The Kirks

We spent a few days in the Grand Teton national park. Jackson Hole ski resort is right in the middle of the park and apart from getting some sun, we did some hikes around Rendevous Mountain. The Tetons are a beautiful range of mountains and it certainly looks like the skiing in the winter is great. We stayed in a nice hotel in the Teton Village for some much needed R&R.

The Grand Teton National Park is right next door to Yellowstone which was the USA’s first national park. The park is sitting on top of a gigantic “supervolcano” which has blown 3 times in the last 2m years. It’s still geologically active (3000 mini earthquakes every year) which accounts for the geysers, hot springs and bubbling mud pools which dot the landscape. Of course, Yellowstone’s most famous feature is Old Faithful which blows every 25 minutes or so. We arrived just in time to push our way through the throngs of gigantic people munching food and get this photograph.

Old Faithful is “Tourist Central” and very very busy. Even the drive round Yellowstone was pretty busy. We stopped at all of the main sites and some superb pools and geysers. Although compared to Zion, Bryce and the Grand Canyon, the scenery isn’t quite as dramatic and breathtaking there are some absolutely beautiful sights. This is Prismatic Pool.

On the other side of Yellowstone, we exited down a steep mountain pass towards Buffalo Lake and Cody. The landscape flattens out and turns into the classic USA small farm land in the fertile valleys. Past the Buffalo Dam, we dropped down into Cody, the self styled “home of the cowboy”.

Cody is a town unlike any I’ve ever seen. The air has a constant Hydrogen Sulphide smell which must be blown through from Yellowstone. Main St is lined with shops selling unlimited cowboy tat and every resident appears to wear a cowboy hat and spurs. It’s hot, dusty and the home of Wild Bill Cody (Buffalo Bill). We stayed at the hotel which Bill Cody started called the Irma Hotel. It’s trying to be a traditional hotel but it’s staffed with room temperature IQ (celsius) people and nothing really works properly. It’s a slice of the old west but not a slice that you really want to see. They run a “shoot out” re-enactment every evening which is undoubtably the worst piece of amateur dramatics you will ever see although it is punctuated by some very loud bangs and a very wishy washy “don’t touch guns kids” message. All in all, not something to drive a long way to see. However, in the evening, we went to the Cody Rodeo which was actually really good. None of us had ever seen a real rodeo before and it’s was good. There was the small town announcer rattling on about “America’s Number One Sport” (which I’m a bit skeptical about) and making jokes at the expense of Texas and generally doing a great job getting the crowd of about 1000 going. The events are exciting: they’re dangerous, quick and skillful. For the British people reading this, the closest thing to Rodeo in Britain is probably something like Speedway Racing. It’s got the same excitement but also the slightly down at heel, past its prime feel to it. Not only is it dangerous but nobody wears any padding or helmets and they’re sitting on top of 1400lb bulls which could crack your skull with a single kick. I was surprised to see the junior events: Kids as young as 8 being strapped to bucking bulls for 6 seconds without helmets or padding. But, we stood up with everybody else for prayers and the national anthem and generally went with the Cody zeitgeist. The idealised “cowboy life” existed across the western USA at the turn of the century and at its zenith in the 50s, the entire world knew of the cowboy through countless avidly watched movies and TV shows but there’s no doubt that the experience of a town celebrating a 50 year old idealisation of a life that existed 100 years ago is somewhat odd.

To our surprise, on our way out of Cody the following morning, we passed a bookshop and Isabelle got her copy of “The Half Blood Prince”! It goes without saying that it took her less than 24 hours to finish it and Trish and I are now fighting over who will read it next.

This helped to keep Isabelle occupied during the 450 mile drive to Rapid City. This was a great drive. Long straight roads across the great plains through towns, large and small. The larger ones are living embodyments of “Small Town, USA” complete with Main St and soda fountains in the center although they tend to be surrounded by ugly strip malls. The small ones (my favourite being Emblem,WY: population 10) are just a tiny aggregation of farms. The names are great too: Crazy Woman Creek, Dead Horse Creek…it goes on and on.
Finally, the highway ran out and we joined I90 (which is going to take us all the way to Chicago). Before the border with South Dakota, we turned off to see Devil’s Tower. If you’ve seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind, you’ve seen Devil’s Tower. On the road there, we all started singing “boo bee boo bee booooooo” and pointing out strange crop formations where all the grass had been gathered together into strange square “bales” by alien forces beyond our ken. It’s an amazing natural feature and was worth the 50 mile detour. If you look very carefully at this picture, you can see a tiny climber on the skyline preparing to abseil down the tower after climbing up.

It’s not far to Rapid City, SD from Devil’s Tower and we reached the Alex Johnson Hotel in the early evening. This is a great traditional hotel and Rapid City has a certain cosmopolitan charm…compared to Cody anyway. It’s a center for exploring the Black Hills of South Dakota which house (amongst other things) Mt Rushmore. Up early, we drove out to Mt Rushmore along Mt Rushmore Road which is lined with places designed to trap and fleece the tourists who are there to see Mt Rushmore. We managed to avoid most of them but stopped at the truly excrecable “National Museum of Woodcarving“. Atrocious crap. Mt Rushmore is odd: clearly we don’t have the cultural background to find it as emotional and patriotic as the thousands of Americans who were there at the same time as us so it’s hard to see it as they do. The monument itself is strangely smaller than one expects. During the entire trip, everything I’ve taken a photograph of has appeared smaller in the picture; Mt Rushmore appears a lot bigger. Spooky.

We then moved on to the Crazy Horse Memorial. There’s a lot of political stuff surrounding this but after 50 years of carving without Federal support, it hasn’t really got that far which isn’t made entirely clear in the various promotional leaflets strewn around South Dakota. A rough guess based on the volume of material removed, it should be finished sometime in 2450. Visits to Wind Cave and Jewel cave were interesting but the Borneo caves were larger and a lot more impressive.

Visiting all these sites and monuments has given us an opportunity to peruse the visitor books. It appears that the US education system is in worse state than I had thought. There are only two adjectives in use: “Awsome (sic)” and “cool”. Nobody appears to be able to think of anything else to say. Very occasionally you get light relief from the “awesome”s and “cool”s with comments like “It wuz cool to the maaaxxxx” or “intiristing (sic)”. My favourite comment at Jewel Cave was simply “I pooped”. Ah, the lyrical language of Shakespeare is alive and well.

Our day in the Black Hills wasn’t going well and we didn’t have very high expectations of the Mammoth Site at Hot Springs when we pulled up in the carpark next to the inevitable “Gift Shop”. However, it was absolutely great. 26,000 years ago, a sinkhole opened up in the prairie of South Dakota and over the next few thousand years, mammoths jumped in the pool seeking water and vegetation but couldn’t get out. Strangely, all the mammoths in the sinkhole are young males so it’s possible that the sinkhole was the mammoth equivalent of buying a motorbike or drinking 8 pints of lager in a night: plus ca change… They estimate that there’s over 100 mammoth skeletons in there and they’re perfectly preserved. The Mammoth Site Center is a big building build over the active archeological dig site. You can watch giant bones being literally brushed out of the rock in front of your eyes. The supporting information surrounding the site is extensive, intelligent and thoughtful.

Finally we drove up through the Custer State Park which houses one of the few herds of buffalo left in the US. When Columbus arrived, it is estimated that there were 120 million buffalo in the continental US. By 1900, there were less than 1000 but a herd of 36 was preserved in the Custer State Park which has now grown to nearly 1500. This truly is one of the few places where “the buffalo roam and the deer and the antelope play”. The park is relatively small but is a beautiful mix of prairie and woodland. On a small gravel road we found ourselves literally in the middle of the buffalo herd. A fantastic experience.

Over the last two weeks, the western USA has been suffering a heatwave. It has been amazingly hot. In Las Vegas last night, the lowest temperature recorded was 92F. It’s been 120 in the shade during the day. We haven’t experienced quite as hot temperatures but it’s rarely been below 100 during the day.

We’re off tomorrow to a Ranch in the South Dakota badlands for three days before we drive 900 miles to Chicago. It’s unlikely that we’ll have internet access until Friday or Saturday so no blogs until then. There’s no GSM phone access anywhere in the regions we’ve been in and email access is very spotty indeed.