Who da ho?

Rapid City to Wind Cave, SD (9/14)
Wind Cave to Bighorn Mountains, WY (9/15)
Bighorn Mountains to Yellowstone (9/16)
Yellowstone to Driggs, ID (9/17)

So, today we woke up in yellowstone, did a 3.5 mile hike in the Grand Tetons and then booked it to Driggs, Idaho to watch the season premiers of the office and parks and rec, which were worth it! We had planned to stay in Jackson, just south of the Grand Tetons, but it turned out to only be for rich old people and not assholes like us. So, rhetorically, how did we get here? As per the last post, we stayed in EconoLodge Rapid City last Sunday - the NFL, in return for $40, has agreed to let me watch all 16 Browns losses online, at a slight time delay of a few hours, though that means I need internet access on Sunday nights. So Monday morning we hit up the Minuteman Missile Silo near the Badlands and were told to go away, so then we went to the Badlands themselves, hiked around a bit, and then left, because while they were large jagged rocks as expected, by 2 pm we were ready to move on. So we decided to camp back in Wind Cave, where we had passed through the day before. We got lost a bit in the black hills, though that is essentially what the black hills are for, and set up camp well enough in the dark.

Tuesday was black hills day, we headed up to rushmore but stopped first at the crazy horse memorial, which robbed us of $20 to view a monument that seems 80-100 years away from completion. Thus robbed, we decided to drive by rushmore rather than park and pay whatever it was they were asking, but really, you can see it well enough from the street to get the general idea. In the interest of making spectacular time, we planned to camp in the wyoming black hills but then pushed it through Devil's Tower to the Bighorn Mountains, which is about midway through the state. We set up again in the dark, this time in a quasi lightning storm, though we seem to have missed the most of it.

Then: highway 16 leads us through Cody into yellowstone, which apparently takes several days just to drive around the main park loop. We grabbed one of the last camping sites and really, that was Wednesday. Wednesday was the fourth night camping on the trip, and the first in which the Bear threat started to be real. It turns out that while camping at yellowstone, a very small subset of the sounds you hear at night that sound like Bears are, in fact, Bears. We passed up the $42 bear spray in Cody, because we didn't want to a) spend $42 and b) look like jackasses, because it is only sold in large canisters that have to be worn in holsters. If one/both of us are eaten or mauled, then a) will seem like a silly reason in retrospect, though I'll still be glad we didn't look like jackasses. No Bears so far, though we saw a few more buffalo in yellowstone as well as some mule deer, which are essentially deer, but larger.

Thursday morning, we went to see old faithful, which is pretty good. We then drove down to Grand Tetons for the hike, clapping rhythmically all the while to scare away the Bears, though really they may have thought of it as akin to those theme restaurants where the waiters put on a show as they serve your food, but anyway, not eaten yet (They also recommend talking in a loud voice to alert the bears of your presence, but after a couple attempts of my attempts at reciting Shakespeare and the periodic table, Brad insinuated that he might rather be eaten by a bear -M). And then, as stated earlier, from Jackson through Wilson and Victor - and through Teton Village, where a robot tried to kill us, but I bested it - to Driggs, Idaho, which had the first hotel we could find that would let us watch tv and plug in our phones. By this point, it's worth noting that we, and mandy in particular, smell terrible. Tomorrow, back to either Grand Tetons or yellowstone.

-B