2,100 Miles, 9 States, 5 Days

Last week was my travel week for getting to Yellowstone National Park to start work. It’s an awful lot of driving, but what a great experience to see the American landscape unfold before you. 

It isn’t just the distance; it’s also the diversity of landscape and the variety of places.  The lush rolling farmland of northern Indiana. The industrial brawn of Gary/Hammond. Feeling Chicago’s urban energy driving the Dan Ryan Expressway. Then, onto the American prairie where agriculture is king. Minnesota’s farms are gigantic, manicured, all grain crops, a thousand or more wind turbines; so different from South Dakota’s grasslands and cattle. 

A camping overnight in Badlands National Park is probably the trip’s highlight. The geology there is surreal (75 million years old; dinosaur fossils chronicle the time when the mid-continent was covered by ocean). In its 220,000 acres (just one-tenth the size of Yellowstone) wildlife abounds: in my short stay, I saw mule deer, antelope, bighorn sheep, and western meadowlarks everywhere singing their heads off in the warm spring air. Dinner that night was a burger & beer at the Wagon Wheel Bar & Grill in Interior, South Dakota; population, 67. Afterward, I walked two blocks to the edge of town in one direction; and two blocks to the edge in the other direction.

Three rivers crossed stand out.  I-90 crosses the Mississippi at Lacrosse, Wisconsin. Though already tamed there by Army Corps dams, it is still an impressive river. The steep limestone cliffs and drumlins that roll for several miles on the Minnesota side remind of the river’s power over the eons. 

Next was the Missouri River midway across South Dakota.  After endless miles of flat prairie, a long, steep-grade decline was evidence of its strength. And, its place in American history when Lewis & Clark toiled upriver two hundred years ago and sparked the nation’s imagination.

Finally, there was the Little Bighorn River in eastern Montana, site of Custer’s Last Stand. A wonderful National Monument there tells both sides of that tragic story; the American government under President Grant, the Sioux Nation under Sitting Bull. Prairie rivers like the Little Bighorn were the arteries of prairie life back then.  Water, transportation, game and crops.

I reported for work here at Yellowstone National Park yesterday. A cold front and the 3,000 foot elevation change put springtime on hold here. Work may have started, but not the fishing. The season inside the Park doesn’t open until Memorial  weekend. Training first, then I’ll be at the front desk of Old Faithful Inn when it opens for the season May 18^th.