The Rest of the West
- Phil Smith
- 6 days ago
- 6 min read
After being in Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks, it seemed like it would be hard for any other place to wow us like they did. But the natural beauty and wonder of the American West doesn't stop with those two places.
The Tetons
Leaving Yellowstone, we drove south for the short trip to the Grand Teton National Park. These mountains are a true world wonder, thrusting upward from the prairie to 12,000 feet and more. It's hard to believe one is looking at a real mountain range instead of a large painting.
They are young mountains, forming in just the last 10 million years - a blink in the Earth's geologic time. And they are still rising, as periodic earthquakes along the Teton fault continue to push them upward and the floor of the Jackson Hole plain downward.
As young as they are, they are made up of some of the oldest rock on Earth! The mountain-building caused by tectonic plate movement has caused very old rock to be brought to the surface in these mountains.
Smoke from Canadian fires was drifting into the area, so the first day we were there was the best viewing. We drove along the length of the range and found a nice spot to stop and have a picnic lunch. Then we went to the town of Jackson, where our hotel room was.
We had a little issue with the hotel, but it was sorted out and we had a comfortable room with a kitchenette, within walking distance of the town center. It's an older western town that has become a magnet for a wealthier clientele. There are many good places to eat and some very high-end art galleries. We had excellent meals at Gather and The Kitchen. It was a good place to be for food, but it was overwhelmed with people.
The park is a true wonder. On our one full day there we took a bus tour that stopped at many places for good views and a little history of the region. One of our favorite places was the small Jenny Lake lodge, which has well-appointed cabins and a wonderful restaurant. We decided that if we come back it would be a great place to stay.
Jenny Lake itself is a small, beautiful lake at the foot of the mountains. It was created when the huge glaciers that covered the land and shaped the mountains retreated. Lake Jackson, another glacier-formed lake, is much larger but is having water level issues due to mandated releases of water to irrigate the Idaho potato farms further down the Snake River. Our boat tour on the lake was cancelled due to the low water levels.
We left early the next morning and drove across Wyoming to Casper, where we stayed a night. Then it was on to the Black Hills.
The Black Hills
The Black Hills National Forest on the western edge of South Dakota has long been a sacred place to the native Americans of the region. After kicking out the Cheyenne, the Lakota Sioux were the dominant tribe in the area and the US government reached a treaty with them in 1851 that gave them the Black Hills in perpetuity.
The discovery of gold in 1874 by a party led by Gen. George Custer meant that treaty was thrown out the window by the American government and set off years of armed conflict. That included the famous battle of LIttle Bighorn, where Custer made his "last stand" and the Sioux gained some measure of revenge. That was short-lived, however, as they were fully defeated and removed from the land in 1876.
There are several natural and a couple of man-made wonders in the Black Hills. We visited the man-made ones as we drove in. We first stopped at the Crazy Horse monument, a carved mountain in the image of the famous Sioux warrior who evaded capture for years but finally turned himself in. He was promptly murdered by a US cavalryman.
The sculpture is still under construction some 80 years after it was begun. If it is ever completed, it will be a stupendous monument, however there are some questions about whether or not the geology of the mountain is such that the original design can be finished.
We left there and went a few miles down the road to the Mt. Rushmore National Memorial, where our lifetime Senior National Park passes were worthless. It is a sight to see! But once seen there is little else to do there but eat ice cream. So that's what we did, and then left to find our VRBO in Lead, SD.
Lead is where the famous Homestake Gold Mine was. That mine was deepest and the most productive gold mine in the Western Hemisphere until it closed in 2002. It is now a center for scientific research.
It is also just down the road from Deadwood, SD, made famous in western lore as the place Wild Bill Hickock was killed as he was playing poker by the relative of someone Hickock himself had killed. We were there a few days before the beginning of the big annual motorcycle rally in neighboring Sturgis, so there were A LOT of bikers everywhere.
One of the most amazing natural wonders in the Black Hills area is the Devil's Tower, made famous in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It is located about an hour and a half west of Lead in Wyoming, and was something Phil had wanted to see since he first saw pictures of it as a kid. So we went and it really is a wonder! Highly recommended if you're in the area.
The Badlands
About an hour east of the Black Hills lies Wall, SD. There is a famous tourist trap there called Wall Drug, which started out as a drug store a long time ago and has now grown to be a western must do. There is still a compounding apothecary there, but there is lots more as well. Phil bought a western-style leather belt there and Ann got a t-shirt.
Wall is so named because one can see the "wall" of the Badlands from it. The Badlands National Park preserves unique rock formations that are slowly eroding, forming otherworldly banded peaks, valleys, canyons and more. There is a ridge of harder rock running through the park, which looks like a wall.
The formations are so twisted they would have been nearly impossible to walk through even for the native Americans. Indeed, the translation of the Sioux word for the area is "Bad Lands." So every group of people who have encountered it made paths around it. There is no water and no grazing ground for horses. Nobody wanted to be there.
There are lots of prairie dog towns there. At times one can also see herds of bison and elk as well as bighorn sheep. We didn't see any when we were there. It is a really interesting drive through the park, and there are some trails one can do to get a better understanding of it.
After two full days in the area, we packed up the Road Warrior and headed further east, toward big cities and the last two weeks of our grand adventure.
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