Mom Completes The "Lower 48"

It's hard to hit a moving target, but Mom decided years ago to visit "all 48 states". Now, at 92, she found she was missing just three: South Dakota, Montana, and Idaho. Michael and I decided to take her to visit them for this year's trip. Many of the small-sized photos on this page have hyperlinks. Click on them, and you will be presented with a full-sized (1024 x 768) wallpaper-friendly copy of that picture. Please feel free to enjoy as many of these photos for non-commercial use as you wish. The larger photos can be used as wallpaper, as is.

Tuesday, August 17, 2004 The plan was to leave when I got off work at 2pm. I work at home; so we should have been able to hop in the rental car and leave, right? However, there was a bug in the program I was trying to find; and wound up taking an extra hour to try and fix it before we left (which I wasn't able to do). Then it turned out there were things we absolutely needed to buy before leaving. So, we didn't actually manage to reach the highway until 4:30 pm, which is rush hour. Once we left the Phoenix area behind, though, we made good time. Nevertheless, we did not reach our reserved motel room in Albuquerque until 1:30 am Phoenix time—2:30 am, Albuquerque time.

Wednesday, August 18, 2004

Today's was a long run from Albuquerque to Cheyenne, Wyoming. This suggested we get an early start. However, because we had arrived at our motel so late, we awoke late; and then it turned out there were more things we absolutely had to buy and therefore another trip to Wal-Mart. Then, with a Hallmark store near the restaurant...well, it was, again, 2:30 pm before we got on our way.

We had to make frequent stops to avoid discomfort during the trip, which allowed us to discover the many pretty rest areas along the way. For example, at a rest area just south of Santa Fe, we discovered a lovely garden of purple cosmos flowers that attracted Mom.

We then hit an area of overcast, and rain, which got increasingly worse. We had hoped to visit the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs, but given the rain and the fact the sun had already set, there wasn't much point. (We'd visited there before, anyway.) We'd also hoped to visit Michael's niece, Cathy, who lives in Denver; but by the time we got there it was near midnight and dropping by would have seemed rude. The rain and flooding in Denver were so bad we passed no fewer than four car wrecks there. By the time we crossed the Wyoming border, Mom was convinced it would rain throughout our entire trip, which would therefore be "ruined".

It was only sprinkling when we finally arrived at our motel, at 1:30 am. Mom immediately had us turn the TV to the Weather Channel, which confirmed her worst fears: Las Vegas had been flooded, as well as Denver; the cloud mass covered , much of the Southwest and it was expected to continue to rain over Denver through the weekend.

Thursday, August 19, 2004

The morning dawned bright and beautifully, or so I assumed, since the sun shone in a blue sky when we awoke at ten. Today's plan was to drive to Sundance, Wyoming, with a stop at Mt. Rushmore National Monument—which would satisfy the trip requirement of visiting South Dakota. Again, this depended on getting an early start. Again, there were things we absolutely had to buy; so another Wal-Mart was located and, again, we didn't get on the road until after 1 pm. About this time we re-arranged the car so that Michael or I could stretch out in the back while the other drove. That put Mom in the front seat, where, armed with the overview map of the trip, she was able to second-guess the route.

We arrived at Mount Rushmore National Monument around 7:30 in the evening. Fortunately, the sun had not yet set at that latitude. The monument is surrounded by the natural beauty of the Black Hills of South Dakota, and we made several stops at scenic areas where people were swimming, fishing, and hiking.

At one of these turn-offs, I spotted Michael waving frantically and pointing into the sky.

"What?" I asked.

"Look!" he shouted back.

"What?" I repeated. It took me several tries to spot what had been right in front of me: The giant head of George Washington. It was hard to spot because it looked so different, from this angle, than the view of Mount Rushmore to which we have become accustomed.

Although it is a National Monument, and our Parks Pass should have gotten us in at no additional charge, Mount Rushmore has turned the parking franchise over to a private concern, which charges $8 per car for the privilege of spending time at the Presidential Memorial and visiting the museums. I did not see any evidence of a Park Service shuttle; so Mount Rushmore is, effectively, a private tourist attraction.

Nevertheless, it's an impressive one. If we'd been able to stay longer, we could have viewed the Illumination Ceremony (Illuminati Ceremony?) at 9 pm. However, anxious that we would arrived late again at our next motel, Mom urged us to continue on.

I got another couple of photos and then we continued to Sundance, Wyoming, where we awakened the proprietor at 12:30 am.

Friday, August 20, 2004

Since Sundance doesn't have a Wal-Mart, I was hoping for an early start. However, Mom and Michael found a gift shop where we spent a good hour-and-a-half. And that's after breakfast. So, again, it was after noon before we hit the road.

Today was a big day, scenery-wise. It was to end at the town of West Yellowstone, but include Billings, Montana (to satisfy the trip requirement of visiting Montana); and we also were far to close, in Sundance, to not make a short side trip to see Devils Tower, made famous in the Spielberg film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Devils Tower is a magma extrusion, from around which erosion removed the earth, leaving the tower standing alone. It's odd shape commands attention from anywhere it is in view.

	The technical explanation for Devils Tower is probably no more interesting than the Native American explanation, shared, we were told, by most of the tribes who passed through this area. According to the legend, there were seven sisters who were playing in the meadow one day, when they were attacked by a giant bear. They prayed to the Great Spirit, who rescued them by causing a column of stone to rise into the air, carrying them beyond the reach of the bear, even when it scored the sides of the column with its great claws. However, once the girls were beyond the reach of the bear, they also could not get down. So the Great Spirit transformed them into stars. Which ones? The Pleiades, of course, known to Europeans as the Seven Sisters. What's so interesting about this story? Only that the Pleiades consists of more than seven stars. On a clear night, far from cities—such as was the case at Devils Tower before the Europeans invaded—anyone with good eyesight can make out at least fourteen stars. (With binoculars, twenty can be counted.)

Billings was no more interesting than I remembered from my truck driving days; but it did give us an excuse to actually drive into Montana. We then cut down the scenic route, US 212, which brought us into breathtaking (literally!) altitudes as we crossed the Beartooth Mountain Range on Beartooth Pass.

It was long after dark when we drove through Yellowstone National Park for the first time. We didn't see anything, but the air was wonderful and the stars were brilliant.

Finally, we made it through the park to the town of West Yellowstone, where we checked into our motel, the Stage Coach Inn—highly recommended; very comfortable beds. Our check-in time of 12:30 am was our earliest yet.

Saturday, August 21, 2004

That relatively early bedtime didn't get us on the road any earlier. Fortunately, the park is right at the edge of town.

There are many areas to Yellowstone, which was once the site of a Mt. St. Helen's-sized volcanic eruption that leveled what had once been a huge mountain. Most of the park is, therefore, the ancient caldera; overgrown, forested, meadowed, but still geologically active—they get as many as twenty minor earthquakes a day.

As we entered the park, we were greeted by a seemingly endless vista of dead trees standing stark against the sky. "Oh, no!" Mom cried, reading the brochure we'd been handed. "Eighty percent of the park was destroyed by fire last year!" "It's not destroyed," I pointed out. "It's here." It turned out that "destroyed" wasn't quite the word the brochure had used. The actual word was "burnt", and I had to explain that it's necessary for period fires to destroy the old trees so that new trees can replace them—a concept that, perhaps, came a bit too close to home for Mom to find comfortable. Nevertheless, Michael and I tried to help her focus on the exuberant new life that was pushing out from beneath the burnt skeletons of its ancestors.

Mom was also uncomfortable with all the downed trees littering the forest floor. She referred to the trunks as "lumber" and thought it should be picked up. I explained that fallen trees provide homes for dozens of species of plants and insects, as well as larger animals that live no where else.

I'm not sure that even the park posters describing the cycle of life in a natural forest, and the place of fire in it, convinced her. She comes, after all, from the generation that believed Nature was inherently flawed; that it needed to be subdued, and that Man was its master.

Next we came upon the geyser section of the park, where the crust of the Earth is thinnest. This was the part Mom knew about. In fact, she explained, she thought Yellowstone consisted only of Old Faithful!

Old Faithful is the park's centerpiece, of course, with a lodge and a cafeteria (with good food, what a surprise!) and seating for hundreds to enjoy the geyser's periodic eruptions.

Old Faithful isn't quite as "faithful" as we'd been led to believe; you can't set your watch by it. It erupts anywhere from 34 minutes to 94 minutes after the previous one. But once an hour is the average, and, in fact, it was almost exactly 60 minutes after we'd arrived that it erupted again.

The caldera section of the park is marked by rivers, streams, and ponds, including the enormous Yellowstone Lake that fills its bulk.

With this much beauty visible from the road, imagine how much there is to see from the hiking trail or a kayak! Michael and I are already planning a return.

The Grand Tetons National Park

Just south of Yellowstone is Grand Teton National Park. These incredibly high peaks provide a backdrop to the town of Jackson, Wyoming, home to many celebrities, who are the only ones who can afford to live there.

Our final trip requirement was to see Idaho; which we did by driving through Idaho Falls. We didn't get to see the falls, but did enjoy the sight of the sun setting over the Snake River that forms them.

Our original schedule had us driving all the way to Beaver, Utah, on this day. Well, that wasn't going to happen! For the only time on this trip, we cancelled our reservation and stopped "early", though it was still after midnight, in Ogden, Utah.

Sunday, August 22, 2004

We took Mom to Mass at a lovely church in Ogden, then, after breakfast, started our race home. We were racing exhaustion, and I'm talking about Michael and me; Mom was fine. However, once we came near Bryce Canyon, the fit started hitting us again. We'd never successfully seen Bryce Canyon; the first time we were here, it was raining and foggy and we couldn't see anything. So we decided to make that 30-mile round trip to see it, now that the weather was so nice.

In spite of what the map advised, we did not stop south of Bryce Canyon. Instead, we continued on and on and on...and got home at 3:30 am...on Michael's first day of school, and a day I was supposed to return to work after my vacation.

Michael slept through his classes; I begged off of work. And Mom, our 92-year-old traveler?

Mom requested a ride so she could go shopping.

To Wal-Mart.