Battle of Little Bighorn

We left the recreation area with no electricity and headed to Hardin MT to a campsite with all the hookups plus a laundry.Sometimes beating your clothes out clean on a rock is just not an option!
We got there in time for the big weekend of the Reenactment of Custer's Last Stand.
Hardin is right on the edge of the Crow Indian Reservation. Sadly, it is a dying town. The businesses and factories are moving away.Once there were sixteen bars and churches on Main Street.But they have this one week in the year when the tourists from all over the world, according to them, come to play.
We toured the battlefield which is a very eerie place. There are grave markers all over the battlefield to show where the soldiers' bodies were found after the battle.
On Wednesday night the Relay for Life Group had a beef BBQ, which we attended and met some of the locals who had grown up in the town. As one lady said,"Thirty years ago this was a jumpin' town." On Thurs night the wrestling team had a pork BBQ which we attended and met other campers.
On early Friday afternoon in the heat of the day was the first performance of the reenactment. It is about 2 hours long and tells the story of the battle from the Indian point of view. The show was written by an Indian and tells why the Indians felt this too was their last stand to try to protect their nomadic way of life.
When the Indians surrounded the wagon train, I could just feel the terror the settlers felt when looking at the Indians on horseback, yelling and riding their ponies into and out of the train. Observing one lone Indian on horseback studying the long train of settlers, one understood that the Indians were fighting for a way of life.
But hearing the tales of surrounding the soldiers like "swirling water over stones" gave an idea of hectic and savage the battle was.
This was a history lesson for me. It explained how Custer got misinformation, made decisions on this information and died because of this information. Toward the end of the battle the Indian firepower increased due to the guns and ammunition they took from the dead soldiers. The fight became a rout as the Indians pursued and killed fleeing soldiers.It explained how desperate the battle was at the end when Custer and his men killed their horses to use as shields.
It was not one of my favorite stops, but it sure was an educational one. I had always considered Custer an arrogant leader that did not listen to his scouts, which is true, but he also was misinformed...........Plus listening to it told from the Indian point of view was also rather unsettling.............There is probably a sermon in there somewhere.

Mountain Goats and Lakes

We took many drives and had wonderful views, but the mountains that we passed going into the campground kept nagging at the old man. You see he had bought "hiking shoes" when we were in Salt Lake City. We had thought to try them out in YNP but the snow did us in.
Each time we left the camp he would look at those red mountains and try to see whether there were trails or not.Then one day the temptation was too great. He left in the morning to walk over and just study the mountains.I stayed in the campground with my eyes glued to the mountain top.
There he appeared!

That afternoon we trudged down to the Lake for the free boat rides. Most of you know that I am fascinated with young kids and their thinking. Well we were standing in line to get our free boat ride when this 9yr old cutie says,"We have to get the fast boat." Her grandmother wouldn't go with her and her brother, so we said we would take the fast boat.....Man, let's rethink that...too late.We wound up on a boat valued at over $60,000 designed to surf behind while on the lakes. It has power and it is fun! We have the two young ones that are sooooo excited and us plus another couple. The pilot took us down to the canyons where the walls are thousands of feet straight up

You can tell how worried I am about this....
Later that day we decided to go find the wild mustangs again. This time we wanted to see them on the other side of the mountains. We had heard that you could go up into the mountains on a dirt road and see a whole herd of them. So off we went. The road looks rather nice, right?

Even in the back hills, this part is marked
But the road just goes on for miles. Sometimes we can see the road, other times it goes on for miles and we hope we are actually on a road and not near the edge of the cliff

Convinced that we were lost;that we would be there forever; no one would know where we were and would not miss us for ever so long, and the puppies would starve and die and someone would eventually find our bleached bones inside the truck that I hate, I sort of panicked. Boy did I feel like a baby when we met coming from the other direction an old woman BY HERSELF driving down the mountain.She told us we had much further to go and that the horses were on top of the mountain. Did I mention it was over 90 degrees? So back down we go. Not so bad going down as going up, I might add. We got to the bottom of the mountain on good road and look what we found
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Bighorn National Recreation Area

Our next four nights and five days were spent in a magnificent campground in Lovell Wyoming. It is a National Recreation area built by the Bighorn Lake.

There are big sites
a beautiful lake, and the best part...it is FREE!
Of course there is no phone service, no internet service, no electricity, no water, but FREE!The Wild Mustangs of Wyoming and the Bighorn sheep are right there too. We were fortunate to be at the lake during Lake Days and they had FREE Boat Tours...what more could you ask?
Since we saved so much money on our site, we felt we could ride more and further and see the area.
Our first afternoon we met a couple that told us about the horses and where to see them the sheep
and where to find them and a back road we might want to explore...see what I mean about helpful? We will meet them again in Gillette, WY when we go to the Rally.
And the sheep are gone
So off we went to explore.
We drove down the road to Devil's Lookout and peeped over the edge. There , that pea green ribbon is the Bighorn Lake.

We were bombarded by these tiny little birds that flew very close to you and very, very fast, canyon swifts.
We drove on and saw our first wild mustangs, excitement.....

The next day we got a little braver and took some of the unpaved roads into the canyon. I cannot describe how beautiful it is here. So different from anything I have ever seen, very remote and quiet. There is even a different smell here. I spent a lot of time just looking at the wild flowers
and thinking about the diverse country we live in. Of course there is always the warning signs, I swear!

These little guys had figured out a way to be free....out of the fence, but their buddy was not quite so brave.So they visited him. It is as if they are trying to coax him to just try freedom

HiWay 14, WY

One of the prettiest drives we have taken was on HIway 14 in WY. We left the campground and headed for Bear Lodge in the mountains. We had been told it was a nice way to have lunch.
The views were awesome.
Plus once again we were back in the snow. We drove to the lodge had lunch and drove home the long way. We passed these guys on snowmobiles.
They work for Polaris and were trying out the 2009 model of their snowmobiles at just about 95 mph. Tough job.
Once again we did a little hiking and found these gorgeous wild flowers growing on the road side.



All in all our trip to Bighorn Lake and the Bighorn Mountains was an unqualified success.

Ride em cowboy

Our last two days in Cody we got our energy back and did a few things. We liked our campground. It was close to everything and had nice sites. Other campers told us about the largest museum in the West called the Buffalo Bill Historical Center. It is 5 buildings: Bill Cody Rooms, Firearms, Indian, Painting, and the Museum of Natural History plus a huge gift shop.We spent a couple of hours in the Cody Room and Erwin spent hours in the Fire Arms sections. We have been told it is the largest collection of firearms in the US. Quite impressive.

Look it is our next camper parked on the side of the road!
The next day we spent in downtown Cody. Bill Cody built this town. The most important building is his hotel, the Irma, named after his daughter. Every afternoon there is a Wild West Shootout in the street fronting the hotel.
It was hokey and hilarious.

We met a nice couple of ladies traveling through the West and got some good information on restaurants, sites and places to see from them.( No, not the ones in the picture!) In this lifestyle everyone is friendly and helpful.You never seem to meet a stranger or a person that won't share their knowledge of either campers or things to do and places to stay.
We took their advise and ate at Bubba's for dinner and then went to the rodeo.
Cody has a rodeo every night from June through August. It is where the guys you see on PRC get their start. There was bronco bustin', steer wrestlin', barrel racing, bull ridin', calf tyin' and clowns. We were entertained by The Village People, a one man show that was made up of life-size puppets in Village People costumes all supported on two sticks around the man....you just had to see it!Most of my pictures did not come out because of the darkness but I'll give you what I have.......
The absolute show stealer was a child about 6 on a small pony competing in the barrel racing. The women's time was about 17 seconds. This child with her dad leading her took 45 seconds. It was just precious. Another beautiful girl about 8 did the regular barrel course in under 17 seconds, beating all the women. Wish I could remember her name, she has a great future. There were youngsters competing in almost every event.



What a great day!

Last Day at Yellowstone

Since we have been in Cody we have been just blah...I don't know if it is the change in altitude or what. We have done nothing up til yesterday. Yesterday we decided that we had come this far West to see Yellowstone. The snow had hampered our trip through the park due to drifts, closed roads and general bad weather. So we wanted to see the park in good weather. We started out with the temp over 60 degrees and headed down the Bill Cody Scenic Highway to YNP.
This was one of the "scenics" by the highway.

And this was another:

It was over a 50 mi trip to the entrance to the park. This entrance had been closed or the roads we could take to it had been closed since we got to the park. This might explain why:
That is a snowbank almost higher than my 4 wheel drive truck...amazing

We were convinced that the other side of the park was prettier and had more wild life than this one til we turned the curve onto this scene.

The hot steamy water pouring into Yellowstone Lake at this point causes the water to be a different color...can you see it?

We have learned, being the seasoned travelers that we are, that in this park when there are lots of people congregated in one spot, there is a bear. Sure enough a big grizzly bear. I had no idea that they had blond fur on their back.

We stayed for quite a while watching this one forage through the grass for who knows what. It would look up at the crowd every once in a while, but not be interested enough to quit eating. ( We think Disney did a remarkable job on this one making it look so real. Ha)
We drove on over to Mammoth Springs, quite a drive filled with beautiful snow sites, but I am sure you have seen enough of that.As we approached here was our welcoming view:

Elk, lots and lots of elk complete with a warning sticker!It reminded us of our first visit to Banff, before the elk became such a nuisance that they were banished from the town.
Nothing in YNP is easy to get to. You must walk from the parking lot to the sights. Some of the walks are awe inspiring, some are "AW, no!" inspiring. This one was the latter:
We climbed most of this thing. But to do all of it is about a 2 hour hike.
Due to geological changes, earthquakes, calcium deposits and etc springs have left the most interesting deposits down the side of this hill( and I think the hill is from that too):

Yellowstone is full of warning labels. They warn you about the animals. They warn you about cars in the pullouts. They warn you to stay on the trails. They warn you not to walk on some of the ground because some of the ooze is so acidic that it will eat through the soles of your shoes. The scariest warning is that any minute a new steam eruption may occur. Some of this stuff is just vile:
But no one told the buffalo/bison.

We saw more wild life on this side of the park. I think it was because of the weather. Even the animals don't like the snow. Deer, elk, bison, bears a couple of times (remember look for the crowd of people), rabbits. We even think we spotted an eagle's nest, but some spoil sport said it was an osprey's.We have seen a "wolf-ote", so why not a "osgle"?

This guy was a hoot. So slow "one foot then wait then another foot then oh yeah I have two more feet to move

, but there is good grass right here":

Just remember if you are in that big a hurry you should have left yesterday!