Go West!

We camped in a small National Forest site just down the road and it was really nice to have a fun evening around the camp fire again (most places recently have had burn bans due to the risk of forest fire). In the morning we woke to wetness - think this is our first proper rain during the day for well over a month, but fortunately it started to dry up as we got to Mt Rushmore. I wasn't expecting too much from this, but we took in a really good talk from Red Cloud's great grandson on the white/red-skin relationship as the government took this land for a national monument.

As we wound our way west over the rolling hills that started to emerge out of the enormous flat plains of Wyoming, there is suddenly a massive rock sticking out of the earth without any good reason why. As we got nearer we saw Devil's Tower is straining itself out of the earth with these unusual hexagonal blocks, a bit like Giant's Causeway. We were surprised to find a lovely little campground nestled at the bottom so we parked up early and enjoyed the gorgeous evening sun. There was a ranger programme on the night sky which was pretty interesting, and we saw a couple of shooting stars from the meteor storm. What was even more amazing was the climbers lights on the tower as they descended in the pitch black.

The next day we drove west and climbed out of the plains very dramatically. It was so nice up on high pass that we decided to spend the night in one of the National Forest campgrounds up by Bald Mountain and watch the rest of the meteor storm.

Saturday was a restocking day before we hit Yellowstone, so gas, petrol, food and of course beer. Lovell, a small town en-route, offered a free campground with showers so we gratefully took advantage the latter. From there we drove on to a little camp site by a brook just outside the park.

Rather than head straight into the park we turned the opposite direction and drove a few miles of the Bear Tooth Highway which runs across the wilderness area that borders the park. We found a gorgeous little camp site next to a big lake and decided that would do us. We did a nice little (8 miles) walk up to the lakes above us. It was a lovely evening so we decided to cook a curry on the open fire - all was going well until the hail, thunder & lightening but the fire survived and it simmered away nicely whilst we hid inside waiting for it to clear. We popped down to the lake before it went dark but no sign of the resident grizzly (on the other side of the lake!). It was a chilly night dropping down to 10C, which was a bit unexpected as it's been high 20s most nights.Read more