John Rachal's Blog

DAY 9, May 30, Thursday

Another fine day based in Custer State Park. The bathrooms are nice and we have showered there instead of our own shower, though Val and her brother Kevin have gotten me so concerned about cooties in a public shower that I fear that if I let my bare feet touch the floor I will contract some devouring skin disease, so I wear rubber slip-ons, as I loathe flip flops. On the recommendation of a fellow camper—one far more experienced than we are in adventure camping—we decided to go see the Crazy Horse head after all. I need to look into the alleged controversy over it, namely a case of the family of the original sculptor making a fine living off of their compassion and respect for Indian culture. Val told me about it on the way over and I had to admit that it sort of soured me on it. The project was started the year I was born, 70 years ago, and yet all they have is the face, a petty pace if I’ve ever heard of one. The movie—a movie the family had total control over—was highly respectful of Indians, but it also managed to portray the three generation family of the original sculptor as borderline saints. It was almost a white-folks-doing-good-works-for-red-folks scenario—and making a good living at it.

We took the dogs back to the camper, had a very quick lunch, and high-tailed it down to Wind Cave National Park. We did the one-hour tour of part of the cave. When they turn off the lights, it’s darker than the inside of a cow’s belly in there. So far there are at least 150 miles of cave in three dimensions (not all at one level as we tend to think of a cave), all of which are under a single square mile of surface area. There is speculation that only 10% of the cave has actually been discovered.

We covered 107 miles today. The dogs were alone in the camper with A/C on for about four hours.

DAY 10, May 31, Friday

After four nights in the very pleasant Custer State Park, we began a long, three day stretch to the east side of Glacier National Park, knowing, however, that one of the two main east side campgrounds was closed and we would not be able to camp inside the park. In fact, all we could find nearby was a KOA, which, in our self-promoting vision of our pioneering selves, we tend to disdain as appropriate only for wussy alleged campers. But of course the reality is that we too are wussy campers, though our abode does not rival the palatial forty foot RVs with every amenity humankind can conceive.

We exited South Dakota into the northwest corner of Wyoming, and with some reluctance bypassed Devil’s Tower, a huge, naturally fluted monolith of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” fame. A question arises: How many of the roses do we stop and smell? It would have added another 45 miles on a long travel day, and the distance covered in a day is sometimes dictated largely by where Val can find us a place to stay that night. But the Little Bighorn Battlefield in southeast Montana was close by the highway and for me, at least, not to be missed. Also, our enthusiasm for specific sights is variable; Val, pacifist to the core and not overwhelmingly enamored of history, especially military history, came along on that one to accommodate me, which she invariably and generously does.

We had approached the site from the southeast on a long two-lane highway, US 212, through the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation. The site itself is in the southeast corner of the Crow Indian Reservation. The scale of the place is considerable, far more vast than “Last Stand Hill,” where Custer and many of his men met their end. That particular area is fenced off, with gravestones placed seemingly randomly where individual soldiers, including Custer, fell. There were other officers and their men on the larger battlefield, but Custer and Last Stand Hill are the center of attention. Not far off is a circular monument to the several tribes involved, including Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, though total Indian losses were estimated below a hundred, compared to 263 of army forces. But the larger issue for me is that the Indians were defending their way of life. The Black Hills had been theirs all along; then we “gave” the land to them as a reservation. But gold was discovered there, and soon enough whites were there in droves. The army tried to expel them. Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and other leaders still wanted their nomadic way of life—who wants to surrender their total way of life to an invading army and, more importantly, an invading, hostile, and alien culture? They attacked white settlers and gold seekers and soon enough the army was attacking them. While we may, and should, weep for those 20 year old boys of both civilizations who lost their lives on June 25 and 26 of 1876, the more melancholy aspect of this place is the clash of cultures, and the inevitable ultimate submission of the one that descended from the first humans on this continent to the one whose technology was greater and whose roots were on a far distant continent. We left this place, both a bit subdued.

Val found us a nice Cracker Barrel in Billings—nice because most Cracker Barrels and some Wal-Marts and a few other businesses allow RVs and campers to stay overnight, no charge, provided that you don’t actually set up camp. It was our first night to boondock, i.e., living totally self-contained, with no hook-up. We had a fine Cracker Barrel dinner, walked the dogs a couple of times, and retired around 10:30, covering 330 miles for the day.

DAY 11, June 1, Saturday

We got up and had a great Cracker Barrel breakfast, then went to a nearby Wal-Mart for “provisions”—a nice pioneer way of saying a few groceries and, in my case, a new $229 Canon camera, since I think my ten year old Nikon may have gone to its greater reward. It wouldn’t charge or even turn on. Upon reflection, however, it might just be that the re-chargeable battery, which was the original battery, may have finally expired. So at some point I’ll buy another battery and hope to resurrect the camera. Again, finding campgrounds at around the 300 mile mark was tricky, and we ended up going well past Helena and Great Falls to a little city campground in tiny Valier, Montana, after a 410 mile day. We are only about two hours away from the KOA on the east side of Glacier. Tonight’s campground is right beside a large lake, perfect for jet skis and some fishing. The snow-patched Rockies loom in the far distance across from the lake. There are some annoying flying bugs called midges that look a little like large mosquitoes, but happily they are not interested in human blood. The camp host, a genial, grandfatherly but active man, said that in mid-March, a mere ten weeks ago, the temperature there was 26 below zero. It was perfect for us though, mid-seventies, and cool in the night.

DAY 12, June 2, Sunday

We slept in until about eight and had a fairly leisurely departure since our KOA destination was only about 75 miles away. But much of the road was curvy through the eastern edge of the Rockies and several miles were unpaved. At one point going downhill the Tahoe braked by dropping into a much lower gear and was revving at over 3000 rpms, whereas on flat ground it hovers around 1500. We arrived around one at a very scenic KOA on the east side of Glacier National Park since there were no “dry” camping spots in the park itself, or at least there weren’t when we made reservations a few days earlier. Dry camping, Val informs me, is self-contained, no hook-up camping in a campground, whereas boondocking is dry camping without the benefit of being in a campground, which still may have a central place for water, possibly bathrooms or at least vault toilets (OK, latrines), and a dump station. We had lunch in the camper, went to the registration/store and had huckleberry ice cream, which Val had been craving for days. In all our previous travels to Kalispell and Glacier, she had long ago acquired a taste for it. But my suspicion is that, as these things often happen, one’s liking of a thing is what it is associated with—in this case, the glory of vacationing in Kalispell and nearby Glacier over many summers.

We decided not to go into the park today and just relax, or at least catch up on laundry and writing. I am usually a day or two behind in the latter category, and while I do wish to record these days, knowing that otherwise they will simply blend together down the road, I don’t want to become overly compulsive about it especially if it gets in the way of actually doing things. I am also having trouble with my occasional Facebook posts from my phone, having thought I posted two which never actually appeared. My vast technological ignorance is a curse.