Going to the West

It’s Pollinator Week!

June 19-25 is national pollinator week, and we have been celebrating by traveling through five of the top ten honey producing states in the country: North Dakota, Montana, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Idaho. Everywhere we go as we travel the backroads and byways of this part of the country, we see stacks of beehives. Everyone claims their state produces the best honey. Our organizer friends in Montana told of their fight to keep Roundup-Ready GMO crops out of the state in an effort to protect both human and pollinator health.

So celebrate Pollinator Week where you are. Plant a flower. Kiss a bee.

Or better yet, breakfast on toast and honey.

Across the Great American Prairie

In South Dakota, I bought a book called The Prairie Traveler, first published in 1859 by U.S. Army Captain Randolph B. Marcy, who had since the 1830s led both military and civilian groups of European Americans across the American prairie in search of farming homesteads, Native American rebellions, gold rush fever dreams, and the West Coast. The book is chock full of helpful advice for the prairie traveler: “Upon the head of the Sweetwater River, and west of the South Pass, alkaline springs are met with, which can be exceedingly poisonous to cattle.” and “Water taken from stagnant pools, charged with putrid vegetable matter and animalculae, would be very likely to generate fevers and dysenteries if taken into the stomach without purification. It should therefore be boiled, and all the scum removed from the surface as it rises.” and “Meeting Indians: On approaching strangers these people put their horses at full speed, and persons not familiar with their peculiarities and habits might interpret this as an act of hostility; but it is their custom with friends as well as enemies, and should not occasion groundless alarm.” The book has been good company on our travels, though we have seldom needed the advice it offers.

We have followed and encountered many historical markers of emigrant roads – from Lewis and Clark, whose tracks we have followed off and on the whole trip, to the Oregon Trail – as well as older Indian trails and migration routes. This land is crisscrossed with stories of people on the move. (In a more modern iteration, we have noticed that almost every homestead in Idaho and eastern Washington has a large RV parked in the driveway: apparently that traveling spirit lives on.)

Travelogue: The West

In this fair land I’ll stay no more,

Here labor is in vain

I’ll leave the mountains of my birth and seek the fertile plain

I’m going to the West.

– Collected by Byron Arnold from Janie Barnard Couch in Alabama, 1947

Listen to the song

(Pictures below)

Last week, we crossed the Continental Divide, officially entering the West. Yesterday, we crossed the 45^th Parallel, the halfway point between the Equator and the North Pole, so we are officially again in the North as well. In a nation so divided by racial, political, and economic lines, it is almost a relief to cross at least the geographical lines that divide us.

We have traversed almost the entire country, mostly by back roads and byways – through forests and small towns, mountains and desert, and landscapes that feel like something from another planet. This afternoon we crossed into Washington state after a week and a half in Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. Much of the time we've been without phone or internet signal – hence the tardiness of this "Wednesday" installment.

What a week and a half it’s been. We left you last week in Spearfish Canyon, S.D. After that, we detoured into Wyoming to see Devil’s Tower/Bear’s Lodge, the volcanic spike in the middle of otherwise flat land in the northeast of the state. Then it was on to a National Forest Service campground (Red Shale) before heading to Bridger, an hour south of Billings, where we slept in the city park before meeting friends from Billings bright and early for a morning of birding in the nearby Clarks Fork Waterfowl Production Area. Joe saw an eagle (and its nest) and I spotted several long-necked grebes and a yellow-headed blackbird, among more familiar species.

Wyoming’s Yellowstone Park was of course amazing. We spent two nights camping in nearby national forests, and our days wandering the varied landscapes of the park. The first day was about the animals. We saw of course bison and prairie dogs, but also a grey wolf, a mother grizzly and her two cubs, pronghorn, elk, mountain goats, and marmots. We even saw a baby osprey in its nest! Day two began with a nice surprise: a Father’s Day pancake breakfast at the Gardiner, MT, Volunteer Fire Department. After that it was all about the supervolcano that is at the heart of the park, and all the caldera, hot springs, and geysers that remind us that this is a living planet.

From there, it was south through the Grand Tetons and out into Idaho. We had thought there would be camping spaces on our route, but it wasn’t until the end of a very long day that we discovered (through the app iOverlander) a remote, hilltop vista at the end of a very steep, rough dirt road, with wild camping spaces where we spent the night.

Idaho has been intense. It is my next-to-last American state to visit (Alaska will be the last), and I was looking forward to it. From the snow-capped mountains in the east to the desert hills in the west, Idaho is all American West. Boots and cowboy hats, grazing cattle and horses, tumbleweed and tiny, remote towns along the backroads we took through the state, Idaho definitely feels like its own place. Images of gun-toting extremists haunted us, but we met only kind, friendly and welcoming people. (There is no telling if they are one and the same!)

Some highlights were sleeping on the banks of the Idaho River at Idaho Falls; visiting the world’s first nuclear energy reactor near Atomic City, the first town to be powered by nuclear energy; going to Minidoka, the site of a Japanese concentration camp during World War II; and exploring Craters of the Moon, where an eruption only 2,000 years ago left the landscape littered with lava, cinders, and ash for hundreds of miles. It was a bit of an anticlimax to spend that night in the Twin Falls Walmart parking lot, but a delicious Thai dinner helped save the evening.

But the most delightful surprise of Idaho (for me, anyway) was our serendipitous discovery of the National (!!) Old Time Fiddle Competition and Festival in Weiser, Idaho. We had been searching for a place to stay, and noticed that there was a public campground in Weiser. When we came into town, there were signs everywhere for the festival, which included camping on-site. I spent the evening singing and playing guitar with a jam of folks from Idaho (banjos, mandolins, fiddles, guitars and some great harmony singing), and Joe attended the junior competitions and masters’ performances at the nearby high school.

Yesterday, after dabbling for a while in Oregon, we crossed into Washington, but that’s for next week’s blog.

Devil's Tower National Park,
more accurately known as Bear's Lodge –
a volcanic jut of stone in the middle of the NE Wyoming plains

Our first birding expedition, in Bridger, MT –
with five little dogs, including Darwin

The Beartooth Highway crosses the mountains between Billings and Yellowstone.
Countless switchbacks, eye-shutting drop-offs (for the passenger, at least),
and falling snow let us know we were in rugged territory.
It's called the nation's most scenic stretch of road.

It was cold crossing Beartooth Pass.

At the top of the Beartooth Highway

Yellowstone

Mother grizzly and two cubs

Nursing bison

Resting bison

Steaming field of calcite

Proof we were there, thanks to a very tall fellow visitor

Old Faithful – of course!

Crazy Creek – running beside our campsite outside Yellowstone

Free pancakes! For a donation, of course.

Across the Great Divide

Crossing the Continental Divide.
West of here, all rivers flow into the Pacific.

The Tetons – as the sun peeks through on an otherwise drenching day.
The view from our mountaintop campsite

Idaho – potatoes, ranches, and high desert

Typical landscape in much of Idaho

Curious cows watched us where we wild camped
on BLM land near Craters of the Moon

Otherworldly volcanic landscapes at Craters of the Moon

Tiny fingernail-size wildflowers dot the lava fields of Craters of the Moon.
Their root systems can spread out three feet to capture the elusive moisture of the arid surface.