Monday, 7/21/97
-----------------------
I woke up at 6:30 am this morning to
quiet -- no rain. Until, that is, I contemplated getting out of the warm sleeping
bag. Then the rain started again, gradually increasing intensity. The more I
wanted to get up, the harder it poured, and thus, the longer I waited in the sleeping bag.
Remember, the raincoats were in the car. But by now, I needed to get up
for a rest room visit.
Then I remembered that buried in the bottom of the storage area below one of the trailer seats, was an old Army issue
poncho that I had never thrown out in spite of its ragged condition. It had been
in the same spot during our trip in 1985, and no one had used it then, nor in the intervening dozen years since.
So at 7:30
am, I got dressed and started
digging around for that heavy olive green monster of a poncho. It was under a
large cardboard box full of backpacking food. The box was wedged into the seat
cavity entangled with ten feet of retractable electrical service cord. There
were also all kinds of loose things piled up around it in the confined storage area.
That box was a bear to get out so I could retrieve the ugly poncho, then get back into the storage area. It took me twenty minutes of futzing around to the music of the pouring rain on the roof of the trailer. I put on the poncho, dancing around trying to find the hood, and get the face opening
actually in front of my face. Just call me “Dances with Ponchos”. I stepped out into the rain to head for the campground rest room, and the rain slowed
down to a drizzle. As I arrived at the door of the rest room, the rain STOPPED! I looked up and saw clear sky to the west. Oh,
well!
I figured that since we had been up quite late last night and the recent rain would make butte climbing really messy,
that I let Brennan sleep in so things could dry out a little before we began today’s adventures.
We eventually did get breakfast and head out for explorations. Today,
we drove the Scenic
Loop Road to the
West, stopping at points of interest. Then we kept going west on the unpaved
Sage Creek Drive. Along the
way, we encountered the largest bull bison I have ever seen. He appeared to be
laboring with each step to move his massive body along, but even from inside our large Ford Explorer, he looked big and powerful. We gave him the right of way as he crossed the road a few feet in front of us.
We kept going west all the way to beautiful downtown Scenic. No kidding,
there is a town out there called Scenic that looks like it was a tourist stop in the 1930’s, and has been deteriorating
ever since. Most of the buildings were run down and closed up, but several had
signs proclaiming the usual tourist draws, “Souvenirs”, “Gifts”, “Moccasins”, and “Sorry
Closed”. All of the buildings had solid metal doors and no windows, making it look like they were fortified against
some impending attack. Some of the buildings appeared to be WWII Quonset Huts
purchases surplus in 1946 and not painted since. The only commercial establishment still open was a single pump gas station
/ grocery store that had fewer groceries in stock then we had in the trailer. It
had two racks of snack foods and a cooler of sodas and not much else.
We followed a road south from Scenic to the Southern Unit of Badlands National Park.
That section of the park, although geographically huge, is pretty isolated from the major tourist routes, but is the
location of much Indian history and culture including the historic places of the Ghost Dances in the 19th century. The dances were to help bring to reality the dreams and predictions that, at last, the white man would
just go away and life on the plains could return to the way it used to be for the Native Americans. The Unit has one small Visitor
Center with one small exhibit room about the Sioux Nation and
its culture and another small room for viewing the “Badlands Welcome Videotape”, and a tiny picnic area outside.
By the time we got to the Visitor Center, with all the stops for scenery and bison we had made, it was already past
noon. We asked
the sole ranger/volunteer running the Visitor
Center what there was of interest in the area and all she had
to offer was to visit the Cuny Table Cafe, ten miles to the west on the Indian Reservation or to drive twenty-five miles north
to the 4x4 road that leads to and up Sheep Mountain Table. But she thought there
had been too much rain the last two nights so that we might get stuck in the mud, and that was “a lonely place to get
stuck in the mud.”
So we chose to ignore the Cafe and the tiny picnic area and eat our lunch up on Sheep Mountain Table. The dirt road crossed the level plains to the base of the cliff then climbed up a steep incline to the
top of the table, then nearly leveled out after that. The track was rugged, with
some mud puddles, but quite passable in four wheel drive up to Gunnery Point Overlook where we had lunch with nobody else
around, perhaps for twenty miles in all directions. We sat at the edge of a drop
off of several hundred feet with visibility for miles. Looking down on the valley
below us, there were no signs, roads or human habitation.
After lunch, Brennan played with thumbnail size toads that had been watching us as we ate our lunch on the rear bumper
of The Beast. Then we climbed back in and drove further along Sheep Mountain Road. There were
deep watery ruts and even deeper puddles beside the road, making it ecologically damaging to swing around the ruts. until we came to a puddle that looked like it would sink The Beast in mud up to the radio antenna. So we backed up looking for the first place that was safe to turn around. It turned out to be a quarter mile back at the overlook where we had eaten lunch with the amphibians.
We turned around and started back toward civilization, meaning toward roads others might travel today. Just before we reached the steep downgrade off the mountain, we spotted a pair of tire tracks leading off
to the southeast. I looked like it could be a road or not, depending on how adventurous
you felt at the time. So we followed the tracks across the prairie grass until
it reached the east rim of the table. There were deep canyons on two sides of
us and discovered that we had a marvelous echo machine in the one to the south. We
shouted all kinds of phrases and sounds to hear them return clearly. Simple minds
find simple pleasures.
We drove back down off the mountain and toward our campsite at the other end of the Badlands. We stopped at a few points of interest that we had skipped
on the way out this morning. The Sage Creek Primitive Campground is well named. It has a fire ring and a picnic table at each site.
Only a few of the picnic tables had sun shades. There was one vault toilet
to serve the occupants of the dozen or so sites and most were unoccupied.
We could not resist stopping at the Robertson
Prairie Dog Town. We spent a good half hour just watching this colony that
was much less trusting of humans than the prairie dog town we had visited in the Black Hills. Making it more challenging for us and the cute little varmints
was the fact that the recent rains had left a good bit of water draining across the surface and even filling some of the burrows.
As we got back close to camp, we pulled over, grabbed the day packs for last long explore into uncharted Badlands, meaning going where there were no trails.
Brennan went one way, and Bob went another, both of us going north from the parked car toward the rising cliffs and
into the many canyons.
Bob encountered a man walking a bicycle toward the road. This is a very
strange place to see a bicycle, so Bob asked. A nice friendly conversation began
between the two, as the man revealed that he was biking his way across the country on a very limited budget. He was getting paid by a small town newspaper in New Jersey to send in two articles and two rolls of black and white film every two weeks, documenting
his journey. He had set up his tent at an undesignated campsite one of the buttresses
to be out of sight of the road. Since back country camping is allowed here, he
was saving on camping fees. The man then went on his way, planning to bike to
the Cedar Pass Motel / Camp Store and get some groceries.
Alone again, Bob began wondering where Brennan might be. Eventually, Bob
spotted Brennan halfway up a canyon peeking into a dark hole. As they rejoined
each other, they both admitted to being ready for dinner, since it was already 6:30 pm. So we drove back to camp, washed the
dust and mud off our tired bodies and then got dinner at the Cedar Pass Lodge Cafe.
As a last
ditch effort to milk this journey for all the adventure we could, we drove east to the Windows/Doors Parking Area near the
East entrance to the park. We hiked those two trails in the twilight hours with
some of the most incredible colors in the formations being turned on by the reddish glow of the setting sun. I think it was here that Brennan said, “Remember back in Ohio, when the car was still not working right and we were debating giving up and going back home?
I’m glad we decided to keep going. I know now
why I wanted to go out West.”
I am finishing tonight’s journal entry
at 10:15 pm, and am reluctant to go to bed. Tomorrow begins the return home. Plan P expected to take four
days from here to drive back to Silver Spring, Md.
