June 10th - Big Horn Mountains, Wyoming

Our morning drive was up and over the Bighorn Mountains to the west. We chose a route that curled first north and then west over the central ridge of these mountains before turning south to the town of Greybull on the other side. As we left Sheridan we spotted a commercial crop-dusting airplane making low passes over the field next to the interstate, and we were both amazed at how low over the field he was flying—a couple of feet at most.

I don’t know what the other routes thru the Bighorns are like, but the route from Sheridan to Greybull gave us a wide variety of spectacular scenery. On the way up to the ridge, the road ascended thru increasingly timbered slopes, which was a nice shift from the dry savannah of the previous day. At certain points the road cut thru various rock strata that had different colors and textures, and were sometimes even folded into waves or V-patterns. It was pretty spectacular and when you stop to think about it, folding entire layers of rock must have required an enormous amount of force. Better still, the state had erected plaques by each formation that gave the name and approximate age in millions of years.

At the top of the ridge we found a Visitor Center for the Bighorn National Forest that included a small but nice gift shop. Monika could not resist buying a stuffed red-tail hawk that gives out authentic screeching sounds when you press its tummy. The Visitor Center also had a nice museum on the history of the Bighorn area. We found out that all the campgrounds were actually open for camping even though they were technically closed, which confused me a bit but is useful to know if we come here to camp early in the season.

We continued our drive over the pass while watching the tallest of the Bighorn peaks to the south of us. They were black but snow capped and made for a beautiful sight as we crossed a kind of high plateau to the other side. As we started our descent we stopped at a wayside rest area at Shell falls, and we would highly recommend stopping there to anyone else doing this drive. The falls had a surprising amount of water at that time of year and were really quite spectacular. We took the a 1/8th mile loop walk that followed the rim of the valley that had been carved by the Shell creek over the eons, and it offered more great views of the shear, rocky river gorge about 150 feet below. The information area beside the parking lot gave a very brief but thorough history of the geology of the river and history of the people residing in the area from ancient times, which I found very interesting.

The land dried out again during the final leg of our drive over the Bighorn Mountains, but we now were treated to some outstanding rock formations somewhat reminiscent of the Badlands. These craggy ridges and peaks were eroded into fanciful forms—one was called “the elephant” and I could make out a trunk, eyes, and so forth with a lot of imagination! The road followed the course of Shell creek out of the Bighorns into the broad, shallow valley that leads to the Rocky Mountains and once again the land dried out.

We stopped for lunch in Greybull and one totally unexpected sight was an airport with about 16 old DC-3s or similar cargo planes, apparently outfitted for fighting forest fires. In fact, the airport boasted an aviation museum that focused on the history of fire fighting. I really would have like to see it, but we hadn’t scheduled time for it in our drive and we were anxious to get on to Yellowstone and find a campsite. So we didn’t stop but I would put that museum on my list of things to do next time.

During the 50 miles or so from Greybull to Cody, the land became a true desert. Some of it was completely bare while other sections supported only some scraggly-looking sagebrush. Some crops were grown on irrigated fields, and from what I saw they were using a drip irrigation system where pipes fed the water directly to the roots of the plants. That system was developed by the Israelis for the Negev desert, as I recall, and is very efficient for water use, but it also requires a huge investment in laying pipes in the fields and the canals feeding the pipes.

Cody has a Buffalo Bill Historical Center that I would like to see someday, but it was getting late so we continued on into the Shoshone National Forest that lies just outside Yellowstone National Park and then into the park proper. It was still desert as we passed the huge dammed lake just west of Cody, and I found the contrast of the huge amount of blue water and totally arid landscape to be quite stark and jarring, a feeling that would recur when we later saw Lake Powell. The Shoshone National Forest has lots of campsites along the way up to Yellowstone and some were tempting us to stop for the night, but we had our hearts set on trying for a spot in Norris campground so we pushed on.

Our entry from the east into Yellowstone seemed somehow anticlimactic. The scenery paled in comparison to what we had seen that morning in the Bighorns. Monika and I had the same reaction and after pondering it a bit, we finally agreed that it was partly that the rock formations in this part of Yellowstone were a monochromatic brown rather than the bright multi-hued rock of the Bighorns. Don’t get me wrong, the Yellowstone formations and mountains were impressive; they just weren’t really beautiful. Along the way we did stop for pictures of buffalo and elk, our first wildlife in Yellowstone.

We skirted Yellowstone Lake on our way up to Norris. The lake was a beautiful deep blue edged by the snow-capped mountains to the south. The roadside vistas were very nice and worth stopping for in normal circumstances, but by now it was 3 p.m. and we hustled north to Norris to try to get a campsite. When we got there, we were relieved to find about ¼ of the campsites were still open, but the campground was hilly and not that many sites had a flat spot big enough for our tent. At last we found one that suited us and we put up the tent for our stay.