July 2010

Our national parks are places where nature is preserved – and nature can be dangerous.

We have been away from news  internet service for about 4 or 5 days.

A while back, I subscribed to press releases from the National park Service.  While going through those that had accumulated, I noticed that there were several fatalities .  Then, while I was putting this post together, I was told about bear maulings in the Yellowstone area.

Nature can be dangerous.

Some people get hurt or killed because they don’t follow the rules.

Sometimes, though, natural events are the cause.  The bear maulings near Yellowstone appear to be very unusual, where no one did anything wrong.  It appears to be a rogue bear.

Links on each of the picture go to the applicable news piece.

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photo from July 9, 2010

We are currently off the grid and off the internet somewhere in the Idaho mountains.  We will be preparing blog posts to publish when we have the opportunity to go on line.

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The last three nights, we’ve been camped in the mountains west of Stanley, Idaho, at Bull Trout Campground.  Our camp site is close to a small lake, Martin Lake.  It’s a natural mountain lake, with very clear water.

The weather overall has been good since we got here.  I think it might have got up to 80°F the first afternoon after we got here.  Highs the next couple of days were in the mid to lower 70s, with lows at night in the low 40s.  This morning the low was 41.1°F at 7:06 a.m.

The road coming in is a 2 mile dirt road. It was very dry and the surface was like powder.  Even driving very slow, it billowed up around us.  When we got into the campground, the car, which we tow behind the motorhome, was covered in dust.  I used our broom to sweep the worst of it off.

Fortunately, though, it rained that night so the road was just fine the next day.  Yesterday, it was already dry and starting to kick up a little dust when we drove over it.  This is a popular recreational area.  On the weekends, there are probably a lot of people in here with various types of motorcycles and all terrain vehicles, which is largely why the road was worked up into such a fine powder on the surface.

We’re moving on today into southwest Montana.  We’re going without a reservation as we’ve seen a lot of forest service campgrounds in this area that are not on the reservation system, which right now I’m not very happy with.

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We visited Fort Laramie late in the day after stopping at several other places.  As a result, we were tired and didn’t spend as much time looking through it as we would have liked to – and we still were an hour away from where we planned to stop.

From Wikipedia:

Fort Laramie was a significant 19th century trading post and diplomatic site located in the U.S. state of Wyoming. During the middle 19th century, it was a primary stopping point on the Oregon Trail and the Mormon Trail and was, along with Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas River, the most significant economic hub of commerce in the region. In the 1840s it was taken over by the United States Army to protect travelers on the Oregon, California and Mormon trails.

Today, the remaining structures are preserved as the Fort Laramie National Historic Site by the National Park Service.

National Park Service – Fort Laramie

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Another prominent feature along the emigrant trails is Scott’s Bluff.

This was our third visit to Scott’s Bluff.  The last time we were here was a little trying.

“At Scottsbluff National Monument, where the interior of the van had gotten extremely hot while we we going through the museum, I started the engine to cool things off before everyone else made it back.  Then, not realizing that my wife’s purse was in the van, I locked the doors.  This was in the days before On-Star, so we waited for over an hour for a locksmith to arrive from town.”

Our kids refer to that vacation as the "trip from hell."

This time, the only problem we had was that one of our cameras got left on the shuttle bus that goes to the top of the bluff and back…, but we didn’t discover it until the driver had headed to town to refuel the bus, so, another wait.

“Fur traders, missionaries, and military expeditions began regular trips past Scotts Bluff during the 1830s. Beginning in 1841, multitudes of settlers passed by Scotts Bluff on their way west on the Emigrant Trail to Oregon, and later California and Utah. Wagon trains used the bluff as a major landmark for navigation. The trail itself passed through Mitchell Pass, a gap in the bluffs flanked by two large cliffs. Although the route through Mitchell Pass was tortuous and hazardous, many emigrants preferred this route to following the North Platte river bottom on the north side of the bluff. Passage through Mitchell Pass became a significant milestone for many wagon trains on their way westward. In one of its first engineering deployments, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built a smoother road through Mitchell Pass in the early 1850s. Use of the Emigrant Trail tapered off in 1869 when the trail was made obsolete by the completion of the transcontinental railroad.” ….wikipedia

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On July 9th, we were headed to Wyoming from our last stop in Nebraska, following  the path of the emigrant trails of the mid 1800s.

We saw a lot of these flowers along the way.

Courthouse and Jail Rocks are two of the most famous landmarks of westward migration.  Nearby passed the Oregon – California Trail, the Mormon Trail, the Pony Express Trail, and the Sidney – Deadwood Trail.  The rocks were the first of scenic markers travelers would encounter on their westward travel.  Hundreds of emigrants mentioned Courthouse Rock in their diaries.  The formations were first noted by explorer Robert Stuart in 1812, the name Courthouse was first used in 1837.

Chimney Rock is another notable feature along the trails to the west.  The first recorded mention of ‘Chimney Rock’ was in 1827 by Joshua Pilcher. Pilcher had journeyed up the Platte River valley to the Salt Lake rendezvous of the Rocky Mountain fur trappers. The first non-natives to see the pillar were probably the Astorians of Robert Stuart in their eastern journey from the Pacific Ocean in 1812. This marker of the plains was recorded in many travelers’ journals.

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We are traveling about 150 miles today.  We have reservations at a National Forest campground in the mountains between Stanley and Boise, Idaho.

There are a lot of people camping this summer.  Many of the campgrounds have been very full and, in a couple of cases, we were lucky to get a spot.

On July 13, about an hour or so before getting to Dubois, Wyoming, we finally reached  an area with cell phone service and called ahead to the KOA there.  They had one spot left, next to the horse coral.  We said we take it.

“Are you sure? It is next to the horse corral.”

We had left Pathfinder Reservoir late in the day because of the wind and really didn’t want to go searching for a camp site.  “Yes, we’ll take it.”

We have reservations at a campground in Yellowstone a little later in the trip.

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In 1973, I was a student at the Naval Reactor Facilities in the Idaho Desert on the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory – now Idaho National laboratory, an 890 square miles (2,300 km²) complex located in the high desert land of eastern Idaho.

As a student at one of the three Naval training reactors, I worked rotating shift work, 7 days in a row on each shift, with varying number of days off in between as we rotated to the different shifts.  I think there was a 2 off, 3 off, and 5 off.  On weekdays, I worked 12 hour days as a non-qualified student; weekends were 8 hour days.  Students were required to ride buses to the site because of the long hours and the 2 to 3 hour daily round-trip commute, depending on where you lived on the bus routes.

Three buttes – all of volcanic origin.

The site and the mountains beyond.  You can see some of the facilities off in the distance.

The little yellow Department of Energy sign warns that this is a restricted area and that unauthorized people are to stay out.

No trees in this high country desert.  It’s a sagebrush steppe – a treeless plain, a temperate, semi-arid landscape of shrubs (sagebrush) and widely spaced bunchgrass.  Total precipitation is about 8 inches per year.

Our motorhome and car on the highway between Idaho Falls and Arco.

Needless to say, the humidity is very low here, and the fire danger can be very high.

  This display is from a monitoring station at a rest area on the Big Lost River, just a few miles west of where the rest to the photos were taken.

In 1977, after 3 years of submarine duty, I was assigned instructor duty back at the Naval Reactors Facility.  We lived for about 6 months in Idaho Falls.  As an instructor, I didn’t have to take the bus, but still did a good share of the time. 

In the fall, we were able to assume the loan on a house in Arco, which is west of the Idaho National Laboratory.  My commute time was cut to about an hour a day.  There were other guys from my crew living there also, so for the next three years, most of the time I carpooled to work.

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The animals in our National Parks truly are wild and even those that seem mild may attack if provoked.

Recently, a woman was attacked by a buffalo that appears to have become enraged when someone in another group threw something at it and hit it.  Following a friend who also got too close, they became the buffalo’s target after angered by being hit in the side.

The CNN report includes the woman’s video, in which you can see the object hitting the buffalo, followed by the buffalo bucking and charging the first humans it sees.

"I thought it was the end," Cathy Hayes told CNN by phone late Wednesday.

Hayes said she was vacationing in Yellowstone on Monday with her husband and a friend. The group was driving through the park when they spotted a bison.

"My friend is from California, and had never seen a bison before," she said. "So we pulled over and went to get a closer look."

Minutes later, the bison attacked. And it was all caught on tape.

Read the whole story and see the video on CNN.

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