Day 5: Badlands, Mt Rushmore, Devil's Tower

Ed: Posting again from Bozeman, MT. If you haven't had the chance yet, look down and read the post before this (I just posted that too). This entry was written on Friday morning, the one before was from Thursday. Pictures and Yellowstone adventures to come!

Relaxing in a hotel room at Yellowstone. We have two days of hiking and camping ahead of us here, and then two more days at Glacier National Park. Originally, we were planning to camp out for our entire stay here, but the campgrounds were full when we arrived late in the evening last night.

We left the Badlands at dawn yesterday morning. Unfortunately, this meant that we missed the Minuteman Missile National Monument, which didn’t open until 8. Instead, we proceeded straight to Mt. Rushmore. To be fair, I hadn’t been expecting much: just four Presidential faces carved on a mountain. It wasn’t until we were standing there, and looking up at Washington’s nose that the magnitude struck it. Mt. Rushmore is really, really big. Ironically, it was supposed to be even bigger: the original design showed all four presidents down to their waist. You can still kind of see this. If you look carefully, you can see Lincoln’s fingers holding on the lapels of his coat.

From Mt. Rushmore, we proceeded to Devil’s Tower (it’s the place where ET’s spacecraft sets down on). It jutted out of the landscape like some ancient monolith, made up of connected columns of stone. According to the signs there, the native Americans saw it as the scratches of a gigantic bear. I can definitely see the resemblance there. To me, it looked like a lone, massive column of some Greco-Roman temple. We got out of the car and took the short, mile-long trail around the tower, climbing into a region filled with massive boulders which had fallen off of the Tower. High above us, climbers scaled the peak, almost indistinguishable from the trees, growing seemingly out of the rock itself at precarious angles.

I must put in a word for the breathtaking beauty of Wyoming. The land is indescribably vast here: we passed rolling hills for hours. Farms, cattle ranches and little towns seemed to disappear in the vast swathes of grassland, like little islands in a vast green sea. And then, we passed through mountain valleys, framed on both sides by snow-capped peaks, and gorgeous mountainsides. Rivers ran wild and untamed; cascades of fresh water, tumbling down the mountains, rushing towards some unknown horizon.

I’ll save my reflections on Yellowstone for next time. I feel that we haven’t spent very much time here yet, and our experiences so far would be biased by unfortunate misadventures due to our arrival late in the evening.