our 10,000 mile summer

Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

—Helen Keller

We’ve been home now for several weeks, and a new school year is getting underway.  I am way overdue in putting up a post to wrap-up our summer odyssey and had better do so now before the teaching treadmill picks up too much speed.

Denali Highway, Alaska: a long, long way from home.

Looking back over my posts from the road, I’m struck by the way they fizzled out toward the end, partly due to technical issues but also partly due to languor, the daily demands of logging significant mileage often leaving little time and less energy for blogging at the end of the day.  Compared to the posts from my 2008 trip with the boys, a journey with no real agenda or timetable, the writing just didn’t measure up.  And besides the tyranny of the timetable, there was another significant difference with this trip: I had adult company for the duration.  After the boys went to sleep, I still had someone to talk with.  And, while my dad was with us, someone to knock back a few Alaskan Ambers with.

Anyway, unlike my blog posts, the trip most definitely didn’t fizzle out toward the end.  In fact we ended on a real high before I put Belinda and the boys on a plane in Salt Lake City and drove the rest of the way back.  But more on that later.

First, a couple of general reflections:

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the long and winding road

We made it to Fairbanks.  In fact, we’re about to leave again after a busy 36 hours.  Dad has the boys downstairs in the hotel pool while I scrape together a quick update.  It’s funny how quickly the time seems to go up here, even when the daylight lasts forever, as you’re tempted to keep cramming in activities and stay on the move.  Following dinner last night, we left my brother’s apartment at nearly eleven with the sun still up and would have probably stayed there and kept talking until the wee hours had the boys not kept us honest by looking tired.

The Alaska Highway took us a leisurely four days, and I might have a lot to say about the drive if I had more time.  On the other hand, how much is there to say, really, about a drive?  In general, the road was emptier and prettier and in better condition than I expected once we got beyond the surprisingly busy and refined Dawson Creek and Fort St. John area.  Our campsite at Muncho Lake will undoubtedly be a highlight of the trip.

Every chance they got in this campsite, the boys would say “You know where we’ll be” and disappear to the lakeshore to journal, skip rocks, and fish. The boys have now fished unsuccessfully in Wyoming, British Columbia, and the Yukon Territory.

We saw lots of wildlife, including this black bear right at the side of the road who probably would have let us hang out with him all afternoon.

Hey, BooBoo.  Let’s go get us some motorhome tourists!

On all accounts, the drive out went astonishingly well.

So now we begin the slow road back.  We’re heading toward Denali and will then take a few days to reach Haines.  From there,  several short ferry hops through the southeast islands will take us to Prince Rupert, BC.  On the 12th, Belinda will meet us in Vancouver and I’ll kick my Dad out of the car so she can travel with us for a week or so.

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north to Alaska

I always expected that the middle third of our outbound trip would be the most psychologically difficult.  We’ve been getting further from home with every mile yet are still a very long way from road’s end, and it’s been difficult to strike the right balance between keeping the driving days manageable and making enough progress to feel like we won’t be on the road for all eternity.  Moreover, I know from her tone of voice on the telephone that this stage has been tough on Belinda, too.

But things are looking brighter.  Tonight, we’re holed up in Hinton, Alberta, and by perhaps lunchtime tomorrow we should make Dawson Creek, BC—Milepost Zero for the Alaska Highway, the beginning of the end for our outbound journey.  Tonight I had the first chance since we left to have a substantive phone conversation (beyond routine checking in) with my beautiful and tolerant (and lonesome) wife.  And firm plans are taking shape for her joining us for the middle third of the return journey.

Some notables from the last few days:

• On Tuesday, we camped at Belly River in Waterton Lakes National Park (Canada’s sister unit for our Glacier).  We were worried that the little campground there might be full by the time we arrived, but we found it absolutely empty.  We enjoyed such a quiet night that we found ourselves ludicrously annoyed when two cars rumbled through during breakfast the next morning.

We had it all to ourselves.  Why this place wasn’t overrun is still a mystery.

The wind was just right to break out the big kite for her maiden flight.

• We spent much of Wednesday afternoon at a place called Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, a UNESCO World Heritage Site where the Blackfoot people (before horses and firearms had been introduced by European contact) hunted bison by stampeding them off a cliff (that’s an exceptionally condensed summary of a fascinating and complex practice).  This site is well worth the visit—the haunting physical location and first-class interpretive center made quite an impression on the boys.
• Driving north from Great Falls, Montana you can’t help but be struck by the emptiness of the landscape, the feeling that you’re coming to the end of things. It’s just too cold and lonely way up there.  And then you cross the border and continue north into Alberta and the country strangely starts filling up again until you reach Calgary, a sprawling and gleaming ultra-modern metropolis that feels like a city the Sunbelt somehow misplaced.  Driving through on the third day of summer, I had trouble imagining it ever being cold and snowy and dark there.
• Banff is a funny place.  I think about it in comparison to Jackson, WY . . . Jackson might also be touristy and glitzy and expensive (and not without its charms) but at least it’s tucked away in the southern end of the valley and doesn’t sit smack-dab in the heart of the Teton’s signature scenery.  Banff shows no such modesty.  Then again, the Canadian Rockies have so much signature scenery that one jaw-dropping valley can be “sacrificed” for a township.  In particular, all 140 miles of the Icefields Parkway heading north through Banff N.P. into Jasper N.P. had scenery so numbingly spectacular and pristine that, had I been in a pull-over-and-take-a-picture mood, the traverse might have taken us  two days.
• That said, Lake Louise did not live up to my expectations.  Any mountain hiker worth his or her salt has been to numerous alpine tarns of equal or greater beauty that didn’t have an incongruously modern hotel and parking lots packed with tour buses at one end.

The obligatory snapshot.  Thousands of other people were taking one, so I had to, too.

• The interpretive portion of the Athabasca Glacier visitor center (sorry, I mean “centre”) in Jasper N.P. was very, very well done.  The gift shop, however, was a joke, filled with the same useless trinkets that you might find in a Gatlinburg T-shirt shop.  I’m struck by the irony that downstairs they hit you with displays extolling conservation and living in harmony with the earth while right above they push mindless consumer dreck like Canada shot-glasses and Jasper N.P. ashtrays.  And I’m reminded of the wisdom shown by our own National Park Service in turning over visitor-center gift shop duties to non-profit natural history associations.  Instead of Gatlinburg T-shirt shops, we get independent niche booksellers.

If all goes well, by this time next week we’ll be in Fairbanks.  The roads get awfully (wonderfully) lonely from this point . . .

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best father’s-day weekend ever

We’re in Great Falls, Montana, at the moment, having arrived yesterday after three night’s camping in Yellowstone and the Beartooth Mountains.  Opi is at the laundromat while I hang out at our hotel, letting the boys sleep in.  I don’t have the time to write a proper post, so I’ll mostly let a few pictures speak thousands of words.

Opi continues to cook up a storm, drawing on the experience of “camping” on board his sailboat for nearly two decades.  Two years ago, I mostly prepared glorified backpacking meals on my trip with the boys, but this time we’re taking full advantage of the relative comforts of car camping.  Before departure, we spent the better part of two days building a wooden “chuck box” to serve as the heart of an organized camp kitchen, and we’ve both been inordinately pleased with our creation.  And while Opi cooks, I’ve had more time to fulfill fatherly duties like flying kites or tossing a baseball with the boys.

Tonight’s menu: grilled pork chops with baked potatoes and steamed leeks.

Top of the boys’ list of “to-do’s” in Yellowstone was to try out the new fishing rods they received from their Uncle Michael for their birthdays, so we spent two hours on Saturday scaring all the fish in Nez Perce Creek and a couple more spooking them in the Gibbon River.  Come to think of it, the fish were probably more amused than terrorized by us.  The boys got a lot of casting practice but not a single nibble,  likely using the wrong tackle with the wrong technique in the wrong location.  I was absolutely no help at all, failing miserably in my fatherly duties in this realm.  Fish were rising all around us on the second afternoon, and Uncle Michael would have known what to do.  Nonetheless, I did get a lot of practice untangling hopeless snarls of line, and I no longer need to consult the diagram he gave me for how to tie something on the end.  I practiced enough patience to supply a lifetime of fishing trips.  In the meantime, Opi went and sat on a log and read.

I’ve always thought of unsuccessful fishing as a great excuse for spending more time in locations like this one.

At any rate, Yellowstone was magnificent as usual, and I could fill paragraph after paragraph with superlatives.  I have to laugh, though, that we saw three wolves about a mile from our Madison River campsite—after years of my mostly fruitless effort over a half-dozen visits with students to see Yellowstone’s wolves (hiring expert guides, getting up in the wee hours to be in position at dawn, waiting patiently for hours in freezing temperatures), these three might as well have walked up and introduced themselves.

The boys agree that thermal features, like campfires, are more watchable than television, even static ones like Grand Prismatic Spring.

After two nights at Madison River, we camped in a delightful Shoshone National Forest site up in the Beartooths, right under the two iconic peaks known as the Bear’s Ears.  Somehow I neglected to take pictures, probably because I was too busy enjoying a few Father’s Day beers with my Dad and poking at the campfire with my boys.  I won’t need pictures to remember this night.

That’s enough for now . . . it’s time to leave Great Falls and head north into Canada.  Hope everyone is doing well at home.  Mom, we miss you!

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la escoba de dios

We arrived in Niobrara State Park yesterday evening to find a landscape full of light and motion, the tall grasses on the hillsides rippling in the wind like the surface of a pond and the setting sun flooding the entire scene with warmth.  It was every bit as spectacular as the boys and I remembered from our visit two summers ago.  The boys lobbied hard for us to return to the same campsite we had used before, one tucked into a sheltering grove of trees in a little hollow.  In the end, though, we chose a site high on an open, grassy ridge.  Dad was really taken with the panorama of the braided confluences of the Niobrara and Missouri Rivers, and the boys exploded with delight to see a bald eagle wheel past at nearly eye level.  About the wind, Dad predicted “I really think it will die down once the sun sets.”

Well, I’ve been teasing him all day about this last one, his finely-tuned sailor’s intuition not serving him well in the center of the continent.  The wind was strong enough as we cooked dinner to blow a full can of beer off of the cooking table, and erecting the tents was something of an adventure (would have been flat-out impossible with cheaper gear).  On the plus side, it was nice and warm, and no mosquitoes pestered us.  I’ve got to give Dad credit, moreover, for cooking a terrific meal in that howling gale—bacon-wrapped filets and fried potatoes and steamed vegetables.  I’m basically putting him in charge of the cooking for the duration!  And in the meantime, the boys and I learned that you can succesfully fly a kite in that kind of wind  provided you attach the right kind of tail.

In fact the wind did not die down overnight but has steadily increased all day.  Cooking breakfast (scrambled eggs and fried potatoes and sausage links) and breaking camp was again a bit of an adventure, and by this afternoon we were fighting a steady 40 mph headwind as we drove west across the plains.  Tonight finds us camped in another comfortable hotel, this time in Casper, WY.  We’ll head to Yellowstone tomorrow.

The boys journaling through our lunch stop at Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge.

A quick note about the boys: the best 15 dollars I have spent on ths trip has them both set up with little journals, and they have been writing and drawing away in the back of the car and at every stop to make this English teacher’s heart proud.

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trying to make kidsicles

For the first time since our summer odyssey, the boys and I got away for a quick camping adventure this past weekend.  I’d been trying to make this trip happen for weeks, so I dug my heels in and cavalierly brushed aside Belinda’s misgivings as the mercury plummeted in the days leading up to our departure.  “They won’t freeze,” I said. “The fact that human beings survived in cold climates for thousands of years means that kids must be tougher than we think,” I said.  But yeah, with a low in the mountains for Saturday night expected to be somewhere in the high teens, I was inwardly worried.   Not that we wouldn’t survive the night, necessarily, but that they’d be miserable, that they’d quickly sour on the whole camping concept altogether.

Doubt has a way of manifesting itself as crippling procrastination, and even as late as noon on Saturday, Belinda had to ask “So, are you going or what?”  Bitten by an insistent wind every time I ferried a load out to the car, I’d come back in and get caught up in something on television . . . or log on the computer to see how the Liverpool/Fulham game was getting on . . . or read through my guidebooks for another twenty minutes, vacillating on just where we might go.   Finally, however, the boys kicked us out of the door—having enlisted them as allies in my negotiations with Belinda, I couldn’t say “no” to them now—and so late afternoon found us settling into our campsite in the upper Tallulah River headwaters, in the shadow of Standing Indian and Big Scaly mountains.  I was quickly reminded of a personal epiphany I reached years ago, that inclement weather is never as bad in person as it is when contemplated from a warm, dry place.

Not as fragile as we think they are.

Simply put, the boys didn’t freeze.  They had a great time.  They learned a number of important winter camping lessons: to eat heartily (food is fuel) and quickly (cold food is not good food), to get up and dance around if your feet or hands start to feel cold (we would have looked mighty silly to someone watching from a saner vantage point), that a Nalgene bottle filled with hot chocolate and tucked inside your jacket works like a personal heater for hours.  I built a good fire (nothing beats a store-bought bundle of firewood and a Duraflame log to start it for speed and ease) that we needed less for warmth than we did for marshmallows.  I’ve written before about how much work it is to be the solo adult while camping with young kids, and I’ll admit that this time it was worse—along with the usual needs to tend to, someone always seemed to need help getting a glove back on or something zipped up—but watching them feel comfortable and confident in conditions that most adults would recoil from made it all worthwhile.  As we lay in our sleeping bags and drifted toward sleep, we chatted happily about trips we’d like to do in the future.

The next morning we found a small cliff festooned with icicles, and the boys had a great time breaking them off and swordfighting with exploding weaponry.  As the day warmed up, we moved downstream to a place where the river cascades through a gauntlet of car-sized boulders, found a nice sunlit slab to eat lunch on, and threw rocks into an emerald pool, trying to imitate the sound of each splash (“thiomp!).  And then even as we began to drive home, the boys decided they weren’t through—”we haven’t climbed a mountain”—so I drove to a place where a short hike on the A.T. took us to a summit of west-facing rock slabs, and we luxuriated in the sun for well over an hour.  In the end we had a weekend worth four or five ordinary weekends, and I come away wondering why we don’t do that more often.  What would we have done at home?  Watch TV?  Spend too much time on the computer?  Mount an expedition to Target to buy paper towels?

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looking back, lessons learned, final thoughts

“Is exploring the natural world just a pleasurable way to pass the golden hours of childhood or is there something deeper?  I am sure there is something much deeper–the development of an inner resource of strength that will endure as long as a man or woman lives.”   –Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder

“I cherish the sacredness of these outings.  They return me to the father I want to be rather than the one I sometimes am” –Rick Van Noy, A Natural Sense of Wonder: Connecting Kids with Nature through the Seasons

[August 1]  We’re all back home now, including my car, which I went and fetched from K.C. last weekend.  Andrew got his plaster cast off yesterday and was outfitted with a removable walking cast, and the doctors are hopeful that he seems to be (slowly) healing normally.  Nonetheless, he screamed bloody murder as his plaster cast (security blanket) came off, and he’s very reluctant today to put any weight on his foot or let anyone come anywhere near his toes.  With Andrew, the emotional healing is likely to take longer than the physical regeneration.

I still have a week before school starts for me, and there’s plenty of unpacking and cleaning and storing yet to do.  My car needs some attention, too; besides being absolutely filthy, there’s the matter of the “check engine” light that came on about the time I turned eastward.

Looking back on the trip, here are some lessons learned:

1. I may have backpacking down to a science, but I’ve got a lot of room to refine my front-country car-camping technique.  A first step . . . I’m building one of these.  Moreover, I left town with very few provisions, figuring it would be easy enough to live off the land.  But the little commissary in Cooke City, Montana, has very little in common with my local Whole Foods, and my general lack of preparation was one of the factors that forced us to come down out of the hills every few days for supplies.
2. I will never ever get a car with an onboard DVD player.  It’s totally unnecessary, unless the kids’ sense of curiosity and imagination has already been sucked dry by such a device.  Windows are amazing things, and I encourage all kids to try them while traveling.
3. The decision to blog the trip was, on the balance, a good one, and I think I’d do it again.  Keeping up with all that techno claptrap was something of a pain, and from time to time this added layer seemed to usurp our agenda, but writing and sharing was fun, and the boys were proud that other people followed us and seemed to think that what they were doing was special.  Our blogging certainly helped Mommy keep her sanity while we were away from her.  For myself, it was a good dry run for what I might do with future summer courses . . . the Field Geology courses and Naturalist Field Study course that I’ve taught in the past could certainly have incorporated this!

One a more serious note, one of the reasons you leave home is to be able to come back and see home from a new perspective, and I’m sorry to say that I’m even less happy with Atlanta summers than I thought I was before I left.  Baking in its own heat island and smothered with a blanket of bad air, this has not been a pleasant place to come home to.  Of course I expected that.  What’s changed for me is that I look at it now in terms of my kids’ experience; they’ve quickly gone back to being caged creatures.  I’m as convinced as ever that nothing could be more wholesome for my boys (for all children) than more opportunities to be “free range kids” in healthy natural environments, and I’m determined to give my boys more opportunities, but where to do this in Atlanta?  I might take them to Sweetwater Creek, I might take them down to the Chattahoochee River, but I certainly wouldn’t let them play in the water, and I probably wouldn’t let them out of my sight.  (Of course, Andrew can’t get out of his wheelchair, anyway, so it’s a moot point right now.)  What about as they get older?  As a kid, I spent hours with my friends (no parents!) exploring the little pockets of woods in my neighborhood that stitched together the backs of people’s backyards, but do kids do that anymore in the city?  Do I have to drive two hours (or three weeks) out of town to give them these opportunities?

And finally . . .

There are some pictures that I didn’t take but that I cannot get out of my head, as much as I wish I could: every single lodgepole pine tree in the mid elevations of the upper Colorado River watershed is dead or dying from pine beetle infestation.  The west side of the Continental Divide in Rocky Mountain National Park and the surrounding area is just devastated beyond description.  We drove for two hours through a forest that has died seemingly overnight, mountainside after mountainside, valley after valley.  I backpacked in RMNP last August, and you could see the beginnings of this outbreak, but nothing like what has transpired this summer.  Now I’m not bothered by forest death under natural conditions (the Yellowstone fires of 1988, for instance, were all part of the healthy natural cycle).  Pine beetles are native pests, and big outbreaks do happen every couple of decades under normal conditions.  But the extent of this outbreak is unprecedented, absolutely staggering, and the cause is alarming–ten years of warmer-than-usual winters have removed the primary limiting factor keeping beetle populations steady, and what you have now is an ecosystem in radical flux.  National Park biologists are unequivocal about climate change being the primary factor (among several) contributing to the unprecedented severity of this outbreak.  Is this just a taste of things to come?

Of course I realize that I radically expanded my own carbon footprint by taking a six-thousand-plus mile road trip this summer.  It bothers me.  Theoretically, our family’s cars and air travel are carbon neutral because I purchase offsets for them through TerraPass (who knows, maybe I helped subsidize the windmills I saw popping up in Nebraska and Iowa) , but that doesn’t change the fact that there would be some 5,300 fewer pounds of CO2 in our atmosphere had I stayed home.  Oh well.  To paraphrase Barry Lopez (I think), it’s not the environment that is degraded, it is humanity’s relationship with it.  That is something I can address, at least within my own family.

Back to start of trip

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no longer outnumbered

Well, from this point, the tenor of the trip has changed a bit.  On Wednesday afternoon, I shipped home much of our camping gear from Jackson before going to the airport to pick up Belinda.  We’ve become a foursome.  And I sit right now in the lobby of the Old Faithful Inn . . . extra luxurious accommodations compared to what we’ve been used to.

(BTW, we shipped via UPS.  Why is it so easy to find a UPS Store but not see UPS trucks on the road?  FedEx trucks continue to be everywhere.)

Backtracking a bit, here are the past couple of days in pictures.

Monday: From Swan Laundry in West Yellowstone, my last post location, we drove back into the park and on to Upper Geyser Basin, where we walked out onto the boardwalk just in time to see Castle Geyser erupt in the distance.  Castle has become perhaps my favorite Yellowstone geyser; it only goes a couple of times a day, but it’s relatively predictable and very impressive.  Castle’s eruptions last much longer than those of Old Faithful, and they’re followed by an impressive roaring steam phase, which was still in full force when we got this close.

Daaad, will the stinky steam get us?

We wandered the area for an hour or so, waiting for Old Faithful’s next eruption.

If possible, visit Upper Geyser Basin after dinner, when you can have it (relatively speaking) to yourself.

My favorite vantage point for watching Old Faithful is on the backside, away from the buildings and the crowds on the main boardwalk.  Plus, you can sit right over the outflow stream where it drops into the Firehole River.

The boys both say that “tasting Old Faithful” has been one of their favorite things so far.  Funny what resonates with them.

We ate dinner at the lodge, watched the sun go down, and saw Old Faithful go again (a much longer and more impressive show this time).

Never in a million years did I think this picture would turn out.

A personal rule: on any given visit, give Upper Geyser Basin a long enough visit to see two eruptions.

Despite all lodgings in Yellowstone having been booked solid months in advance, we hit the cancellation jackpot for the first time on Monday night and ended up staying in Grant Village.  We had lingered so long and so late at Upper Geyser Basin, that this was a real stroke of luck.  At the same time, I secure a cancelled room at the Old Faithful Inn for Thursday, knowing Belinda will be thrilled (I understand these rooms can book a year in advance).

Tuesday: Driving south to the Tetons, we tried and failed to snag a campsite at Jenny Lake (10:30 AM is not early enough!) before backtracking and establishing camp at Lizard Creek.  We then drove south again to spend the afternoon and evening at String Lake.

No swimming pools like this at home!

In fact, there’s no natural swimming hole I can think of within an hour and a half of home that’s clean enough to let the boys wade around in.  Certainly not going to let them do this in the Hooch!  What a shame . . . no wonder modern kids suffer from Nature Deficit Disorder.

Will happily cooperates while I experiment with backlighting and shutter speed.

Returning to camp, we learn two things: 1) our campground hosts know exactly where we live (their son lives in our neighborhood) and 2) a black bear has been nosing around our camp.

Fresh claw marks . . . the bear was up in this tree when our campsite neighbors came back for the evening.  Daddy Hoot, them Park Rangers aren’t just trying to be annoying with those pesky food storage rules!  This bear got no joy in our campsite.

Wednesday: Lingered late in camp while Will played with the ten-year old girl from the next campsite and I talked with our campground host.  Poor Andrew . . . this is the second time that Will has found a campground friend, and Andrew has ended up feeling pretty left out.  Will tries conscientiously to include him, but he just doesn’t quite know how to hang with older kids and ends up coming back to where I am and moons around.

Leaving camp, we spend the afternoon getting ready for Mommy . . . showering, doing laundry (again!), cleaning out and organizing the car, shipping stuff home so she has room to sit.

Belinda arrives on schedule, we eat dinner at Dornan’s in Moose (cowboy-style Dutch-oven cooking–highly recommended), and then drive to Jackson Lake Lodge for the night (yet another cancellation jackpot).  Happy that Mommy is with us, the boys stay up too late.  In his fatigue, Will gets all weepy and emotional.  Our dynamic is definitely different . . . no more Team Testosterone.

Thursday: Why the hell does housekeeping begin knocking on doors at 8:00 AM?  And why knock when you don’t really listen to the people inside yelling “We’re still in here”?  Just a question.

But we slept late anyway before heading to Jenny Lake, where we join the tourist masses for the boat shuttle and the subsequent hike to Hidden Falls and then Inspiration Point.  Will misunderstands me when I say that the trail into Cascade Canyon is flat once you get beyond Inspiration Point, and at one point he turns and yells “Daaad, you were wrong; this trail isn’t flat!”  Another dad going the other way with teenagers in tow comments grimly “He’ll never believe you again.”

I haven’t loaded my pictures of the hike onto the computer yet. but I’m not sure they’ll be that good anyway, the mid-afternoon light being far too harsh (it was flat-out hot today).

Now, we’re backtracking through Yellowstone with Belinda along.  Tonight at Old Faithful, tomorrow night probably in Cooke City again before turning south towards Denver, where she’ll fly home with the boys and I’ll turn the Outback eastward to finish the circuit.

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Back to start of trip

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the most beautiful seven words in the English language

Without a doubt, the most beautiful seven words right now in the English language are “Will, take your brother to the bathroom.”

As I dreamed about and then planned this trip, I had any number of people ask “are you going to be able to handle those two by yourself for all that time” with the same disbelieving tone they might use while asking  “Are you sure bison-tipping is a good idea?”  I had every confidence in the world that I could—my boys are good travelers, and our agenda was loose enough as to be functionally non-existent if need be.  At least that’s what I hoped.

And they have been good travelers, mind-blowingly good travelers, even better than I expected.  I’ll give you a for-instance: this morning I dragged them from their sleeping bags to go wolf watching in Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley, revisiting the central point of wildlife watching etiquette as we drove—no loud noises of any kind (you even close your car door witha gentle shove of the hip).  The hard-core wolf-watching regulars with their spotting scopes and two-way radios are unfailingly warm and friendly with the casual tourists, but then again I wanted to be accepted by the inner circle (or should I say “pack”), and most parents with six and four-year olds don’t hang around for two hours at a stretch.

Anyway, they did me proud and then some, hanging around in the car and entertaining themselves for long periods when there was no action and getting out quietly and eagerly when I knocked gently on the window.  And then when Will stepped down from a wolf-watcher’s spotting scope, took out pen and paper and began earnestly drawing what he had seen without any prompting whatsoever, I thought my heart would just explode.  (More on wolf watching—our Sunday morning church service—later in this post.)  Needless to say, the pack approved.

As good as they have been, as regularly as my heart has wanted to explode with gratitude and pride, this has still been tough going for a lone parent.  Someone always has to go to the bathroom or needs to be buckled in or wants something to drink or needs his pancake cut or simply wants a response to a “Dad?” call before asking another question.  I have to laugh at myself for packing my usual traveling library of field guides and tree-hugging literature; I think I’ve read one chapter of Scott Russell Sanders and opened my bird field guide once.  I’m surprised I’ve done as well as I have with taking pictures; every time the camera comes out they start asking to take turns, no longer satisfied with having little disposables of their own.  Will and I have had some earnest discussions about the meaning of the word “pester.”

A very typical Andrew pose.  “Daaad, I caan’t hold it!”

I told Belinda on the phone the other day that I was wrong when thought I’d be the one who most wanted to camp.  I figured the boys would push me to stay in hotels more often.  In fact, it’s been just the opposite—the boys love camping, are disappointed every time we head for town.  And why not?  Each campsite is a big playground for them.

The main attraction at Pebble Creek campground, our home in Yellowstone for three days.  Why am I not in this picture?  Well, I guess because I’m taking it, but in other circumstances it’d be because I’m too damn busy.

It’s just so much bloody work–unpacking the car, pitching the tent, inflating the mattresses, assembling the stove, cooking the food, cutting the food, washing the dishes, picking up and disposing bear-attracting scraps and so forth and so on.  All while “Daaad” rings out every three minutes.

And so there’s no way we could function without my giving them more and more responsibility and freedom.  That’s why the words “Will, take your brother to the bathroom” are the most beautiful in the English language.  Followed closely by “Andrew, ask your brother to help you.”  Or “You boys stay right here for two minutes and don’t move while I [go to the bathroom, run across the street to the ATM, whatever].”

And I have to say something about their ability to entertain themselves.  Right now I’m sitting in a restaurant in West Yellowstone, and Andrew is playing some sort of game with two pieces of silverware (in lieu of talking to Mommy on the telephone).  They’ve made up games using colored pencils, hotel room keys, sticks, rocks, empty water bottles—you name it.  Just before leaving home two weeks ago I decided not to let them pick out a couple of toys to take with them, and I’m frankly glad I did.  And this experience just reinforces my absolute refusal to ever buy a car with an onboard DVD system.

So what have we been up to?

Even the tortoise arrives at his destination eventually.

We entered the park on July 4th by the Northeast Entrance and made camp at Pebble Creek, a rather small and remote site, nothing like the industrial campgrounds at Canyon and Madison.  We drove up and down Lamar Valley and made a quick visit to the crowds at Tower Falls, but mostly we hung around camp and explored its immediate area before going back up the road to Cooke City for fireworks in the evening.  The fireworks were okay, about what you’d expect in a town of 140, but the way the big blasts echoed off the surrounding mountains for a full seven seconds was pretty impressive.  For his part, Andrew spent the whole time with his hands clamped firmly over his ears and asking to get back in the car . . . until they were over and he started talking about how great they were.

On Saturday, we drove toward Canyon, visited the super-cool new Visitor Center, checked out Upper Falls (but had to leave quickly because Andrew had to pee), had lunch by the Yellowstone River in Hayden Valley, and walked around the Mud Volcano thermal group.  Will and I are both big fans of the feature called Churning Cauldron.  Andrew isn’t real sure about the “stinky steam.”

Maybe we can catch a fish for lunch!

Will, I don’t want to go in the stinky steam!

But the big highlights for the day were the bears.  We saw four black bears, including a mother and cub, and three grizzlies, including one which we watched for a good thirty minutes from a distance of probably only 40 yards, a truly magical and bizarre experience, the bear being safely atop a thirty-foot roadcut cliff and being ogled by hundreds of tourists below.

No I don’t (yet) own a really big telephoto lens (I top out at 150mm).  He (she?) was really that close

The bear kept digging and eating, digging and eating.  Occasionally a rock would cut loose and roll down the slope, dropping off the roadcut and narrowly missing a tourist car parked below.

And then yesterday we had our wolf morning.  In the past, I have spent a lot of Westminster’s money, contracting with the Yellowstone Institute for their guides to take my courses wolf watching.  I’ve stood and shivered through a number of early mornings, waiting to see what might turn up in what were considered “sure-fire” locations.  And I had seen nothing.  So I debated trying again with the boys, but I’m thankful that I did.  Most of the pack stayed back in the trees, but we heard them howling a couple of times, and then one adult made a circuit all the way around our position, popping in and out of view for a half hour or so.  As wolf sightings go, I guess it was pretty ho-hum, if there is such a thing (yesterday in another part of the Park we just missed seeing one take an elk calf), but it totally made our morning.

We spent the afternoon hiking to Trout Lake, where the big attraction was watching the spawning Cutthroat Trout swim up the inlet stream.

Hiking through a garden of wildflowers . . .

. . . to a beautiful little lake.

They don’t really show in this picture, but there are at least a dozen big cutthroat in this riffle in front of Andrew.  He squeals with delight every time they give him a good splash.

Okay, that’s our progress so far.  If there are any typos, I’ll have to fix them later . . . our laundry is done and the boys are hungry.  This evening, we’re off to Old Faithful.

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devils, bighorns, and toothy bears, oh my!

This will have to be a quick post, as we’re in a breakfast place and the boys have one need after another to be addressed.  This is much easier to do after they have gone to bed.  So here are some pictures.

From Sundance, we headed to Devil’s Tower.  I thought we’d spend the morning there, but in the end we spent most of the day.

They could have sat by the prairie dog town all day.

We hiked all the way around the tower.  Only a mile and a half unless you insist on scrambling over every single boulder on the way.

From there, we drove up into the Bighorns, racing darkness to make camp (in the rain).  After a very cold night, we woke to sunshine by a pretty mountain river.

Andrew practicing his fish stabbing technique.

Driving from east to west on Hwy 14 in the Bighorns, you have to make a choice at Burgess Junction: Left on 14 or right on 14A.  Last time through, I went left.  This time I got to see what I had missed . . . 14A led to some very dramatic mountain driving (was to be a theme for the day).

Big snow year for Wyoming meant there was lots to play in at the summit.

From there, we crossed the Bighorn Basin to Red Lodge, MT, and headed up into the Beartooth Mountains.  The next 60 miles took us about four hours with all the stopping and gawking and playing we did.  Simply put, this was by far the most dramatic and beautiful mountain drive I have ever been on.  Unfortunately, just as the sun started going down and the light got really nice for photography, the boys (suffering from extreme sensory overload) fell asleep, so I just drove on through.

Where’s Andrew?  Would rather sit in the car than wear a hat.

We decide to climb a little mountain.

All smiles at the summit.

Unfortunately, there was so much snow in the mountains that almost all of the FS campgrounds were closed, and the few that were open were filled.  So we roughed it in Cooke City, just outside the northeast entrance to Yellowstone.  For the next several days, we’ll camp in the park (coming back up to Silver Gate tonight for fireworks) before heading down to Jackson to get Belinda at the airport next Wednesday.

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