You Can Leave Your Hat On

Steamboat Springs, Colorado

We went to the top of Storm Mountain today to check out the extensive ski lifts and gondolas. This is one of the premier Colorado ski destinations, along with Aspen and Vail. The town is surrounded by ski trails and ski jumps. As we take the Gondola up, it suddenly shudders to a stop, leaving us swinging at 300 feet. Eventually the cable starts again. I'm reassured somewhat by the Swiss manufacturer.

One of the things to see in Steamboat is Fish Creek Falls. We went there early before the downtown shops opened. I'm anxious to see the legendary FW Light store. Their Stetson hats range from $5 to $500. They've been selling hats there for 103 years.

They have a rodeo here every Friday and Saturday, starting next week. The alpine slide next to the rodeo grounds descends 400 feet over a 2,400 foot run. It's open tomorrow. You get a little sled and ride a plastic chute down. If you go to fast, your sled leaves the chute. We had thought to leave in the morning, but if we do, I'll never ride the slide. Mrs Phred and I discuss this and come to the depressing realization that there are many things we'll never see or do. We want it all. We want it now. So we will pull out about noon, after tennis and a few rides on the slide in the morning.

Here's my new hat.

Baby, take off your shoes...(here, I'll take your shoes)

Baby, take off your dress

Yes, yes, yes

You can leave your hat on

-Randy Newman

Show Me the Ka

Chugwater, Wyoming

We drove over Cameron Pass yesterday so we're on the East side of the Rockies again. My GPS said the summit was 10,300 feet. The surrounding mountains still went up another half mile or so.

We found a camp ground on a river in the Roosevelt National Forest. It was on the eastern slope of the Rockies, about 30 miles from Fort Collins. The river was rushing downhill and swollen from the above average snowfall. The river noise was conducive to sleeping.

There was no electricity there, so we played Scrabble after dinner. I added an "A" to "jar" going down and placed a 'K' in front of the 'A' on a triple letter score. Mrs Phred challenged the 'ka', of course, but I was a gentleman and failed to point out that an unsuccessful challenge normally requires a turn forfeit. It's rare that I win against her. Ka is the part of a person that leaves the body after death, according to the old Egyptians.

Our last day in Steamboat included tennis, a ride on the alpine slide called 'The Howler', a two hour raft trip on the Colorado, a visit to a book store and then dinner in Glenwood Springs with Kim and Randy. Mrs Phred met Kim online. Randy is an architect who wants to build his own RV. Kim just won a weight lifting competition. She was the only one entered in her class, but I'm impressed anyway. Randy is 6'-5", a former Army Ranger. They were interesting, I'm glad we went.

Dinner was at a microbrewery in Glenwood Springs about 125 miles from Steamboat. I ordered a sampler tray of eight beers.

Mrs Phred drove home from Glenwood Springs. She tends to run the Toyota about 30 MPH faster over the mountain curves than I do, constantly running up and down through the five-speed manual gearbox. I try to read and clutch the sissy bar at the same time.

We are in Wyoming today. We want to go to South Dakota and see the Custer State Park, Mount Rushmore and the Cave of the Winds National Park tomorrow. Maybe I'll get the bikes down off the back of the RV where they've been hanging for the last two months and gathering gravel road dust.

What Have You Accomplished?

Custer, South Dakota

Sixty years ago the Crazy Horse carving was begun in 1948 by sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski. When finished, it will be the largest sculpture in the world, 641 feet wide and 563 feet high. It will be taller than the pyramids and much more enduring, carved as it is from the hardest granite in North America. By comparison, the carvings on nearby Mt Rushmore would fit into Crazy Horse's head.

The memorial was commissioned by some of the same elderly Oglala Lakota chiefs that rode with Crazy Horse against Custer. Korczak arrived nearly broke and initially lived in a tent nearby. He built 758 steps up the mountain and began removing 80 million tons of granite with a jack hammer and dynamite. The statue is about 5% complete after sixty years. There is no fixed timetable for completion.

Korczak acquired a used 4,000 pound 'Buda' air compressor and ran lines up the mountain to power his jack hammer. The Buda was cranky. One day he climbed down the 758 steps nine times to restart the hand-crank engine. Korczak died in 1982, before even the head fully emerged from the mountain. He left behind a wife and ten children to carry on his work.

This memorial is really for Chief Crazy Horse, not Korczak. Crazy Horse was bayoneted in the back by an American soldier while under a flag of truce. It was one of those 'he won the battle and lost the war' stories.

Korczak was fanatic about free enterprise. He turned down several offers of $10 million or more of government assistance, preferring to fund the project from private donations and admission to a visitor center.

It's cold here this year. The temperature gets up to about 52 F. We're staying another day to see the Cave of the Winds National Park, some in situ mammoth skulls down in Hot Springs, and maybe the Agate Fossil National Monument in north-east Nebraska. I never even knew we had a National Monument for agate fossils.

There is a lot to see in the Crazy Horse visitor center. They have a fine collection of native art and many photographs, sculptures and paintings.

In nearby Custer State Park we find buffalo and mountain goats. The goats are not native to the area. Six of them were imported in 1924. By 1928, they had all escaped and now there is a herd of about 400 goats living in the 'Black Hills'. They call it the Black Hills because the predominant tree, the Ponderosa Pine, has a needle with a flat side that doesn't reflect much light. It makes this ancient, 150 mile long mountain range appear black from a distance. We drove past Mt Rushmore today as well.

We want to see Deadwood and Sturgis before we continue. Deadwood is where Wild Bill Hickok was assassinated. Sturgis is the site of the big motorcycle rally. Somewhere around here is a field called Little Bighorn.

Guys Don't Ask For Directions

Cave of the Winds National Park, South Dakota

In Hot Springs, South Dakota they are excavating mammoth remains. They are down about 20 feet and so far they've found 56 skeletons. An underground cave collapsed here 27,000 years ago. A sink-hole formed and an artesian warm spring made a slippery trap for woolly and Colombian mammoths. All 56 of the mammoths so far have been young males. Like elephants, mammoths are thought to have had matriarchal societies. These young, inexperienced boys died of starvation or exhaustion after the old girls kicked them out. They died in a trap that lasted about 700 years.

The mammoths died out when a clever little bipedal animal came over the Siberian land bridge and used stone lances to hunt them to extinction. Without people, the mammoths ranged North America for about 200 million years. My first SCUBA dive in 1964 was a search for mastodon and mammoth teeth in the muddy St Marks river in Florida. The numerous Florida sink-holes lead to underground caverns full of mammoth bones. Flat feet are not ideal for climbing out of water hazards.

The Cave of The Winds National Park is more interesting above ground than below. The park supports a number of pronghorn antelope, buffalo and prairie dogs. The combination of prairie grass and forest is lovely.

The Cave of the Winds has an interesting and unique feature called 'boxworks'. 95% of the known boxworks in the world are in this cave. Boxworks have no known economic value. So far these caves have 128.47 miles of explored features. There are none of the usual stalagmites, stalactites or soda straws. There are only these strange and fragile boxlike features. We watch a young boy named Kyle find a snake in the grass outside the cave entrance. The natural entrance sucks in or discharges air depending on the air pressure changes that occur outside. The Winds blow in the entrance. A young man named MacDonald explored miles of the cave in the late 1800s with candles and string. This site was named as the 8th National Park by President Theodore Roosevelt. The area was thought to be an ideal area for the nearly extinct buffalo to recover.

They Call It the Badlands

Badlands National Park, South Dakota

The Badlands are 60 miles of low, eroded soft sandstone mountains, interspersed with prairie grass. The camp ground is about half-full.

We've driven past here on Interstate 90 lots of times over the years. We've always been in too much of a hurry before to pull off the Interstate and take the loop through the park.

It's a cool morning at dawn and the birds are singing in the prairie grass. I need to wire up a loose spashpan on the Toyota and change the oil and oil filter of the RV. I bought seven quarts of synthetic 5W-20 back in Hot Springs.

The tow lights on the Toyota stopped working for some reason. My voltmeter shows good signals coming out of the RV. For all of the lights to fail at once, the cause seems likely to be a bad ground in the Toyota wiring. There are four diodes controlling the brakes, turn signals and tail lights. No way they could all fail at one time.

There are some empty Minuteman ICBM silos just up the road. You can sit in the padded blue chairs in the underground launch center and turn one of the launch keys if you want to. The site is just a National Monument now that the cold war is theoretically over. It's closed on weekends.

We went outside the park to the little cowboy town of 'Interior' last night. The small grocery store had only one red wine. It was a Gallo Merlot for $5. Not bad. They had a small town jail with iron bars on the windows. A hand-painted sign said that Lawrence Welk was there once (in the town, not the jail).

An Inconvenient Truth

Leech Lake, Minnesota

We're parked on the shore of the third largest lake in Minnesota. The front wheels are practically in the lake, so we can see the waves through the wind shield.

We're next to the swimming area, which has an old-fashioned slide, a raft and a sand beach. The bicycles are finally off the back of the RV. The tires are pumped up to 40 PSI and the seats are adjusted. A 100 mile paved trail runs right by the lake. We can rent small boats and canoes and fish for walleyes, bass, perch and pickerel. There's an Indian casino nearby. The lodge next door sells ice cream. The liquor store is a half mile away. The town of Walker, two miles south, has tennis courts.

I still have two fat novels to read by Greg Bear and Norman Mailer. It's not against the rules here to wash your vehicles or change your oil. Most private camp grounds have rules against those activities.

The 500 mile run up here from the Badlands was fraught with errors. First off, I chose rural highways rather than the Interstate. They don't build camp grounds where RVs don't normally travel and it was a summer holiday weekend so the two camp grounds we found were full. The longer we drive, the fuller the available camp grounds become. We ended up with no camp-site at dusk on a rest area west of Fargo. It was quite nice, really, to split a bottle of Shiraz and some dark chocolate for dinner and then drift off to sleep to the drone of a refrigerated meat truck's generator.

We had a situation on the drive with a severe thunderstorm with one-inch hail, tornadoes and 70 MPH wind gusts. We reversed course for awhile to outrun it, then headed back north and followed it down the interstate to Fargo.

On this Father's Day, our son turned 39. We're too young to have a son that old. It's an inconvenient truth, but, happy birthday, anyway.

The Firecloud Report Archive

Phred Firecloud

19.03.09 Front Page

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