us many river tales, of running the river in the spring snow mealts and tipping whole rafts, of the cult who owns thousands of acres along the river, of his buds who ski’d down a sand slide of a mountain.

That night was our weekly cheap hotel night, and we didn’t get back into the park until eleven or so, but we must say that Gardiner is the most chill of the resort towns surrounding YNP. We didn’t do much, but even when that’s the case there’s always something to talk about. And this day’s thing was Lamar Valley. If you’ve never seen a bison before, don’t worry; they’re everywhere in this valley. Herds like we’ve never seen. And there seems to always be at least one herd that’s crossing the road, though we had two of them.

Meanwhile, we just landed in Grove City, on the Northeast entrance to the park, and it’s funky AF. We ate noodles from Montasian–“half Montana and half Malaysia”–and it was a welcome change.

I swear that the dogs can tell when we’re approaching home for the night when the road turns to gravel, and then to shit, as we burrow deeper and deeper into national forest land following I-Overlander. Tonight was no different, but the site, north of — was extra pretty, by the Lady of the Lakes Trailhead.

We explored an abandoned mine and smelter site that we happened upon as we walked the trail a little ways. The mine had two cabins and a rusted car seemingly in the middle of nowhere. It was wild to see, especially considering we weren’t expecting it. Nick mentioned having see a scene like this in the Blair Witch Project. And it really was fairly spooky.

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On the 30th we awoke to snow, as we were over 7,000′ over Lulu Pass on the NE entrance to Yellowstone north of Cooke City, once a legit mining town with a proud history and museum. Its general store is a historical landmark and is the original of all of the copies you’ve seen on TV.

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If you ever make it to YNP, consider spending a few bucks on hike734’s guide to day hikes, as it turned us on to a couple of incredible ones. The loop it described up the Yellowstone from a relatively quiet picnic area, allowed us to sneak the dogs, which is a rarity in any NP!

The trail was alongside the river for a good portion of the hike, and we were able to see vents that were steaming up along the river banks. But there was this particularly spectacular view of the river cutting through the basalt formations and hoodoos of which the colors our cameras would never be able to capture.

Although, the last 1/8 mile we had to walk alongside the road. And Karyssa’s anxiety was peaking. We made it back to the parking lot with no trouble, however.

[Nick, generally speaking, isn’t much a fan of horses due to serial negative experiences with them (and honestly, I’m surprised he’s still willing to get on one after so many!). But throughout our travels, especially as we got to North Dakota and on, there were ranches with increasingly more and more horses. And I, who am in love with horses (as with nearly any animal) was continuously excited by each horse-sighting. So, the first thing Nick did when we got the funds was call up the nearest horseback riding place and reserve us a session. <3 And today was the day!]

We made it back to West Yellowstone and the Double P Ranch for our horse-riding sessions. Rode some really chill horses–Sable and Rupert, that is–across the road over the hills and through some woods.

Rupert was quite stubborn and slow, so Karyssa, at first, was often far behind. But she kept telling him it was okay, and he could go his own pace.

Meanwhile, Sable was taking the chance to eat any bit of grass she could get her mouth on. And the guides warned us before we even got on the horses that we were not to allow them to eat anything because then they’d be stopping constantly along the way to take a nibble at whatever they could.

The trails did get slick and the dude in front of us had his horse slide back on his haunches, but he shook it off and continued.

Boondocked back in Gallatin NF that evening, and the following day made the by-now-repetitive trek back into the park, but as the road to Thumb Bay on Yellowstone Lake had been opened, we got to see new aspects of the park, including the famous falls. Then more geysers around the lake before heading south to the Tetons.

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Between Yellowstone and the Tetons was yet another amazing waterfall that we stopped at.

We stayed in a site overlooking the Tetons and were amazed by the view.

We walked to the top of a nearby hill and watched as the sun set. Unfortunately, the mountains were, of course, back-lit. So we couldn’t really get a picture of it. But trust us, it was grand.

We went to Jenny Lake in the Teton NP on the 2nd of September, and loved to see a picture of the original Native Jenny, the daughter of a fur-trader and Native American, and who (kinda like Sacajawea) guided the earliest whitey into the Grand Teton fault. There is evidence of Native American settlement here for 10,000 years, y’all, while we have been since the 1850’s and while it’s cool to see some recognition of this on informational panels and the like, we’d like to see more of the social history of this place.

We slid down Hwy 89 out of Jackson and along the beautiful Snake River, then met the Salt River in the most southwest part of Wyoming, before boondocking while buffeted by insane winds on Wild Horse Canyon Road above Green River, WY.

We didn’t see any wild horses, just their poop.

We swung by the beautiful Smoky Mountains of Medicine Bow National Forest near Laramie, and took a quick dip in the hot springs in Saratoga…

…and now we get to luxuriate at Lisa and Billy’s home in rural Eaton, Colorado–thanks a million, guys!–and we wish all the best to the smokejumpers and firefighters working hard well to our west.