Road Trip, Part VII

Friday, May 27: Woke up early after an uncomfortably cold night in the sleeping bag. I was cursing my stupidity at not having tested it before taking it on a long trip like this until I realised that I hadn’t completely zipped it up near my feet. Slightly mollified by this, I broke camp and headed out of the Black Hills toward Yellowstone National Park, with a brief detour to Devil’s Tower.

The awesome, nearly-vertical monolith is in Wyoming, about a hundred miles from Custer and rises over twelve hundred feet above the Belle Fourche River. Once hidden below the earth’s surface, erosion has stripped away the softer layers to reveal Devil’s Tower. The English name evokes very different images from the Lakota Sioux name of Bear’s Lodge, a sacred place of worship that is still visited by Native American tribes every summer.

These days, Devil’s Tower is also very popular with rock-climbers for its sheer faces and vertical-crack-laden hexagonal columned structure and I saw several such maniacs scaling the monument during my walk along the trail encircling it. I also stumbled into a territorial dispute between two squirrels on the trail and their constant chatter and lightning-quick skirmishes were most entertaining!

Mindful of the nearly four hundred miles of driving that remained in the day, I pressed on, passing through the cities of Gillette, Sheridan and Greybull and several protected areas, including Shoshone and Bighorn National Forests. I climbed nearly seven thousand feet and came all the way back down before ascending again into Yellowstone, which is at an elevation of more than eight thousand feet. The drive was extremely scenic but tiring, as I had to keep a close eye on the road to navigate the many hairpin bends in the mountains.

It was well past sunset when I finally reached the East entrance of Yellowstone National Park and the thirty-mile drive to my campground took more than an hour because the road was under repair for first five miles. On the way I noticed white smoke rising from several locations which I thought were campfires until the pungent smell of hydrogen sulphide hit my nostrils and I remembered that Yellowstone was known for its highly active geothermal features, including the famous Old Faithful geyser.

The main motorable roads in Yellowstone are shaped in a rough figure-eight, of which the bottom section is hexagonal and the top section is square. I was due to spend all four nights of the Memorial Day weekend in Yellowstone, so I had made reservations at two campgrounds in the southern section of the “eight.” The first two nights I camped at Bridge Bay, on Yellowstone Lake and closest to the East entrance followed by two nights at Madison, at the opposite end of the Park.

At nine thousand feet above sea-level, there were still several areas with snow on the ground and night-time temperatures dropped to near-zero levels. Still, no wind meant that I got my tent up in no time and after a quick dinner I crawled into the warmth of my sleeping bag, tired after a long day of driving.