Month: March 2019

I headed into eastern Montana yesterday after stopping at Pompey’s Pillar and viewing Clark’s name where he chiseled it in the rock while waiting for a rondevous with Lewis. The area of badlands in eastern Montana and western North Dakota plus the flats of Illinois make me believe in that shallow ocean geologists say once covered the land from the Appalachians to the Rockies. Somehow it looks like many of the pictures of sea bottom I’ve seen.

Although I considered stopping, I raced past Theodore Roosevelt National Park. I’ve visited this wonderful park several times, taking great hikes, watching buffalo from my car as I waited for them to move off the road and enjoying the fantastic landscape that seems, in places, to be from Mars.

As I pass by, I think about what a nightmare these dry valleys with their eroded bare mounds of dry rock colored with splashes of orange and rings of pink had to have been for those tough people who came to settle the west. I wonder how many were lost trying to find their way through, perhaps as the water ran out, turning back seeking their own trail on the hardpacked surface between the mounds and not finding it, thinking, “Maybe this is right” only to find another dead end, another dry passage. I wonder how many, after watching their oxen and horses die, struggled on seeking the way out, until they stopped in some transient shade and never rose again, sacrifices to the dream of opportunity if only they could win their way to it.

These couple hundred years later, I raced past heading for Minnesota, arriving in the early afternoon to find myself smiling for the rest of the day. Perhaps there is that special feeling that pervades us all when we arrive where we’ve lived – and I have lived in the upper Midwest, although not in Minnesota – for most of my life. I looked out at the low hills with their maples, locusts and birch growing in the ravines, the even rows of corn, the ponds surrounded by tall grass and cattails – all of it lovely. For the rest of the daylight part of the drive, I travelled in a great, lush sea of shifting greens, seeing the occasional shaft of sunlight penetrate a cloudy sky to spotlight a distant hillside, the deep green where a bit of woods still stands and the dark, rich earth between the planted rows. As the sun set, I crossed into Wisconsin and some hours later, I climbed my front steps; home.

Copyright Dawn W Leigh. All rights reserved

Years ago, I subscribed to National Geographic’s Adventure Magazine. The magazine mostly ran articles about extreme skiing, mountain climbing, scuba diving and magnificent places in the world to do those things. However, they occasionally threw in other types of articles, one of which advocated taking Highway 212 out of Yellowstone. Now I have driven from Cody, Wyoming to the east entrance before and I recall the scenery on that route as amazing. And they recommended 212!

So, on the day I left Yellowstone, I took over 11 hours to drive about 70 miles of distance east when measured as the crow flies. And I didn’t regret a minute of it.

I dropped back int0 Yellowstone at the north entrance and turned east at the Mammoth Hot Springs. Crossing the northern park route, I could still see signs of the huge 1988 Yellowstone fire. Tall, grey-white trunks still climb to the sky while new growth trees reach up at their knees. Far more bare trunks lie spread across the mountainsides. They can’t decompose because the bacteria that does that elsewhere cannot live at these altitudes. So the trunks await the forces of wind, water and ice.

When I turned toward the northeast entrance, I entered the high plains buffalo, elk and pronghorn country. I had seen a small herd of buffalo hiding from the sun much further into the park the day before. But here there are hundreds eating their way across the plain. Of course, Yellowstone, being a huge caldera, the forces of the heat under the ground continue to help shape the land here as it does in the rest of the park.

Leaving the park at the northeast entrance, I began my drive on the Beartooth Scenic Highway (212). I travelled through the edge of the Absarokas Mountains and through part of the Beartooth Mountains moving from the high plains into the alpine regions, stopping at almost every pullout – and there were many and still not enough – to climb from the car to smell, to hear and to feel everything – waterfalls, woods, wildflowers – to see the views. In the high alpine areas, rocks from the last glaciation were strewn everywhere, scattered memorials to the monster glaciers that tore them from the places of their creation, cracked them, scraped them across the land for miles and abandoned them among the land-bound icebergs which would form glacial pools as they melted. In the lower areas, trees would open suddenly to disclose a quiet glen, a lovely view of distant mountains, a rushing falls. It is, indeed, a wonderful drive.

I have been lucky enough to visit Switzerland three times and to walk, climbing thousands of feet, across some of the mountains there. The Alps are surpassingly beautiful. But I would stand the mountains I’ve visited during this trip – both in Canada and the US – as every bit as exquisite. However, our mountains in North America have the huge advantage in that we’ve kept some of them as wilderness. While the effects of man certainly affect them, the mountains remain serene as the fierceness, the striving, the tumult of huge varieties of life spends itself on their surfaces. It is the results of this uncontrolled, unplanned and undomesticated living which brings them much of their beauty. I count myself lucky to have been able to spend some time here, too.

Copyright Dawn W Leigh. All rights reserved