The Journey Home
We found ourselves first in line for the border crossing back into the United States at 8AM, right when it was supposed to open. The institutional, beige, and nondescript architecture reminded us we were on US government property, and almost back on home soil.
We peered at the red light affixed on the wall above the kiosk, and then at the sign that said to stop here before being called forward. We waited for about ten minutes, definitely not going to do anything but sit there until someone appeared. Finally, the border crossing agent showed up at his station (must have been gabbing over coffee), and the light turned green.
I smiled through my mask and said Hello.
"You just put those stickers on yesterday, didn't you?" He said, referencing the multitudinous stickers covering Numa's back windows. We laughed nervously and told him no.
He asked us a few questions, including if we had any alcohol. I may or may not have answered no. He asked if we had a cooler -- I said yes, but there wasn't anything cold in it. The cooler was behind my seat.
He came outside and began opening our doors, much to our surprise, starting at the rear passenger door. He looked at our packed vehicle and asked if anything would fall out. We responded sheepishly that it might.
It was about this time that Vitali looked at me over his mask with a look of alarm. I may or may not have suddenly remembered that we may or may not have had multiple Canadian beers in the cooler for my Dad. Uh oh. I may or may not have unknowingly lied to the border agent.
He closed the rear passenger door and then opened the trunk, inspecting the contents of our vehicle. looking inside our white bins too. Our alarm increased.
He seemed satisfied after seeing our dusty boots, filthy bins, tent, random accoutrements scattered about the interior of Numa, and closed the trunk, and then did not open the door behind me, where the cooler and possible beers may or may not have been.
He waved us through, picking up the plastic crowd control barrier in the lane we were in and we bid him thank you and good day. We drove away, the magnitude of the situation slowly sinking in. Man, did we get lucky.
We departed the border crossing, and then stopped by the St. Mary entrance of Glacier National Park (we had forgotten to take a picture with the sign earlier in the summer), and then we were on our way back east.
We stopped in Billings, Montana for two nights to get our covid booster and to recover.
Our first stop after Billings would be Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, which was quite a somber affair. There was a National Cemetery here too.
Next we headed for Devil's Tower National Monument, in Wyoming. This is a pretty neat one. We were on the lookout for it as we approached and finally it appeared, an unsettling form thrust into the landscape.
N. Scott Momaday wrote: "A dark mist lay over the Black Hills, and the land was like iron. At the top of the ridge I caught sight of Devil's Tower upthrust against the gray sky as if in the birth of time the core of the earth had broken through its crust and the motion of the world was begun. There are things in nature that engender an awful quiet in the heart of man; Devil's Tower is one of them."
The 600' tall butte is an important spiritual site for multiple Northern Plains tribes. According to the Kiowa and Lakota, the butte was created when a group of girls went out to play and were spotted by giant bears who pursued them. The girls climbed atop a rock, prayed to the Great Spirit, and the Great Spirit answered, rising the land up beneath their feet so the bears could not harm them.
Geologically speaking, between 56 and 66 million years ago the Rocky Mountains and Black Hills were uplifted, and magma began to intrude through the sedimentary rock, forming pockets. Eventually the magma cooled, and the surrounding ground eroded, leaving the hardened volcanic plug exposed.
There were a lot of people at the monument which surprised us for how remote it was.
We left the monument and continued on to South Dakota, and to Badlands National Park, where we'd spend two nights (the last two nights the campground in the park would be open).
We arrived just around sunset and were treated to the beautiful pastel hues of the Badlands. For being notoriously Badland averse, these didn't seem so bad.
We set up our tent, painfully aware of how cold it was (maybe only 45 degrees, but it felt awful) after having spent the last few weeks sleeping indoors. The campground had a beautiful view of the Badlands too.
The next morning we headed over the Visitor Center, got a map, and learned that Badlands National Park (according to the park ranger we spoke with) is a free-hiking park. You can hike anywhere you want, which was very surprising.
We decided to combine a few short trails at the east end of the park near our campground first.
We did the Notch Trail first, which involved climbing up a ladder and along some badlands to a nice overlook.
Then we visited the Window Trail, which was a short boardwalk to another overlook.
Finally we visited the Door Trail, which followed a boardwalk that ended in steps that allowed visitors to walk across the badlands for a quarter mile.
This part was pretty cool, badland-hopping.
We headed over to the Saddle Pass trail next, which was a short and very steep hike up to the top of a badland wall.
The top was perfectly flat, which was neat.
Finally, we stopped by the Fossil Trail, which was an interpretive boardwalk with fossil reproductions. Some of the illustrations were pretty amusing.
We went back to camp to chill and then went up to the Cliff Shelf trail to watch the sunset. Shelves form when the limestone collapses and the weight of the collapse compresses the material enough for water to stick around, allowing plants to flourish.
The colors were a delight.
The next morning we packed up and headed west, determined to stop at all of the scenic overlooks throughout the rest of the park.
Each overlook was similar but with unique geometry and varied colors.
We made it to the second half of the scenic drive, which followed a dirt road. Vitali wasn't impressed so we turned around and went to take our picture with the park sign, and then watched some buffalo duke it out.
And also watched a bunch of plague-ridden prairie dogs prairie dog.
We packed up and headed to our next stop, Wind Cave National Park. I found this motel in Rockerville, SD, that was extremely cheap. It ended up being adorably cozy cabins with super nice owners. We spoke with them for a bit about travel and what we were doing. We showed them our blog and they saw the picture of the ice tractor in Jasper and the gentleman said "oh, like Ivan the Terrible!" He was referencing the ice crawler that Canada sold and sent to McMurdo Research Station, where this guy was stationed doing research on meteorites and the aurora borealis. He said it's so competitive to work there that even the housekeeping usually has PhDs.
We headed to the Wind Cave Visitor Center early the next morning to get tour tickets for the Fairgrounds tour at 2PM. The park ranger recommended this tour over the morning tour, and it meant we'd have to sit around in the car for several hours, but we were quite used to that by now.
Wind Cave National Park protects Wind Cave, so named after barometric winds at it's entrances. They estimate that based on the volume of wind that enters and exits, that perhaps the 150 explored miles are only 5% of the cave's total length.
Wind Cave is also the densest cave system in the world, and contains 95% of the world's discovered boxwork, a type of calcite formation shown below, as well as exemplary examples of frostwork and cave popcorn.
This was the first cave protected in the US as a National Park. The Lakota consider this the place they first emerged into the world. The Creator was working on the world and it was almost complete -- plants and animals lived on the surface but the people still lived underground in the spirit lodge, awaiting for the Creator to give them the okay to come up.
Two spirits inhabited the surface, Iktomi and Anog-Ite. Iktomi was a trickster spirit, and spent his time tormenting Anog-Ite. Anog-Ite was a two-faced woman, one face of unbelievable beauty, and one of ghastly horror.
Eventually Iktomi got bored spending all of his time harassing Anog-Ite and decided to torment the humans down below instead. He roped Anog-Ite into playing along (with the agreement that he'd never torment her again), and got her to strap a leather pack to her wolf, filled with meat, feathers, and clothing, and led the wolf to the entrance of Wind Cave.
The wolf entered, and found the humans, telling them of the bounty on the surface, and that the humans only had to come to the surface and he would show them where to find more. The leader of the humans objected to going up, saying that the Creator had told them to stay below until the surface was finished, but several humans still followed, becoming the first humans to walk the earth.
The wolf led them to the beautiful Anog-Ite who taught them how to feed and clothe themselves. The humans thought the surface was pretty dang great, but eventually winter came and they all began to starve. Anog-Ite revealed her other face, and laughed at the humans cruelly.
The humans ran back to the cave, pleading to the Creator for help. The Creator told them they should have listened! And punished them, turning them into the first bison herd.
When the Earth was finally ready and the Creator led the rest of the humans out, he indicated to the remaining humans that the bison could provide everything they needed to survive on the earth -- food, tools, clothing, and to lead them to water.
And after the humans left the cave, the Creator shrunk the entrance from the size of a man to a size much smaller to remind the people where they had come from.
The Fairgrounds tour ended up being excellent.
We left Wind Cave and headed for Ogalalla, Nebraska for the night, and then to Wahkeeney, Kansas for the night after.
The next day we planned to stop for barbecue in Kansas City (Joe's Kansas City Barbecue, which was unbelievably busy), and at the Gateway Arch National Park.
The Gateway Arch Visitor Center was very well done. We had to go through an airport-style security theatre to enter though. They had these huge thick laminated pieces of glass on which videos of frontier life were projected (we couldn't figure out how), and a giant map on the floor at the entrance to the exhibits. The exhibits were fantastic, with excellent lighting and exhibit design.
Unfortunately the tours to go up into the arch were sold out, but we enjoyed the exhibits (although there was only one paragraph on how the arch was actually constructed), and went outside to gander at the magnificent form created by Eero Saarinen, who also designed the office building where my dad worked for many years.
It was difficult to take a bad photograph here. We had learned in the exhibits that the FIRST skyscraper was only a few blocks away too, so we went to look at the building that we had seen in photographs so many times before.
Not pictured in photo, immediately across the street to the right, a Hooters.
We left St. Louis and headed for our final camping stop of the trip, Mammoth Cave National Park, the longest cave system in the world, at over 420 explored miles. We'd spend two nights here.
It wasn't too cold thankfully, being almost in the south in Kentucky. We were once again staying right through the close of the campground for the season too. It was very busy, and Halloween weekend.
The next morning, on Halloween, we went to the Visitor Center for our first tour, the Historic Tour. Our tour guides were very knowledgable and funny. They seemed highly trained.
We entered through the Historic entrance, where visitors had been coming for hundreds of years. Like many other caves, local indigenous cultures consider this place of spiritual significance too, and had been coming here for much longer than paying visitors.
First stop, the Rotunda Room, which was quite impressive. This cave was unique compared to other caves we had visited -- the passageways were large and largely uniform. This is due to the limestone of the cave being capped by a layer of sandstone, so almost no water infiltrates the cave and is thus remarkably stable.
The next stop was the Giant's Coffin, which the tour guide even opened for us with a trick of the flashlight. Many tourists were brought through here in the early years of cave tourism, leaving their mark with candle soot or paint. The earliest we saw was 1870 or so.
This cave, unlike Wind Cave, had a valuable resource within in -- saltpeter, or bat guano. They mined it, eventually transporting out 400,000 pounds, to be made into gunpowder. All of the remnants of this mining operation were intact, including wooden pipes (cored tree trunks) for water for rinsing the saltpeter.
We continued down and along narrow passageways, through Fat Man's Misery (a very narrow section that required walking sideways), and Tall Man's Misery (a very short passageway that required crouching), and finally to a section of the tour where we had to ascend a firetower in Mammoth Dome to exit. We also passed by the bottomless pit.
We passed through the ruins of Karnak, referencing the Egyptian temples that the limestone columns resembled. The resemblance was uncanny.
We finally emerged back into daylight, glad to have contact with our sol again. We headed back to Numa for lunch and waited for our next tour in the afternoon, the Domes and Dripstones Tour. We would take a shuttle to get to this one.
We were a little worried if 4 hours in the cave (over two tours) would be too much. But, we had already purchased the tickets so in we would go! We had hard passed on the wild cave tour that was 6 hours long though.
We had another great tour guide on this one, and before long we were crowded around a small doorway in a sinkhole that would lead us to the underworld.
This tour was much more claustrophobic. A narrow (18" wide) walkway made up the first half of the tour, zig zagging through and down these unique vertical shafts. The mass of the limestone walls around the walkway were physically and mentally oppressive, like we were walking through a passage to another world.
It was very dramatic, and like looking into the depths of HELL!
This is one of the few areas of the cave where water is evident, with tons and tons of stalactites, stalagmites, and draperies.
The tour ended with a trip down to the Frozen Niagara, a particularly impressive assemblage of formations.
It was amazing. How many hundreds of thousands of years did it take for these features to form? I don't know, because I couldn't find this information. Needless to say, a very long time, incomprehensible to you or I.
The next day, we packed up and would drive to the New River Gorge National Park, our country's newest National Park, in West Virginia, another state where we had never been. Despite the name, the river is one of the country's oldest. We'd stay here for two nights.
We headed to see the eponymous bridge overlook first, the longest steel arch bridge in the western hemisphere. It once held the superlative of longest bridge in the world, but was eventually overtaken.
We headed over to do a short hike to Diamond Point via the Endless Wall trail, which we read was the park's most popular trail. Fortunately, it was raining that day so the trailhead was empty save one other car.
The hike was short and sweet, through autumnal forest and fog. We arrived at Diamond Point before long, and a view of the endless wall, which was quite nice.
We headed over to the Long Point Trail next, and sat in the car while it rained and debated whether or not to go.
Eventually we decided to proceed with caution, and the Long Point trail delivered, with a fine view of the New River Gorge Bridge.
We were quite surprised by the beauty of West Virginia. It could have been the fall colors talking though.
On the second morning we drove to the Grandview overlook, hoping to get a better view of the river since it had been rainy and foggy the day before.
Well... next time. Our final stop in the park was Sandstone Falls, which required an extra hour drive to get up close to. We were satisfied with saving time at the overlook.
Our final National Park for our trip this summer would be Shenandoah National Park, which follows the Blue Ridge Mountains through Virginia.
We drove the entire 105.5 mile length of the Skyline Parkway, stopping at countless scenic overlooks. Our timing was close to perfect -- the trees were near peak and quite pretty.
We stopped along the parkway to hike down to Dark Hollow Falls, a quick hike down to a scenic glen and falls.
There were quite a few people visiting here, and it took a few minutes of standing around for the people to disperse to get a good shot.
Just a few switchbacks further down was another, smaller cascade. I thought this one was prettier.
We powerhiked back up, placing in the top ten for the climb, and then headed over to the Stony Man Summit Trail, another short hike which we had overheard recommended by a group in the hotel we stayed at in West Virginia.
Short and sweet, with another nice Appalachian Overlook. It was fun to think about the geological past of the Appalachians and how they once resembled our Rockies.
We completed the scenic drive, and made our way a few hundred more miles and arrived soon home, safe and sound.
another WOW!