The Mountains at the End of America

This was a huge, beautiful drive across brand new country, from one national park to another. We started early. At seven in the morning Paradise was bathed in sunshine. The mountain shone. All the cloud was beneath us.

Pausing only to grab a coffee, we set off, winding our way back down through the forests, through the cloud and finally out of the park. Once we'd got away from the mountain, the sunshine returned and we drove on through a beautiful morning. It was still early when we stopped for gas at White Pass, a tiny, scattered human settlement entirely dwarfed by the distant peaks that reared up on either side of a broad flat valley. Living here must be like seeing everything through a wide-angle lens.

Back in the car, highway 12 took us east. Suddenly there was a huge body of water on our right, lit by the horizontal sunshine. We didn't know it then, but it has the wonderful name of Rimrock Lake. At the time it was new and nameless in the morning sun, as if just the act of driving towards it had called it into being. We had to stop and stare at it.

If this had been a three or four day drive we could have gone on like this, stopping every thirty miles - but we had to be in Glacier that night. We got back in the car, back on the road, chewed up the miles.

The road climbed up out of the valley. The mountains turned to cliffs. We came over a rise and found ourselves in a yellow desert of sage that stretched ahead of us. Gradually it blended into farmland. Washington grows 60% of the apples consumed in America and we were driving through the heart of it, all the way to Spokane.

For the first time since we had bought it, many years before, we actually used a book describing various long-distance US road trips to tell us where we should stop for lunch. The answer turned out to be Frank's Diner in Spokane, just a few blocks from the interstate. For the last ninety years or so it has been housed inside an old pullman carriage, on a busy corner just below the actual railway line. We were intrigued but not especially confident, but there was a reassuringly long line for tables that turned out to mean only a twenty minute wait.

We were eventually shown to bar stool seats looking straight into the galley kitchen where Josh and Nelson gracefully and silently danced around each other in order to cook all the food. It was simple breakfast food, mainly eggs and bacon, with good coffee that kept coming. Laura had the corn beef hash, Chris had a turkey sandwich, William and I had eggs florentine with hash browns. It was all excellent. In fact, it was one of the best meals I'd had in America, and the hash browns were exceptional.

I'd have gladly stayed for dinner, but there were still all those miles ahead of us. On we went, into the afternoon, letting the rest of Washington play out around us. On into Idaho, a mere seventy miles wide at this point. A vast cloud of dark rain lowered far off on our right. We could see the lightning flashing within it, but the rain remained a vaporous curtain on the horizon and never reached us. The road climbed, more mountains ahead, and then spun about to the right and dipped, plunging into Montana.

If there was one place this trip that I wish we had stopped to photograph, it would be this next section of the drive. Turning off the main highway and heading north we found ourselves passing through a golden landscape of great rolling plains, rising to gentle peaks to either side, the grass glowing yellow in the westering sun. Everything blazed under a perfect sky. Far ahead of us we could see more mountains and I was thinking of our eventual destination, Glacier National Park, on the border with Canada. But we were still hours and hundreds of miles away. There would be mountains behind the mountains we could see, but we didn't know that yet.

On we went, now driving along the edge of Flathead Lake, 30 miles long and 16 miles wide. Although it's freshwater it looks like a small sea, the dark blue surface alive with boats, the shores crinkled with marinas and jetties. We left the lake behind and were back into farmland hemmed in by more mountains, punctuated by tiny towns, or ranches with brassy billboards exhorting adherence to the ten commandments.

Sometime close to seven in the evening (Mountain Time) we made it past the Montana Vortex and House of Mystery and stopped int Hungry Horse, MT for gas and a huckleberry milkshake. I don't think I knew they were a real thing, but up here they are inescapable. Later on, we'd be told that no one had worked out how to grow them domestically, and that anyone who did would be some sort of saint in Montana.

Refuelled, we made our final leg of the day: driving into Glacier itself and through to the eastern side where we would be staying. Only 54 miles, but nearly another two hours behind the wheel. On our right, through the pine trees, was Lake McDonald. Ahead of us rose the indomitable peaks of Glacier, the mountains at the end of America.

After Rainier there was something unforgiving, perhaps even cruel about them: a jagged range of brown rock, like broken teeth. To reach our cabin we would need to drive up and through them, along the Going-to-the-Sun Road. Built in the 1920s to facilitate automobile travel across the centre of the park this is, depending on your point of view, either a triumph of civil engineering or a vertiginous nightmare. At the highest point, Logan Pass, a mere 6647 feet up, we climbed out and watched the mountain tops painted red by the sunset.

By the time we made it down the other side to Rising Sun, on the shores of St Mary Lake, the night was black around us and the stars were glinting in above our heads, seemingly closer than ever.

Paradise, WA to Rising Sun, MT

Miles: 606
States: 3
Licence Plates: zero. Inexplicably we didn't see anything new.
Brunch: Frank's Diner, Spokane, WA
Dinner: Two Dog Flats, Rising Sun, MT

Marmots in the Mist

Presumably, on a clear day, the views of Rainier from that path are extraordinary. We may never know. We had a good walk anyway. The cloud was (ha!) atmospheric, and the trees and flowers were still beautiful. The top of the path wound across a flat heathland populated by a huge number of friendly marmots. They bounded around, something like a beaver crossed with a rabbit, eating the flowers and staring ambivalently at any passing humans. Occasionally one would sit up on its back legs and fire a piercing screech through the mist. If anyone urgently needs two hundred photographs of marmots, please get in touch.

After the Wisconsin Disaster

We shan’t dwell on the details of the incident that has become known as the Wisconsin Disaster. Suffice to say that practitioners of the Licence Plate game divide into Purists and Pragmatists and, momentarily, the Purists took charge. The question was, does a licence plate spotted on foot count, or does it need to be seen from the car? Ten minutes later we had abandoned a perfectly good parking spot and were scattered across the cloud-wreathed mountainside car parks of Paradise, without phones or signal, and with visibility at ten metres. It’s safe to say that the Pragmatists will be making the decisions for the rest of recorded time.

The resulting Board of Inquiry made several recommendations, the most significant of which was that, given the heavy and increasing cloud at Paradise, we should give up on our planned walk and head instead back over to Sunrise where we had been the day before. It was a drive, but it should sunnier there – at the very least we should get a view of the peak.

We found the car and set off down the mountain. Just like yesterday, the cloud permeated the forest, tendrils of vapour curled above the road. Then, also just like yesterday, we turned the magic corner and the curtain was drawn, the sky went blue, and the sun blazed merrily.

As we approached the gate back into the park we encountered traffic – we slowed. Was this a bear jam? We crawled forwards, excited…

No. A ranger stationed at the roadside was warning each in-bound car that there was a two hour queue to enter the park. In fact, it was one car out, one car in. Turning around meant another hour and a half drive back to Paradise and, presumably, a similar wait at that entrance too – not to mention the danger that even then we wouldn’t be able to park. We decided to stick it out. Almost immediately our luck began to change.

First, a scruffy green campervan came the other way sporting a dusty, miraculous Hawaii plate. Then the queue began to move. Suddenly we were back into the park and carving our way around the switchbacks on the way up to Sunrise.

As we reached the top, it happened. The road runs straight along the ridge from the last turn to the parking lot of the visitors’ centre. On the right, the land rises steeply, thick with pine trees, to the top of the ridge. On the left, the slope is gentler, with intermittent clumps of trees separated by thick pale grass. At almost the same instant, both William and Laura shouted ‘Bear!’.

I hadn’t seen it and we were already well past. A moment later we reached the car park and turned around, pulling over maybe a quarter of a mile back down the road. We piled out, grabbing the camera. There were bears. Black bears, a mother and cub, cinnamon-backed, making their way through the trees parallel to the road, at least fifty metres away. We stopped. We gawped.

 A pair of cyclists we had overtaken twenty minutes before pulled up. A car stopped behind ours and a woman climbed out. What had we seen, they asked. We had started a Bear Jam.

The mother moved in stately procession, her shoulders making mountains of her brown fur as she paced ahead. The cub frolicked and bounced behind her, bounding delightfully through the grass. Laura laughed with glee, as happy as I’ve ever seen her. The woman from the car sighed with satisfaction; she had been a Ranger at Mt St Helens for six years she told us, and she had never seen a bear before. We didn’t mention the Bear Woman of Minneapolis from the day before.

The bears moved off out of sight. We got back in the car and forgot about Sunrise. We drove back to Paradise, got waved through the line, and parked right in front of the inn. The cloud hadn’t lifted, in fact it was probably worse. We did the walk we had originally planned anyway and it was fine, everything was fine. 

Paradise, WA to Sunrise, WA and back, again.

Miles: Just a smidge higher than yesterday - say, 109?

States: 1

Licence Plates: 4 (total now 47, we're missing Mississippi, Kansas, Kentucky, and D.C.)

Breakfast and Dinner (we didn't need lunch): Paradise Inn, Paradise, WA.

Number of Wisconsin licence plates ironically spotted in the immediate wake of the Wisconsin Disaster: 3.

Attack of the Bear Woman

Laura wants to see a bear. It's her default setting. Any time, any place, but especially so in National Parks which we may or may not have visited for this exact purpose. Most visitors don't ever see one. We didn't in the Great Smoky Mountains, or in the Rockies. But we got very lucky in Yellowstone, in every sense, when we saw a grizzly at great distance and came rather too close to a black bear with her cubs.

So, Laura has seen bears. Box ticked.

And now we are in Mt Rainier, with Glacier and Yellowstone on the itinerary. All home to bears. The box can and will be ticked again, and again. Laura wants to see a bear.

On the first of two full days in Mt Rainier NP so far we had not seen a bear. But boy were we about to hear about them.

We had driven across to the eastern side of the park to a place called Sunrise. The cloud above Paradise had thickened and descended overnight, obliterating the mountain peak and pressing through the trees around the inn. Dramatic and beautiful, but not excellent for walking; fifty miles away, in Sunrise, fifty miles away, things were supposed to be different.

Getting there meant a long slow drive back down all the switchbacks, this time with minimal visibility. The cloud filled everything, masking the forest and valleys below as well as the peaks above so that all was white apart from us and the next ten metres of road. Slowly we crept under the bottom edge of the cloud so that it seemed to hover just above us. Then, about halfway through the hour and a half journey, we turned a long steep corner and suddenly, like the parting of a curtain, the road ahead was completely clear, the sky was blue and the sun shone.

Sunrise is higher than Paradise, 6400 feet above sea level, and the highest point of Mt Rainier that can be reached by car. We walked from there up a steep trail, and eventually, with some huffing and puffing, made it to the top of Second Burroughs Mountain, another 1000 feet higher again.

Here we were well above the treeline, on a broad flat expanse of tundra, the wind in our faces. Right in front of us loomed the top of Mount Rainier itself, huger and nearer than ever, the ice shining white in the sunshine, fading to blue in the shadows. We stood and gawped. And that was when the bear woman appeared.

So often on this trip we've been reminded of the wonderful kindness and friendliness of total strangers. It happens in the UK, but not like this. People we've chanced upon have given us useful information, or just shot the breeze when they didn't have to. Occasionally there were astonishing acts of generosity. We weren't surprised to find ourselves in a rolling conversation with all of the other people that were on Burroughs Mountain, either stopping for a rest like us, or passing through.

The bear woman was part of a lovely family from Minneapolis. They stopped and we discussed their trip and ours, and others on the mountain chipped in too. She was slightly ursine herself with glossy dark pelt hair and pointed and painted bright red nails. Talk quickly turned to bears, because, well, all the seeing of bears had been done apparently. By her.

She had seen a mother and two cubs yesterday down by the pond which we had passed on our way up the mountain. She had seen the same ones, or possibly different ones, further off before that. Whenever she went to Glacier she saw grizzlies. Back home, she had a brown bear which came into her yard.

All we could do was admire her luck and her enthusiasm and go on our way, hoping that we might see one ourselves. The track led down the other side of the ridge, through more forests and meadows and marmots and chipmunks. It was beautiful. Whisps of cloud tangled themselves across the mountain above us. Lakes shone bright blue amongst the trees.

We saw no bears.


Paradise, WA, to Sunrise, WA and back.

Miles: 102
States: 1

Licene Plates: 18

Total: 43

Breakfast: Paradise Inn, Paradise, WA
Lunch: Sunrise, WA
Dinner: Paradise Inn, Paradise, WA

Favourite Place Name: Ohanapecosh (for best results imagine it being said by a parrot doing a Jimmy Stewart impression)

Up and Away

Here are two facts about Snoqualmie Falls, WA.

1) It's on the way to Mt Rainier.
2) It's where they filmed Twin Peaks.

But are either of these facts true?

Well, as for fact number one, no. If you were in a hurry, say you were a cynical wise-cracking Seattle police detective rushing up into the mountains to defuse an environmental bomb planted deep inside your local National Park, you would not go anywhere near Snoqualmie. If you were on holiday and just trying to get there for lunch, you would not let the waterfall from that weird David Lynch show lure you into a substantial detour.

But we had all day to reach Paradise, so why not have everyone indulge me in a side trip to Lynchian Purgatory first?

It wasn't until we were packing to leave Seattle that I realised that the locations for Twin Peaks must be close by. I'm basically the only one in the family that had watched it and I'm certainly the only one that enjoyed it (Laura threw up her hands when the dwarf first showed up and never went back - fair enough). As a '90s teen the show was a bewildering and enthralling must-watch, and I had been entirely hooked. When the show returned in 2017 for another 18 episodes of obtuse auteurism, I lapped it up all over again.

A quick search told me that various Washington towns had been used for filming and that the closest, Snoqualmie, was home to both the hypnotic waterfall and the Great Northern Hotel perched alongside, which appear in the title sequence.

So, no Sherrif's office, no diner, or gas station, but still, easily reachable and almost, basically, sort of, on our way.

Picking up the car was easy and quick. We corkscrewed out of Seattle, and out through the suburbs to the interstate, back on the road, curling uphill away from the coast. Thick dark trees on either side whooshing past. Overtaking huge timber-laden trucks. New but familiar.

Then we got to Snoqualmie. It's not even remotely like Twin Peaks. I've never seen a town look so neat, so respectable. The buildings are well-maintained. The kerbs are freshly painted, the hydrants gleam. The grass on every verge, every median, looks like a putting green. There's a convenient, and free, car-park across the road from the hotel, and a smart wooden footbridge that takes you to an outlook over the falls. In August they boast a handsome but modest flow. They're charming, but nothing like the dangerous, elemental roar one sees on TV. The path was busy, but not crazily so. There were a couple of young families and two coach-loads of silver-haired mid-westerners on a tour. An interminable series of highly-detailed panels recounted the history of hydro-electric energy in Snoqualmie over the last century and a half. There was no mention at all of Twin Peaks.

It's entirely possible I was the only one there that had watched it. Or had I wandered into another reality altogether? One where the show had never existed, and this was just a completely respectable, clean-cut, Washington town with a picturesque waterfall. Nothing bad or mysterious could happen here, there were no dark secrets... How very Lynchian.

We bought a magnet in the gift shop, and discovered that they sold key fobs stamped 315 (Dale Cooper's room, of course, at the Great Northern Hotel), for $10. I was almost tempted, but perhaps it was enough just to have it confirmed that the show had indeed existed after all.

We went back the way we came, stopping at the Safeway to buy ourselves some lunch, and drove down the western side of the park through small towns and rolling farmland. Every so often the mountain would peep out from behind a tree, or appear around a bend, slightly larger each time: a massive great dollop of rock, rounded with ice and snow.

The towns petered out, the farms turned to trees, the road climbed. Once inside the park the mountains were around us, the distant slopes covered by a clinging moss of dark green forest. With every corner the road either swung slowly around a great shoulder of rock or snapped back immediately on itself, splashed by a cascade of water as it leapt down the mountainside.

At 5600 feet we stopped. We had reached the Paradise Inn.

We unloaded and checked in. There was Rainier, still above us. There was still time for a short walk before dinner, so we set off down a path towards a lookout offering a view of the Nisqually glacier, one of the many that drape the higher slopes of the mountain. The pine needles shone in the afternoon sun, the meadows blazed with bright alpine flowers. The chipmunks and the marmots skittered and blinked at us respectively. At the end of the path we stared up and there was the bottom of the glacier, just visible beneath a bank of thick cloud that had settled across the mountaintop: a stretch of ice dirty-white against the bare rose-brown rock, impossibly out of reach.


Seattle, WA to Paradise, WA, via Snoqualmie, WA and Twin Peaks, WTF

Miles: 137
States: 1
Licence Plates: 25 - a strong start.
Breakfast: Doughnuts foraged by Laura and Chris from General Porpoise and Top Pop, Seattle, WA.
Lunch: sandwiches on the road.
Dinner: Paradise Inn, Paradise, WA
Favourite place name: there's a smaller mountain inside the park called Mt. Wow.

Revisiting Childhood with Seattle on the Side

Quick note: my dear ol' Pop has told you plenty of what we've done in Seattle, but he did miss out the most important thing, me!!! (Woo!), so sorry if I leave out the daily agenda, I'm going through a bit of an identity crisis. Who isn't though?

We landed in Seattle on Saturday an hour and a half after we left and, unlike 4 years ago, I seem to have tossed my internal clock into a blender and now I'm leaking temporal gunk all over Seattle.  So far this seems to be very much the trend of the trip: strikingly similar but also somehow super different. Whether it be the titanic portions which are now herculean tasks or simply my personal highlights¹, everything has felt off for lack of a better word, like the mirror universe in Star Trek, if that helps. It's begun to make me wonder if perhaps the America I remember living in is some romanticised dream of the country it could be. 

~FLASHBACK NOISES~FLASHBACK NOISES~

Growing up in America, and Obama's America at that, I was sheltered from the devisiveness of this nation (I mean come on, my biggest issue was not being able to get to the ice cream shop by myself) and that has led me to be a staunch defender of the Good ol' US of A to all the Brits who see it as some form of liberty-addicted Mad Max Apocalypse. I always thought it was chronic cynicism desperate to focus on the failings of its gung-ho kid to avoid having to come to terms with its own failings². 

And whilst that's definitely at least a bit true, I'm back here in one of the most pridefully liberal cities I've ever visited³ and I'm finding myself getting distracted by the small things like the super-sized servings and alcohol possession laws, completely ignoring the actual hot topics like gun legislation and police brutality, let alone all the positives of this Oxford-of-America. (The composting and normalised lgbtq+ inclusivity for starters).

When I read through the blog of our transnational trip nearly a decade ago, I discovered that six year old me's favourite thing was an evolution exhibition in a museum. I forgot I used to be the science kid who would go round the table asking everyone what their favourite dinosaur was. Today the question is much more likely to be on the 2020 democratic nomination (prepare your answers!). I teared up today because I was on Air Force One. (Is jet lag an excuse?⁴).

Not to mention the fact that my favourite ice cream flavour is no longer fruit-based, I'm clearly a very different person to the kid who used 47 consecutive exclamatives in a row on his Yellowstone blog. (Look, see? I've only used six! Total!) And I think this has come up for me because of how close I am to a chapter of my life I thought finished and that's a little unsettling.

However Seattle's shown me the same kid inside: my jaw still goes slack at the sight of the NASA logo, and planes are just as cool as ever. On the blog 10 years ago (yep still 10 years) Mum mentioned wondering if I'll ever stop being the obnoxiously comfident one in crowds and much to many people's dismay that doesn't seem to be the case. Not to mention how ridiculously loud I am all the time. Chris will attest to that one I assure you.

I think a lot of this is surprisingly similar for the USA too. The train ride into Seattle was filled almost entirely with me pointing out all the school busses, Ford pickup trucks and the rest of quintessential America we drove past. There were so many Proustian Rushes it became more of a Proustian Tsunami.

So to summarise the USA: similar but also very different, and I appear to follow suit.

Not to mention the whole UK/USA frenemy shtick is as confusing as ever, even if they definitely have nicer skyscrapers.

Seattle is lovely by the way.

¹Definitely the adorable dogs and the owners who smile back, Air Force ONE. THE AIR FORCE ONE. AHHH. Oh and the Space Needle. Not at all terrifying. Nosiree.

²Admit you would see that film.

³pun intended.

⁴ Also pun intended. D'you know what? All the puns are intended, let's just set that up as standard. There'll be a lot of 'em.

Seattle

In the old days we'd have started on Central Time at least; arriving in Seattle from Britain has meant a lot of early mornings.

Out on the street at seven on the first morning, we went straight to the centre of things: the navel of the city, and perhaps the world, the first Starbucks coffee house at 1912 Pike Place, opposite the market. The line outside was smaller than it had been at St Peter's in Rome, but there was a similar sense of occasion amongst the faithful. Inside the experience is slick and courteous, and at the time I might have thought this was the nature of a corporate flagship. After a few more such interactions I realised that I had just forgotten what it feels like to be a customer in America. But there is something else to it as well.

All around Seattle the story is the same. The signage in that original Starbucks is hand-chalked, almost rustic, although still comfortably within the corporate template. Around Pioneer Square, the heart of the old town, you can see the first skyscraper to have been built west of the Mississippi, and walk along streets down which fell trees tumbled, on their way to the waterfront. In the Museum of Popular Culture they have Jimi Hendrix's diary and Kurt Cobain's smashed-up guitars. Enormous Alaska-bound cruise ships now dock at piers from which prospectors once set sail for the Klondike goldfields. Aside from Starbucks, this is the home of such plucky little start-ups as Boeing, Microsoft, and Amazon. In Seattle, what starts out as indie, as rugged, or individual, has a habit of turning into runaway, corporate success.

For the most part, it seems that the city is at peace with this. The high-rise office towers gleam and smart-casual, ear-budded employees stride to their desks. A short boat trip around the sound reveals the industry of the port, with containers from China stacked up alongside grain silos that will be emptied, their contents exported to south-east Asia. Mass transit works brilliantly, with friendly and helpful staff aboard bus, light rail, and monorail. Everything is recycled, or composted, including plastics, and everyone, in every shop, restaurant, or museum, right down to the lanyarded police accountability officer who volunteered breakfast recommendations on the street this morning, has been utterly charming.

Maybe it helps that this is an irrepressibly progressive place. Everyone seems at ease with themselves, and with each other, and diversity and expressions of individuality seem to be genuinely celebrated rather than merely tolerated. From atop the Space Needle, the whole of Seattle shines.

Back on the ground, the tarnish is inescapable. Some of it, like the graffiti and the bubble gum wall, is playful.

But there is misery here too. The homelessness is worse here than anywhere else I've been. In the morning they are sleeping, in the parks, in doorways, under bridges; towards evening they haunt downtown and the tourist destinations. If there is a plan for them, it isn't working; if there's help available, they're not getting it.

For all that, this has been a pleasant place to spend a few days. Tomorrow, we leave behind the gleam and the grunge.

We're getting back on the road and heading a little south and east to visit the first of three National Parks, Mount Ranier.

Testing...

Steamboat Springs, CO to Estes Park, CO

Almost home, but there's still time for one more National Park. We drove up in to the Rockies today and found ourselves winding up and down and through a variety of greenery. The lower valleys (lush, grassy and home to moose and elk) gave way to the densely forested slopes, all aspen, douglas and lodgepole. Then the trees disappeared and we were up on the crowns of the smaller peaks: broad blasted arcs of fine grass cropped by bighorn sheep, dotted with wild flowers, and strewn with lichen-covered rocks. The weather moved fast, a kaleidoscope of sun, rain and roaring wind that didn't seem to trouble the tiny squeaking pika or the long-tailed weasels. Every 1000ft climbed is the equivalent of travelling 600 miles north, and at over 12,000ft the environment was a close match for Arctic tundra. My head goes a little funny that high up, but it was rather wonderful to be up there: great to peer across at the greater, greyer mountains above us, astonishing to stare down into the glacial valleys, so far below us that the forests looked like a fine lawn.

And then it was on down and down the very windy road to Estes Park, which is touristy but not in an unpleasant way. Tomorrow we'll grab another pair of Junior Ranger badges and head off for the airport, hoping against hope that we see a Hawaii plate on our way...

Rock Springs, WY to Steamboat Springs, CO

We cut clean across Utah today, following another almost entirely deserted road. There were distractions though: some very steep hills, the Flaming Gorge Dam and some useful little signs that explained what sort of rock we were driving through and what fossils we might find if we happened to have packed our trowel. The fossils are a big deal around these parts, as we discovered at the Dinosaur National Monument.

The National Park Service is one of the greatest things about America. The land and animal and plant life they look after is pretty special, but the way these things are protected and managed is simply brilliant. We experienced this again today as the boys earned another pair of Junior Ranger badges, this time by learning about the amazing natural history which happens to momentarily be part of the USA. Ranger Bryan took us on a guided hike through a valley of fossils, explaining from first principles how it had all come to be here. In the stones we saw the marks left by the waves of an extinct sea some 150 million years ago. We saw unexcavated femurs rising from the cliff face, somehow more convincing evidence of the original creature than a full reconstruction might be in a museum. Finally, we were shown petroglyphs made, at some point during the last thousand years, by the people who lived here before the Europeans arrived. Then Ranger Bryan pointed up to a mountain on the horizon where there was a shadow: a small forest of Douglas firs. "That's what we call a remnant forest; the original forest has receded until that's all that's left, but at one point it would have covered this whole area."

Now those people are gone, the forests are gone. Most disturbingly, the lush grassland that greeted the Euro-American settlers only a century or so ago is gone, replaced by the arid scrub we have seen so often. But eventually, of course, all things go the way of the dinosaur.

Today's best name has got to be Dinosaur, CO, where we stopped for coffee. It's another itty-bitty place, and it used to be called Artesia before they changed it to try and drum up some interest from the passing paleophiles. It's either cute or desperate, but the street names were changed too and the main drag is called Brontosaurus Boulevard.

Licence Plate news - we only need Hawaii. We've seen everything else (even a Washington DC plate, and there was much excitement when Delaware and Rhode Island turned up) but sadly no sign of anyone from the Aloha State. Still, there's no shame in getting 49 plus DC when the one you're missing is Hawaii. It just makes it all the more bizarre how often we've seen it in the past. Two more days to go though so who knows...

Grand Prismatic Spring

Canyon Village to Rock Springs, WY

We've reached the giddy lights of Rock Springs, on our way back down from the make-believe realm of Yellowstone. It's a veritable metropolis of 23000 people and look, wi-fi! It's exciting, even after just a few days, to see things like traffic lights and fridges again, but I can't deny that I feel a bit sad to have left behind the wonderful world of mountains, geysers and potentially fatal animal encounters.

There's a thing called a Bear Jam (or an Elk Jam, Moose Jam or what-have-you). This is where one is driving along through the park and one sees a sudden confusion of cars parked up on the road-side and many people pointing and looking and trying to take photos whilst a park ranger frantically divides their time between directing traffic and trying not to let anyone get killed. We were very lucky to plough into one of these at the bottom of a steep slope below a line of cliffs, where all the pointy-looking people had found a bear. Three black bears in fact, a mother and two cubs. So we stopped and looked too and took lots of pictures, like this one.

And then, finally sated of the need to see bears frolicing in the wild, we got back in our car and drove off. At which point we realised there was ANOTHER huge adult bear on the other side of the road, about six feet behind all the pointy-looking people who were all pointy-looking the wrong way. Well, we were sort of off down the road by then, but I'm pretty sure that it all turned out fine.

I'm under no illusions about how dangerous bears are. For the best part of a week I've been bombarded with advice and warnings, seemingly everywhere. Bear Spray gets mentioned A LOT, especially in those little perspex triangles on restaurant tables that would normally otherwise advertise the puddings. Everybody is big on Bear Spray because it can apparently forestall a Bear Attack, providing you fire the thing correctly, remembering to allow for the crosswind whilst judiciously gauging the range and closing speed of the GREAT BIG BEAR RUNNING TOWARDS YOU. It's sold everywhere up thereabouts at the reassuring price of $45. We didn't buy any. Firstly, it's a sure-fire way to guarantee not seeing any bears. Secondly, at that price it is obviously just a tax on scared people. Thirdly, there were no refunds or returns. And then, yes, there was some evidence to suggest that bear-related injuries only occurred when the bear had been startled by a human. As long as people travelled in groups and made plenty of noise, they would probably be fine. Plenty of noise - have you met us?

Later that night, driving back over one of the mountain passes, we ran into another Bear Jam. Somewhere far below, tucked away in a fold in the land was a grizzly bear. Occasionally, as it lollopped about, it broke cover for long enough that we could actually see it, and one of the other bear jammers actually lent us his binoculars to have a look, which was very decent of him. But yes, we had now seen all the bears and could go home happy.

The next day we went for a little walk, following a trail from a flat meadow that would eventually take us up into some rocks called the Hoodoos. Soon enough the slope had become rather dramatic and we found ourselves inching along a very narrow path about half way up what I would call a cliff. I was thinking about bears (and making sure we were being sufficiently noisy); I was also thinking about the dangerous plunge on our right. But most of all I was thinking about what might happen if a bear perversely decided to be surprised by us on this tiny vertiginous path. That sounded like a very sticky situation indeed. But we persevered and soon the drop beside us became only a very steep slope. I started to relax. And then Laura said, "I can see a bear."

She sounded fairly relaxed and later on I found out there were two reasons for this. Firstly, she really hadn't thought it possible that we would actually stumble across a bear. Secondly, the bear she had seen was not the far-away-adult bear that she initially assumed it to be. I could see that it was in fact a very small baby bear that was really very close indeed, slightly below us down the scrubby slope.

"What about the mother?" I asked. That sounds like an idle question, and I like to think I kept my voice calm, but what I really meant is "Oh shit, it had better not be behind us." At some point during the next one hundredth of a second Laura realised that she had spotted a cub, I saw the
mother's large brown shape begin to emerge from the bushes, and we all turned and walked back the way we came. A few seconds after that I realised that they were the same bears we had seen the day before. And a few seconds after that it occurred to me that the fourth bear might be lurking nearby too. But if he was, he heard us coming, and we didn't fall off the cliff either so, all in all, it was a brilliant walk.

I'll tell you what else is brilliant: the Old Faithful Inn. We had dinner there last night and it is an extraordinary building. It's essentially a log cabin, although it is enormous, palatial almost. But despite the size, because of the wood, it is fundamentally a cozy little nook. Now I had had a pint of beer by this point, but it seemed to me to a wonderful place, friendly and homely, and, as the evening darkened, filled with light and music. Although the giant hearths were swept and empty, it felt like there were cheery fires roaring there anyway. Best of all was the thought of it standing there all by itself in the splendid wilderness, radiating warmth and song into the darkness. I will definitely return.

Today though was all about the leaving. We drove south, swapping Yellowstone for the Grand Tetons National Park. Suddenly there were proper mountains ahead of us, grey and pointy, and raggedy old forests unlike Yellowstone's fresh green growths. I like mountains. I like the way they look, the way weather spins and boils about them. I realised this when we took a trail up into the lower slopes towards an outcrop called Inspiration Point. When we finally clambered up there, the view was of the lake and some distant non-descript hills. Pretty enough, and worth the climb, but I couldn't see the mountains anymore. We got to look at them plenty though as we drove away. Soon enough the sun was setting behind them through the rain, sending astonishing bars of light down through the cloud, haphazardly blazing across alpine meadows that were certainly full of moose, and bears.

We left it all behind and returned to Wyoming, the bright lights of Rock Springs waiting for us two hundred miles south through a darkening desert of silver-green sagebrush.

Thoughtful Paws

Still no wi-fi, so still no pictures. This is a problem because I'm sort of lost for words. Today we saw waterfalls and bubbling acid pools. We saw bears. We crossed the border into Montana and the sky became instantly black with rain; we came back and it stopped. We saw bears! It was all pretty amazing.

If I think of any better words, or find some wi-fi, I'll have another go at this, I promise.

Cody, WY to Canyon Village, Yellowstone NP

No wi-fi here but there is, an unexpected surprise, 4G in the lodge so I can post from my phone at least. 

It's been a long day and the frontier sophistication of the Irma hotel seems very far away. We haven't traveled far, but we've done a lot inside Yellowstone, driving up over the Absaroka mountains and down through the geyser basins to the canyon. 

We have had to do a lot of stopping and walking, but most of all we have been goggling: staring in awe and delight at forests and mountains, or elk and moose.

Best and most impressive are those features that can't be found elsewhere. I'm trying not to think about it, but Yellowstone is basically the vast caldera of a supervolcano and this unique geological backstory is the reason for the countless geysers, hot springs and sulphurous blasts of steaming air. 

Ol' Faithful is the most famous, a geyser that plumes up a torrent of water every 88 minutes or so. Sitting and waiting for it to strike feels a little like watching test cricket: there's a gentle pattern of white against green, an inconsequential ebb and flow whilst nothing interesting happens. Then, like the pressure building on a batsmen, tiny spurts of water can be seen, like sporadic flashes of a bat outside off stump. Eventually sufficient force is brought to bear and the full eruption sends the stumps flying as water blasts up into the sky for several minutes although, to my surprise, it goes as just as far horizontally, as the prevailing wind carries a heavy spray over part of the audience.

It really is quite impressive but, by itself, it feels a little like an artificial feature. When its place within the network of surrounding geysers and steaming pools is understood it becomes all the more remarkable. 

I liked those smaller pools very much but the true star so far has been the Prismatic Pool. It looks artificial, photoshopped even, but those colours are real: ice blue in the centre, fading into outer rings of bright green, sunshine yellow and tangerine. The colours are caused by temperature-sensitive algae or something but it looks utterly spectacular, especially with the constant clouds of steam that roll off of the magma-heated water. Alternatively we were roasted and chilled as the mountain breeze battled with the pool's own atmosphere. What an incredible place. 

I'd post a picture, but there's no wi-fi. 

Thermopolis, WY to Cody, WY

The hot springs of Thermopolis didn't detain us long, fascinating and restful though they are; the state-run baths restrict guests to wallowing to just twenty minutes, which is, it turns out, slightly longer than I can cope with blood-hot water and the sulphurous smell of eggs. There were buffalo though - not in the baths, but wandering along the roadside of the state park - and impressive beasts they are too. We ended up learning quite a lot about them today, including the fact that they are not really buffalo at all, but bison. You have to be careful who you mention that to, though, especially at our next stop.

Cody, WY, (population a whopping 9689), is named for its founder William F. Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill. It's one of those names that one hears, but before today I would have been hard pressed to tell you exactly who he had been. On a good day I might have vaguely suggested that he was a sort of showman but it turns out he was so much more than that. The Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody put us right, describing him as nothing less than the world's first global superstar. He was certainly the genuine article: a wheeler-dealer frontiersman and scout who explored the wilderness of the west and became a colonel in the US cavalry amongst many other exploits, all of which were celebrated across the world.

British Buffalo Bill fiction.

Somehow, Cody transmuted this reputation into a theatrical career: by the 1870s he was playing himself on stage in New York in the winter months and spending the summers back out west in the saddle, generating new material. Eventually he ended up impresario and star of a blockbuster live show 'Buffalo Bill's Wild West', which toured America and Europe for twenty years, delighting the likes of Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm. Along the way he became a fictional character too, immortalised in newspaper stories and even British penny dreadfuls and boys' own comic books, well into the 1930s.

It's an astonishing story and he was an astonishing man: an advocate of women's rights as well as the fair treatment of the native peoples of north America, even though he had been their enemy on the plains as a scout. And then he set up a city here, on the way to Yellowstone. He built a hotel in it too, expecting tourist traffic to flood this way and look, here I am, sat in room 59 over one hundred years later. It's all very impressive. Just don't call him Bison Bill.

Despite the name, the museum here wasn't just all about William Cody. There was an exhibit on Yellowstone itself, a gallery of beautiful western photography and a whole wing given over to the Plains Indians. It was a wonderful exhibit - non-judgmental, focussed on the artefacts they created and used, and on explaining their way of life. It is impossible to see such things and not think of the terrible impact of us (the texts referred to Euro-Americans) upon them, the dreadful and savage events of Sand Creek or Wounded Knee, the decline of these indigenous cultures. But America, at times a wholly abstract concept, has been created as much by force of will as by force of arms; and in this wilderness especially it feels like nothing more than an idea imposed upon a landscape. The native peoples of the plains were required by nineteenth century America to abandon their ways, to live in houses, to farm individual plots of land, to drink and to pray to christian spirits. What became clear in this exhibit is that it didn't entirely work. These people adapted, retaining what they could of their former lives. Nothing else summed this up for me like this piece: ancient beading techniques redirected to embellish that most American of items, a baseball cap.

Finally some housekeeping from yesterday that I unaccountably forgot to include due to a great sleepiness. Yesterday's best place name was Chugwater, WY. Today's was Meeteetse, WY, but only because I couldn't read it without thinking 'Me Tipsy'. The Licence Plate Game went very well but listing states is tedious - much easier to quickly colour in a map: yesterday's haul is in red, today's in blue. You are welcome.

 

Houston, TX to Thermopolis, WY

It's been one of those odd travelling days where it feels like we haven't really done anything even though we have flown and driven nearly 1500 miles. The illusion is strengthened by not having reached our final destination: on our way to Yellowstone - still 200 hundred miles up the road - we have fetched up for the night in Thermopolis, WY, (pop 3009) and named for its hot springs which we will sample tomorrow. Even if they are rubbish I won't complain because just driving here has made the whole trip worthwhile.

I don't know how I imagined Wyoming to look, but it is astonishing so far. We flew to Denver and took a car, heading north on the 25 through the neat Colorado landscape; only the gauzy outlines of jagged mountains far away to the west threatened the orderliness. Then we hit the state line, skimmed Cheyenne and the land changed.

Grass in all directions, seemingly forever. A dark wild shade of green, rising and falling, the black road cutting through the swell. Impossible not to think of the sea when faced with this expanse, an open ocean of isolated houses floating like boats, and schools of cows. The sky misted and a spray of rain fell. Far off a great black storm loomed and loomed, filling a quarter of the sky - but even so, above the vast landscape it looked small, adrift. Soon enough we had skirted it and were ploughing on.

It's an empty place. We saw some wind turbines, faint in the distance, and some pylons. Occasionally the railway would sidle up along side the road, the orange engines a splash of colour. We experienced genuine excitement when tumbleweed rolled into our path and cracked under the car like lightning. The towns, and there were one or two, were merely loose collections of buildings, barely cohesive. Casper had an industrial flavour to it. Shoshoni seemed half given over to scrub and sand that lay between the lots, and the houses looked washed out, as if blanched by sea-salt. Hiland, literally just a few buildings, had a sign up declaring its population: 10.

Once we left Shoshoni the evening sun managed to break out from below the clouds and the road wound unexpectedly up along the bottom of a narrow canyon, Wind River. The many-coloured rocks of the cliffs were as beautiful as spring flowers.

And then suddenly we were here in Thermopolis, which so far is quite charming. The Elk Antler Inn is comfortable and festooned with antlers, quilts and carvings of bears. The highlight tonight though came when we buckled to some tired boys and grabbed a McDonalds: the staff were effervescent and I almost had to high-five one when she started insisting that her colleague go home and watch Doctor Who. Here! At what feels like the end of the world, even if it isn't quite the end of the road.

By the way, I feel like I should draw your attention here for an alternative take on our journey so far.

Slideshow

Here are some of the photos from the trip.

Click here to view these pictures larger

Sunset Crater

Home again, home again, jiggety-jig

It's amazing how I lose the urge to blog the second I walk into my kitchen. This may be linked to the stupid mileage we accrue on the final day of these trips - I find it hard enough to communicate sentiently with the cat, let alone the Internet, by the time we actually get through the door. But I don't want it to be Monday yet, so let me at least wrap up the statistics.

Friday's stats:
Started driving: 05:50 MST (if you include our trip out to watch sunrise)
Finished driving: 22:25 MDT
Miles: 483
States: 2
License plates: 2 more - South Carolina and New Hampshire
Breakfast: Yavapai Lodge, Grand Canyon
Lunch: cookies on the road
Dinner: Cracker Barrel, Gallup, NM
National Parks visited: 3
Junior Ranger badges awarded: 4
Years since Sunset Crater erupted: 945 (ish)
Feet descended into Walnut Canyon: 185
Types of lava flow identified: 2

Saturday's stats:
Started driving: 07:28 MDT
Finished driving: 23:45 CDT
Miles: 826
States: 2
License plates: no more :(
Breakfast: Denny's, Santa Rosa, NM
Lunch: candy from the gas station
Dinner: Applebees, Mansfield, TX
Activities other than eating & driving: none (unless you count ignoring the rugby and staring at the super-moon).

Total trip:
Miles: 2703
States: 3
License plates: 47 - we missed Hawaii, DC, Delaware and Rhode Island. I refuse to be disappointed by that.
National Parks: 4
Number of family members keen to return: 4
Number of family members ready for school/work tomorrow: 1

Mike's favourite thing: the Painted Desert

Laura's favourite thing: the aptly named Grand View

Chris' favourite thing: staying in a Wigwam and the moon.

William's favourite thing: going down the canyons.

Backwards

Thanks to the magic of technology, I am writing this on the road. Literally, somewhere along the I-40, eastbound, just shy of Albuquerque and heading for Santa Rosa, New Mexico.

It's roughly ten at night. On either side, the desert is a flat black slick despite the light of the full moon high above us. It sits behind a veil of diaphanous cloud that stretches almost to the horizon. The boys are asleep behind us. Laura is driving. We are coasting along on the ceaseless thrum of our wheels on the road, over which we can just hear Flanders & Swan dropping another hat. The cabin is lit by orange dials and passing cars.

I love this bit. Even as a passenger I still relish the sense that we are making progress, chewing up miles and states and gradually, forcibly, bringing our destination closer.

Satisfying though this is, it can't and doesn't detract from the fun we have when we stop and look about. We managed to do a lot of this today as well.

We sauntered around a thousand year old lava flow at Sunset Crater, AZ. It looked freshly ploughed, an avenue of great chunks of clinker and black sand from which these beautiful Ponderosa Pines had sprouted.

And then we clambered around some similarly aged cliff-dwellings, hewn from the wall of the (modestly sized) Walnut Canyon by ancestors of the Hopi tribe of Native People. It was a strenuously peaceful walk: the cool stone weaves between the sunlight and the shadows of trailing trees. The only sounds, the wind and the caws of ravens.

But before all that we had to tear ourselves from a grander canyon. Long ago, in the dark, we got up, wrapped ourselves in all our clothes and set out to watch the sun rise over the rim. Funnily enough, in the dark the abyss isn't anywhere nearly as scary and I was able to perch happily on the low wall above the drop to wait for the sun to peep. The sky faded to grey and below us the rippling folds of rock gradually materialised from the murk, like leviathans swimming up from the depths. And then finally a needle of orange light pierced the gloom and the canyons burst into colour.