Crossing the One Hundreth Meridian

Good morning. At least it’s good morning here. It’s Thursday, July 13, and I’m writing this from Avalanche Campground in Glacier National Park. More about Glacier later. I’m going to give a brief travelogue of a few days of our adventure. Then a story.

After our stay in Bessey, we headed into the Nebraska sandhills. They are called sandhills for a reason. They are really big piles of sand. For as far as you can see, sandhills covered was sparse prairie vegetation; bunch, spear grass and grama buffalo grass. The limiting factor to life out here is water. There are blowout areas where no grasses are found. And they have ants. millions, billions of ants. Very few places that you can walk without stepping on an ant hill. Don’t do that. It pisses them off. One reason we are not tent camping, at least not in this country.

We start to see prickly poppy, a magnificent white flower that accents the roadsides. We pass a one hole golf course, complete with golf carts. That must be a joke, but you know those golf crazy people. Lots of western meadowlarks popping about. Driving on Route 2 through towns like Theford (population 200), Seneca (population 33), Mullen (population 500), Lakeside (population 12), Ellsworth (population 32), Alliance (population 8,500) and finally to Crawford (population 1000). We start seeing trains go by headed east, loaded with coal. Each train has over one-hundred cars. Turns out they’re coming from Gillette in east Wyoming, where young, adventurous men mostly are mining lots of coal. Coal ain’t dead. We must have seen and heard fifty trains go by, each with three locomotives. All headed downhill to southeastern states to power electrical generation.

We entered the Ponderosa Wildlife Area near Crawford, NE where we had intended to camp. Just outside the WMA we begin to see acres and acres of what appeared to be fifty gallon barrels deployed on about a fifty-yard grid, hundreds of them. A very strange site indeed. We came to a sign that warned us of radioactive contamination. Not good. We drove on to the wildlife management area for a look see. Black flies drove was out. No one else around this open hot dry country. I waved down the only car we saw and it turned out to be two cheerful, retired geologists who had moved to the area fifteen years ago to open a ‘rock’ shop. They told us all about the uranium injection mine that we had just crossed through. Turns out that we were sitting right on top of it. The uranium is extracted from deep below the surface by injecting a highly basic solution into the ore which dissolves the naturally occurring uranium salts. That solution is then pumped to the surface into a settling pond where the water evaporates and they scrape up the uranium salt. They went on to tell us that uranium prices were down so this particular mind was not active but was under what they called a maintenance plan. They told us that we were perfectly safe and that the radiation levels were quite low. That doesn’t explain why Emily’s hair was glowing. The barrels are pump stations. So, the land is sieved with wells sucking the uranium out. “Does the land above the mine ever collapse since you are removing lots of subterranean material over time?”, I asked.  “It happens. It’s a problem”, they replied with eyes wide shut.

We decided to seek another campsite and discovered a park in Crawford. Another one of these free campsites in a well-maintained park. We camped beside a young man named Stephen, a musician, who was biking his way from Olympia, Washington to Lincoln, Nebraska to join others in his band, Oketo. He was carrying everything he needed in two bike packs. Lots of Eurasian collared doves and western meadowlarks in the park.

Next morning, we had breakfast at the Dairy Sweet just outside Crawford, bought some rocks at a local rock shop, and headed on into Chadron for supplies. That night we camped at Cottonwood Springs, a US Army COE recreational site, just outside of Hot Springs, South Dakota. Coyotes nearby. Headed for Badlands national Park the next day. Bird of the day, the lark bunting, state bird of Colorado. The ones we saw obviously preferred South Dakota where people are more genteel.

We drove through Wind Cave National Monument the next morning and saw a coyote. American bison, mule deer, pronghorn antelope and discovered our new favorite animal, prairie dogs. Thousands and thousands of prairie dogs living communally in extensive prairie dog cities. A remarkable, social society of just about the cutest, furry thing on the planet. In Pringle, South Dakota we saw what was billed to be the largest bicycle sculpture in the state, probably the only bicycle sculpture in the state if not in the world. We passed a monument to Crazy Horse in the making. This monument is in the vicinity of Mount Rushmore and the site of Wounded Knee. We didn’t go see Rushmore. Chose Crazy Horse instead. That seemed more appropriate since this land used to belong to Crazy Horse, his people and other tribes of Native Americans.

We finally made our way into Badlands national Park where we camped at the free Sage Creek campsite with about fifty other people. Tent campers, folks with horses. Nice, clean toilets mostly young adventurous people. That night we heard coyotes.

Nostalgia, nostalgia. This reminds me of a time long ago when I was in this country before. Sometime in the mid-seventies my lifetime friend Steve Moore and I came west and camped nearby under a full moon and woke in the early morning to find that we were sharing the camp with four or five big mule deer.

We drove through this stunning park the next morning. My kind of park. Very big, open, hot, dry, dusty and magnificent. Remarkable canyon views. Saw bison, prairie dogs, bighorn sheep, pronghorn antelope, mule and white-tailed deer. Very few visitors. Virtually no traffic. Not like Yellowstone. We bought gas at Cowboy Corner then drove on through Oglala up to Scenic. Long distances on gravel roads in this open, prairie country.

That night we camped alone in the Buffalo Gap National Grasslands by ourselves looking out over stunning prairie vistas. A golden eagle greeted us and sailed by on his way to supper. We watch a thunderstorm develop. You can see them miles away out here. The storm announced its arrival with fifty knot winds, hail, then hard rain. We sat in the car for about an hour and a half while it thundered, blew and poured rain. It was furious and relentless. God added spectacular lightning just for emphasis. It must have rained two or three inches in an hour and a half. Then it was over, just like that. Evening came and we sat quietly watching life unfold in the grasslands. The golden came back, soaring overhead, mule deer and coyotes at dusk. Passed a very pleasant night by ourselves on the prairie.

Next day on to Wounded Knee, South Dakota, where on December 29, 1890, US Army troops under the command of James Forsyth massacred one hundred and fifty to three hundred Miniconjou and Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux Indians. Two hundred of the Indian causalities were women and children. About ninety Indian casualties were fighters armed with bows and arrows, clubs and tomahawks and led by Chief Spotted Elk. Forsyth commanded approximately five hundred army troops, armed with artillery pieces and repeating rifles. Land where this tragedy took place is in the Lakota Pine Ridge Native American Reservation.

There are lots of pieces to this tragic story. Google, it and draw your own conclusions. There is a memorial of sorts, a community graveyard that includes a mass grave where the victims of this terrible incident were hastily buried. It also includes more recent graves of other native Americans from Wounded Knee and the surrounding area, many of whom were veterans of the U.S. Army, many who had served in World War II and Vietnam. I found it remarkable that the relatives of ancestors massacred there would so willingly serve in the very army that had slaughtered their ancestors. Maybe young native Americans in 1920 living on the Pine Ridge Reservation with very little other options in their lives joined the Army to get out. I think the answer goes deeper. I think it has to do with a certain resilience, flexibility and pride these people have. I don’t know.  

That night we camped at the flying V, lodge/campground just north of Newcastle, WY. We took our first shower. Now that may come as a surprise to you but deal with it. We were delighted to meet Twyla, who with her husband, owns the lodge. Nobody else here. We got the grand tour. She told us that they primarily catered to elk, antelope and mule deer hunters and, much to our consternation, prairie dog hunters or more precisely groups of people who came out to what she called “prairie dogs shoots”. This is where, guys primarily but not always, using high-powered, scoped rifles to shoot prairie dogs from hundreds of yards away. The more you kill in a session, the greater esteem in which you are held by your comrades. The prairie dog is considered a pest species out here, a varmint if you will. They are successful and plentiful in this country. Who the hell wants a prairie dog city tearing up property. I sure hope some more advanced civilization doesn’t one day come to consider humans a pest species and pick us off one by one for fun. That wouldn’t be civilized now would it.

Thursday, June 29 on to Sundance Wyoming and Devils Tower, a magnificent volcanic extrusion from which surrounding sedimentary rock washed away and left this magnificent fluted, 875-foot monolith standing guard over the prairie. We spent a large part of that day driving around in the Black Hills National Forest looking for a camp site. Covered a lot of ground but just couldn’t find an easy place to pull off. But we saw hundreds of white tailed deer. Camped that night back on the main road at Bear Lodge in a very fine site with a couple of the folks. Hundreds of white tailed deer during the day.

The next morning on to Montana, where the men are strong, the women good looking and the children are all above average. We came to be in Broadus, MT. Hang on to the reins and dig in the spurs, a story comes next.

Sweet Dreams all you cowboys and cowgirls.

Buck and Slim on the move