John Rachal's Blog

DAY 66, July 26, Friday

I got up a little before 7 to get an early start on my hike, which would also allow Val and the hounds to sleep in and not just have to be hanging out at camp while I indulged myself on a long stroll. My hike, Purple Mountain, began about 15 miles into the park. I started at 8:05 on the six mile up and down trail, with 1500 feet of elevation gain and a 9.5% average grade. I was the first one on the trail, given that no one passed me coming down as I went up. The trail wound its way up through lodge pole pine, and a little higher up required a little more attention as the trail was often less than two feet wide and tended to slope in the same direction as the mountain itself, though not as precipitously, of course. Eventually the trail flattened out at the top, and the actual peak was a gentle, rounded mound just a few feet above the trail which continued on another 100 yards to a spot with a fine view. In the distance were two geysers letting off steam, one of them 158 degrees south of my position according to my phone compass. I checked the map later and determined that the taller one was almost certainly Old Faithful, several miles off, and a mere speck on the video I shot. I found another log to sit on, had brunch of sandwich and banana and Gatorade, discovered that I had a cell signal, and called Val. On the way down I met one threesome, the only other folks on the trail—the polar opposite of the New Year’s Eve Times Square Avalanche Lake hike a few days ago in Glacier.

I was back in camp a little after noon, and Val and I used the afternoon to drive through part of the park. We saw hot springs and fumaroles, mostly from the car, at least partly because parking was an issue almost everywhere, but also because we were becoming a little jaded. I think I’m becoming the horse who smells the barn and shifts from walk to canter.

For dinner we had take-out at the Red Lotus Chinese restaurant in West Yellowstone, the touristy town at the west entrance to the park. Don’t repeat our mistake. The three young Chinese women at the door all made D’s in English back in Beijing, and Val’s and my Chinese is restricted to the words Beijing and chow mein. Val ordered vegetable fried rice with broccoli added, but no egg. She asked what vegetables it had, and after considerable consultation as to the import of this devilish question, the smiling ladies said cabbage, beans, carrots, and all the other vegetables they could remember from their English dictionaries. We returned to camp and opened this banquet at the picnic table. Val’s meal had a bland, pale brown but hardly “fried” rice, three pieces of broccoli, zero other vegetables, and a breakfast-worth of eggs. Hunger drove her to four or five bites, after which she retired from the field.

Needing an early start tomorrow in hopes of snagging a first come, first served site in Grand Teton National Park, the almost adjoining park south of Yellowstone, we hooked up and discharged rather than dumped our tanks in the on-site discharge station. Changing the verb, however, does not make the process itself more pleasant. We disconnected and stowed our water hose and loaded up dog pen and outside chairs, leaving only our power cord hooked up.

Remembering the vile, middle-of-the-night leg cramp I had a couple weeks ago, I had downed a good bit of Gatorade during and after the hike and even for supper, and happily avoided a repeat of that unpleasantness. But no good deed goes unpunished, and my bladder, the size of an aborted peanut, required nearly hourly emptying throughout the night.

DAY 67, July 27, Saturday

Happy Birthday Hannah T! Who loves ya? Dad.

We were away by seven and drove south through the park, and were very pleased to see a grizzly 150 yards off the road. He was black with some brown, and at first I thought he was a black bear. But the shoulder hump was distinctive and he was much too big for a black bear. We crossed the continental divide three times, twice at about 8200 feet and once at 7900.

Shortly after exiting the south entrance to Yellowstone we entered Grand Teton NP. Val’s excellent planning discovered that if we arrived in time for first come, first served, we could pay $78 per night for full hook-up in the park beginning Sunday, but if we were OK with dry camping, we could pay just $16 (the “golden age” rate) beginning today. We chose the latter. We almost immediately had a positive reaction to this park, or at least our area in Colter Bay. Colter had been a hunter for Lewis and Clark, and ultimately spent his days as the first white “mountain man,” living in the Yellowstone and Teton areas beginning in 1806. The very idea of living on your own in this wilderness—when I couldn’t make it two weeks even with modern clothing, weapons, and technology (heck, I’ve never even built a fire without matches)—just stuns me. And if you get injured, which is a fair possibility if you don’t spend your life behind a desk, well that could be it. Remember the guy in Jeremiah Johnson (based on a real man) who broke his leg, knew he was doomed, left a note hoping that a white man would inherit his rifle once he was dead, and was found frozen solid by Jeremiah?

Anyway, this park has a somewhat different feel, probably mostly attributable to being smaller and especially a feeling of being less crowded. You could actually get parking places, and rather easily. Yellowstone left us with a dose of park fatigue, but Grand Tetons (those French mountain men had a way with lusty names) National Park sort of perked us up. The mountains themselves are eye-popping, and that’s coming from two folks who have seen some mountains recently. At only about 9 million years old, mere geologic adolescents, they are sharp, angular, craggy and jagged. Grand Teton itself, the tallest at 13,770 feet, just blew me away. We left camp around 7:30 pm for a trip down the road, and the rain-threatening clouds around Grand Teton and its fellows rivaled Denali itself in grandeur.

I read well into the evening, having bought two books of John Muir’s writings at the Visitors Center in Colter Bay. In general, my reading on this trip has fallen off at least 90%.

DAY 68, July 28, Sunday

The day was gorgeous—blue sky, the scent of Douglas fir in the air, the temperature pleasantly cool. I cooked eggs and pancakes for breakfast on the small gas grill. Tasty, but a little messy. Val had a pancake and grits.

Colter Bay, where we are, is near the top of the park, and we loaded up the dogs and headed south. Jenny Lake disabused us of the idea that the park doesn’t have crowds; we never found a parking place. But we did get one at the Jackson Hole and Greater Yellowstone Visitors Center very near the bottom of the park, and Val went in while I sat with the dogs outside, then we traded. Val had a hankering to see Jackson and the surrounding area well known as Jackson Hole (“hole” is the term early trappers gave to an area surrounded by mountains). We bought lunch at a little deli just as you get into town and took it across the street and ate in a park-like area with willow trees and a small pavilion with a couple of picnic tables. We left our canines in the car, partly shaded with windows half-way down and windshield reflector in place. There were many geese in the neighborhood of the cute little park, but their sense of decorum in the matter of certain bodily functions leaves much to be desired, and a very watchful step was profitable.

Val’s curiosity about this famous small town satisfied, we headed back north and stopped at an entrance sign to the park, and my ever-observant wife noticed a cut in the sidewall of a tire. We hope to find a place in Jackson tomorrow, Monday, where we can replace the tire. If not, we will have to go to Casper, Wyoming, on our way home but 260 miles away. We cannot say whether the injury is serious, but we are playing it as safe as we can since a sidewall blowout on a front tire, and pulling a camper, is extremely undesirable.

We turned on the generator for only about the third time on the trip, and were for a while much grieved to think that after replacing the camper air conditioner two days before leaving and having gotten a second Honda 2200 generator, we still had a problem with the generator running the A/C. Val found a Facebook comment that said to turn off the “auto” function on the refrigerator and turn it to propane. The refrigerator auto function chooses electric power over gas if there is a source for the former, which the generator provides. We did this, thus keeping the refrigerator from pulling on the generator at the same time the A/C was, and all seemed well. Val is marvelously resourceful.

Another conundrum occurred a little before midnight, when Val noticed that the refrigerator idiot light was on. Though keenly interested in the refrigerator doing its job, I never seem to notice these things. At first, we feared a refrigerator failure, but then we wondered if the propane bottle supplying it was empty. We went outside to switch to the other bottle, and that did the trick. While outside, we looked up to see an incredibly dark sky, with the stars brilliant, the Big Dipper stunning, Scorpio ablaze, and even fifth magnitude stars easy to see against a jet black background. It made me think of all those wonderful Patrick O’Brian sea novels, and that those sailors, and their real, flesh-and-blood counterparts of that and earlier eras, saw those stunning points of light against that black sky every clear night, from horizon to horizon in any direction.

DAY 69, July 29, Monday

A mostly disappointing day in that we drove to Jackson at the bottom end of the park to get our tire fixed. No, they did not have any Michelins after all. The substitute they offered was a brand I had never heard of, and our spare is a dodo and not a Michelin, so obviously it was not useful. We decided to wait until Casper, Wyoming, 260 miles away. We had lunch at a Mexican restaurant near the tire store, also a disappointment in food and in service.

The high point was Val’s suggestion to take a side road to Mormons’ Row, a road with a few abandoned houses and barns established in the late 19th century. Against the backdrop of Grand Teton and its neighbors, I got a photo of a barn which I hope will be one of my better pictures of the trip. The small-tailed ground squirrels ran for their holes if you got too close. Seeing the Mormons’ industry in building homes, designing irrigation schemes, and scratching a living out of the land, one simply cannot fault them for their grit, hard work, and communal cohesion. We also met a couple originally from Philadelphia transplanted to Israel 35 years ago. We talked a little politics and religion—the two topics most people have the good sense to avoid. No acrimony of course, just each of us with curiosity questions for the other.

It was a bit rainy when we returned to camp, but in order to get to Casper in time to get our tire changed, we hitched up and discharged so as to get an early start. Again we had trouble with the flip jack, which has to bend like your knee, with your foot coming up to a right angle. But if the camper is sitting low enough when hitched, as it was for some reason, the six inch square foot is too tight to the ground and won’t bend up. We finagled it with a two-by-six under one of the tires, but I think Val agrees with me that the whole contraption needs to come off, leaving only the jack post, which was original. That simply lifts straight up, without the need for anything to bend. The foot is better in that in provides a wider base of support, but that can be compensated for by simply having the jack post sit on a square of wood, which is what we did before and what most people do. Sorry for the granular detail, gentle and long-suffering reader.

DAY 70, July 30, Tuesday

Today began a little drizzly, but we had little to do before departing. But Val noticed a large and raucous-sounding bird. We were both pretty sure it was a descendant of some outcast of the jay tribe, no doubt expelled from the proper society of jays for unseemly deviant behavior long generations before. In any event he was nothing we had ever seen. After a thorough search of our bird sources, I was pretty sure we had discovered another new species, but Val was almost certain it was a Clark’s Nutcracker. I’d like another crack at him before checking him off.

Exiting the park at Moran Junction, we crossed Togwotee Pass, elevation 9,658 feet, at the Continental Divide. The road through the Wind River Valley offered grand views of large, red rock formations, some of which were cliffs within yards of the road. Some areas looked very much like a scaled-down Grand Canyon. We crossed the river three times. It is one of those clear, smallish, mostly shallow rivers that create miniature white water rapids as they gurgle over the stones that make up their bottom, and that I find so appealing.

Eventually the road, heading east with a touch of south, opened into the to-the-horizon, undulating, low hills of eastern Wyoming, roughly four to five thousand feet of elevation. Puffy cumulus clouds hugged that horizon, while a few of their wispy cousins, that looked for all the world like an old man’s thinning white hair, floated above.

Our Michelin tire was waiting for us in Casper. They changed it quickly and we were on our way, $270 poorer, but no longer wondering about sidewall blowouts. I remember paying $50 each for four Michelins for my little 1964 Porsche 356 in about 1969. Now I pay over that for a bicycle tire.

We went another 40 miles to a KOA. We plugged in to the power pole, but neither hooked up to their water supply (we had filled our tank in the Tetons) nor unhitched, all the better for a departure tomorrow. It hit 97 degrees today in Casper, but was windy and dry and did not feel that bad.

DAY 71, July 31, Wednesday

I have begun reading one of the John Muir collections I picked up in the Tetons. The reader insistent on functional, just-the-facts-ma’am nouns, pronouns, and verbs will not likely care for his lush, bountiful assortment of adjectives and adverbs cavorting with and adorning all those nouns and verbs. He paints with words, sometimes neologisms, like “arrowy” conveying straightness. His imagery splatters the page. It’s gorgeous, brilliant, and sometimes overwhelming. But it is pure experience—what he sees, hears, smells, feels, sometimes even tastes—all translated into impassioned language fully able to make an attentive reader almost see, hear, smell, and feel what he does, though at one remove. Possibly we can experience a thing fully—joy, passion, love, hatred, ecstasy—without being able to express the experience in language. I’m not entirely sure. But in his case, at least, expressing it in his word pictures allows him to experience it twice, once in the moment and again in reflection.

We powered on, stopping to smell only one rose. We have been driving along the general route of the Oregon Trail, and there is a state historic site in Guernsey where the wagon ruts cut right through the sandstone. First it was gold seekers, then Mormons escaping the religious intolerance that hounded them, then homesteaders, all over about 40 years. Pulling wagons through these plains, over rock formations, abandoning their former lives: pure guts, grit, endurance, and strength. Seeing the actual ditch their wagons cut through stone, even sandstone, reminded me of what Hannibal is alleged to have said crossing the Alps to attack Rome: We will either find a way, or make one.

We spent the night in Kearney, Nebraska after about a 400 mile day. Appropriately for the Nebraska Cornhuskers, lots of corn fields ran along the highway and beyond, crop dusters zooming in low.

DAY 72, August 1, Thursday

Our longest day in the saddle, 587 miles, through the plains of Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. My Mama taught me that if you can’t say anything nice about Oklahoma, then don’t say anything at all.

We spent the night in a KOA in Sallisaw, Oklahoma, about 600 miles from home. It’s too hot to boondock, though the generator would provide a few hours of comfort, and there are few places to do so anyway. So we need electric hook-up for our penultimate night.

DAY 73, August 2, Friday

We lingered a little in the morning, not leaving another KOA until after 10:30, planning to drive around 350 to 400. Our house-cleaning fellow would come tomorrow morning before we arrived, and there was no reason to grind out another 600 mile day anyway.

Most of the day we were in Arkansas, and there were several roses we could have smelled, including Ft. Smith and the Clinton Library in Little Rock. But history is everywhere, and we did smell one last rose, or at least got a whiff of it, almost at our final destination, Poverty Point State Park in northeast Louisiana. Once thought to be the oldest native American mounds in North America, they are now the second oldest, dating back to around 1700 BC, at least three centuries before the Trojan War, perhaps nine before Homer and Moses, and a thousand years before Rome. I have all of my adult life been somehow mesmerized by the idea that Thing X took place on or near the very place where I am standing Y years or centuries ago. I’m really big on ruins, as Val will painfully verify.

Anyway, we called the little Visitors Center at the site of the primary mounds, but they would close at least an hour before we could get there. Too bad about that late start. Nevertheless, as we drove down the little two lane road to our park, I saw a sign for the site six miles down another little two lane road, and down it we went. The gates were closed, but in the distance between some trees I could see part of a large mound with steps going up part of it. This time of day, around 6, the sun was lowering and the place seemed pleasantly lonely, with only an occasional car or pickup truck on the road. I managed to turn around and we proceeded on to our state park, only a little farther.

The park was extremely pleasant, though admittedly this time of day appeals to me considerably, thus heightening my positive impression. Being our last night of the trip, we took a few pictures of the camper, trying to capture the clouds of a setting sun. I took the dogs for a long walk and discovered the Marsden Mounds within the park. These mounds are a little younger, and it is not exactly easy to determine what you are looking at. The largest is apparently more square than round, about 150 feet by 150 feet, and rising almost imperceptibly only a few feet. The trees have been removed and the grass mowed. But if you didn’t know what you were seeing, you would probably be no more impressed than Leo and Lucy, who loped through the eight-inch grass with smiles on their faces. Walking out, I saw an owl at the edge of the wood, but regrettably had no binoculars and could not identify him. Back at camp, I got a fair shot of a rising sliver of moon.

There was a certain strangeness since it was our last night, but also anticipation. We are both ready for home.

DAY 74, August 3, Saturday

We had only 171 miles to go. We crossed the Mississippi River at Vicksburg, headed to Jackson, and then down to Hattiesburg, arriving around 2 pm. Total mileage for the trip was 12,856 miles, with an average of 15.8 mpg, though probably at least 600 of the miles were without the trailer. The comparatively good gas mileage was also due to almost never getting above 66 mph, even on the interstate, when the limit might be 80.

The inevitable question I knew we would be asked was What did you like most? For me the answer tends to oversimplify. I liked seeing Denali from different points on the ground, and I am certainly glad that I did the little piper cub plane ride in the Denali range, though I wish I had upgraded from the most popular flight to the one that actually circled the mountain. I liked seeing the grizzlies in Denali National Park. I liked the familiarity of Glacier National Park, having been there many times over the last 19 years, and I also enjoyed the modest challenges of my hikes, or, as Muir would say, of my tramping. I generally enjoyed writing this journal; I also generally enjoyed moving, perhaps a bit more than Val on the more lonely roads. I liked the company of my wife, and I would have missed our dogs profoundly had they not been along. I very much enjoyed chatting with other people, hearing their adventures, and getting a sense of where we, or at least I, fit on the nomad scale. For an armchair adventurer like me, one who has never climbed a Mt. Ranier (as my friend Kelly has), much less a Denali or a Kilimanjaro; who has never ridden a bicycle across the continent; who has never swum the Hellespont; who has never run with the bulls in Pamplona; who has never sailed the Atlantic; who has never trekked the Sahara by camel—this was a pretty good adventure.