Crazy Mountains in good company

July 19-22
Three lovely restorative days at Halfmoon campground in the Crazies.

The first night dinner there were seven of us –
Nony, who invited me -- a fellow fulltiming Sportsmobile owner who helped inspire me to go fulltime. I first met her virtually on the Yahoo! Sportsmobile Owners forum, and then in person at both of the San Simeon Sportsmobile get togethers.
Cassandra, Nony’s friend who was the reason Nony first went to Montana, and the owner of the North 40 in Big Timber.
Ivanie (whose chickens lay delicious eggs) and her sister Allison, Montana natives, although Allison now lives in Washington.
Rosemary and Holly from Livingston, owners of Brontosauras, another metallic estate green Sportsmobile, and fly-fishing fools.

The second night dinner it was the four of us Sportsmobile owners (fresh trout provided by Rosemary and Holly) and the third night just me and Nony.

It was so nourishing to share food and conversation with these welcoming women in this beautiful place.

I was too busy enjoying the company to take pictures of anyone (plus I hate having my picture taken, which makes it harder to ask others), but you can see a not-very-good picture of Nony at her blog, and if you move down close to the bottom, to the section named “Ivanie and Casper” there’s a picture of Ivanie, Holly, and Rosemary. I met Casper when I stopped at Ivanie’s place on the way out of the Crazies.

The view from Yawaca Sunday morning, parked at Cassandra's place.

Here's Yawaca at our Halfmoon campsite. The creek is down a little trail right behind the site.

A little wildflower garden near the Rock Creek trailhead at Halfmoon campground

You drive through ranch land to get into the Crazies, and as you can see, it's a beautiful drive.

Yellowstone - Part I

July 17-18
Well, if I though the Grand Tetons were crowded, Yellowstone is a zoo – and I don’t mean the bears and wolves! Traffic jams – not due to accidents, but because someone spots a bear, or a herd of elk – or because Xanterra, the campground concessionaire, takes so long to check people in that the parking lot gets full and the RVs line up and block the road.

I made a flying trip from the South Entrance to the North Entrance at Mammoth Hot Springs in a day and a half, because someone (Nony) made me an offer I couldn’t refuse – camping in the Crazies with Nony, her friends from Big Timber, and Rosemary and Holly from Livingston. More on that in my next message.

The fires of 1988 are still very much in evidence on much of the route I took through the park. It’s interesting to see, but not beautiful. The forest was and is primarily lodgepole pine, not my favorite tree.

To my surprise, I found the two geyser areas that I walked through quite interesting, and beautiful in their own way.

I spent Sunday night at Grant’s Village campground – another NP monster, this one on the south shore the West Thumb of Yellowstone Lake. It was completely full, and the campsites are very close together. The setting is beautiful, but it is way too crowded – and of course, being a National Park, I can’t walk the trails unless I leave Jacob in Yawaca, and I don’t like to do too much of that.

I’m also discovering that my tolerance for sightseeing, even under the best of circumstances, is limited. I much prefer to just BE somewhere – to stay in one spot and get to know it a little bit, looking at wildflowers, birds and whatever other wildlife shows up; watching the light and the weather change, spending at least part of my time just hanging out, sitting in my chair under my awning.

I spent Monday night outside the park at Eagle Creek campground, a little National Forest campground northeast of Gardiner, MT, where it was very peaceful, quiet and undcrowded.

Here are some pictures from Yellowstone.

I believe this is a Fringed Gentian. It was growing next to the boardwalk at Midway Geyser Basin.

This is one of the areas at the Midway Geyser basin. The pool that you see a corner of is a deep turquoise, seen through blowing steam.

This elk feeding at the West Thumb Geyser Basin was most cooperative in posing for her picture.

This is the West Thumb of Yellowstone Lake, taken at Grant's Village campground, at sunset. You can't see them in this picture because they're behind the tree branch, but there are a flock of Canda Geese roosting on the bar.

This is one of the areas burned in the 1988 fire. As you can see, the trees are regrowing, but the damage from the fire is still very obvious, both in the standing dead trees and in the ones that have fallen. I was surprised that the burnt trees don't look charred -- apparantly the char has dropped off.

Grand Tetons

July 15 - 18
Grand Teton National Park has too many people in it, at least in July (duh!) That said, it’s also quite beautiful, but regimented – I kept wanting to stop in places that didn’t have any pullouts.

I stayed at Gros Ventre campground, which is one of the monster National Park campgrounds, but this one was laid out nicely, and because it was not at one of the real popular areas, it didn’t completely fill up. Somewhat to my surprise, I enjoyed my stay there and found it a retreat from the crowds elsewhere in the park.

In addition to the wildlife in the picture below, I saw a Lesser Scaup with chicks (?) ducklings (?) and a Common Merganser ditto. Both families seemed to be practicing diving – first the mother would dive, then the little ones. It was quite fun to watch.

Jackson, WY, has WAY too many people in it. Fortunately, I discovered that they mostly only congregate in a small area, and once I found out how to avoid that part of town, it wasn’t bad, although it didn’t strike me as anyplace I’d want to go back to.

Meeting for Worship at Jackson MM ends after 45 minutes, which startled me – then those who need to leave do so and the others talk, with a focus on politics.

Here are some pictures from Grand Teton.

I'm not sure that moose calves can be describe as cute, exactly, but it was neat to see this mother and baby. Notice that she's wearing a collar, so I assume that she's being studied. These two are the second and third moose that I've ever seen.

Oxbow Bend of the Snake River -- Tetons in the background. This is about a mile from where we saw the moose and the scaup.

Sunset over the Tetons

Update - Part 3 Sarah's health

Sarah and her oncologist have decided to wait and do another PET scan in a month or two, rather than initiate any treatment just now. I'd still rather that none of this were happening (as would Sarah, I'm sure) but at least we're not dealing with anything immediately threatening.

Update - Part 2 Green River Lakes

From Flaming Gorge we went to Rock Springs, WY, where we spent the night at a motel, partly because it was hot and partly to catch up on various business/bills/internet research. (That’s when I posted the Silverton/ Molas Lake pictures.) I didn’t see anything in Rock Springs that would make me want to go back.

The next day we drove to Pinedale, and spent the night boondocked near there are Little Half Moon Lake – a fairly pleasant place except that the mosquitos were fierce! We’ve pretty much not run into mosquitos until this point – they were just starting when we left both Haviland Lake and Molas Lake, and Flaming Gorge was dry and with enough of a breeze to keep them to a minimum. At Little Half Moon Lake, however, they were bad enough that I didn’t want to open any of Yawaca’s doors (Her window all have screens exept the ones on the front doors, so at least we could have ventilation.) Needless to say, we left fairly early in the morning and headed up to Green River Lakes campground, in the Bridger National Forest.

I went to Green River Lakes because the pictures I’d seen really appealed to me. So far, the specfic places I’ve wanted to see have not turned out to be my favorites. This is true of GRL, although the drive there and the lake are quite beautiful. The campground is not that nice, however, both because the sites do not have views and because many of the lodgepole pines which are the main species there have been killed by the bark beetle. The Forest Service has cut down most of the dead ones in the last month, and there’s a lot of dead limbs lying about in the campsites, making the places look fairly scruffy. On the positive side, the hosts were a delightful couple from Ashville, NC.

This picture was taken in the Green River Valley, a few miles from Green River Lakes.

This picture was taken at our campsite -- notice the cut branches on the ground and the dead and dying trees still standing. The forest here would probably be healthier if fires in the area had not been controlled for the last century or so.

Lower Green River Lake --the campground is just uphill from here.

This one's for you, Pat!

Rocky Mountain Columbine growing along the lakeside trail at Green River Lakes. This is about as blue as the sepals get here -- most of the ones I've seen are so light as to be white rather than blue.

Update - Part 1

We haven’t spent much time where I could connect to the internet in the last ten days or so, so I’m behind in my blog posting. The pictures and text below are from July 4 through July 7, in NE Utah, mostly Flaming Gorge.

On our way from Grand Mesa to Flaming Gorge, we went through dinosaur country. Vernal is the closest city to Dinosaur National Monument. The sign doesn't say what species this one is.

This is our campsite at Canyon Rim campground in the Red Canyon area of Flaming Gorge NRA. It was a lovely peaceful place with surprisingly few people. We stayed here three nights and would have been happy staying longer. I wasn't very impressed with what I saw of the rest of Flaming Gorge, but the Red Canyon area is really nice.

Here's Jacob, exploring near our campsite

Wildlife at Flaming Gorge

These are female bighorn sheep that we saw at Flaming Gorge, not too far from where we were camped. It doesn't show in this picture, but when I got a look at them from behind, at least two of them were lactating, so presumably had babies hidden somewhere nearby.

We also saw a doe with two fawns, and an American Coot family with half a dozen chicks. Boy, are they ugly little things! They have bald red heads and orange beaks and scruffy down.

This picture was taken at the Range Study Bike Trail access off highway 191, fairly well at the top of a mountain ridge. There's a great open meadow filled with wildflowers, surrounded with aspen and spruce forest. We spent a couple of hours wandering around, taking pictures. There were quite a few people boondocked here, but well spread out.

This is another picture from the Range Study Bike Trail area.

This is a view of the Silverton City Hall looking down the Animas River from the Memorial Park in town.

Here we are at our Lake Molas campsite.

This is Lake Molas at sunset, taken from our campsite.

Molas Lake in the late afternoon at the end of a rainstorm.

Grand Mesa

Saturday, July 2
I left Molas Lake yesterday morning, headed north. The drive from Silverton to Ouray was a lot less scary on a sunny morning in early July than it had been on a rainy/sleety afternoon at the end of May. It is a very dramatic drive with great views, although as a driver I didn’t get much opportunity to enjoy them except when I stopped. The road is steep, with little or no shoulders, and no guardrails. (The reason for no guardrails is so they can shovel the snow over the side of the mountain.) It was also quite hazy, presumably still from the wildfires in Utah and Arizona.

I had intended to head fairly directly toward Vernal, Utah, via Grand Junction, but by the time I got to Montrose, CO, it was getting hot, and the prediction for Grand Junction was even hotter, so I drove up to Grand Mesa, where I’m camped at Little Bear campground, on Island Lake, in the Grand Mesa NF. Grand Mesa is a flat-topped mountain of about 53 square miles, with an elevation of about 10,000 feet. Although it’s at about the same elevation as Molas Lake, and not far away – about 100 miles as the crow flies – it’s quite different. First of all, Grand Mesa is the tallest thing in sight, so there are no higher mountains in view – the distant view is of the Uncompagre Valley below, although it’s pretty much obscured by the haze. It’s a bit warmer here than it was in Molas Lake, but there’s a lot more snow left on the ground, as the winter snow-pack was deeper. I’m guessing that’s true most years, as it’s more forested here than in the Silverton area, which has more open meadows. And the mosquitos are a lot worse here – more of them, and they’re active pretty much all the time, rather than just in the evening. There are fewer birds.

I’ll stay here until Monday and then head north. I expect I’m going to be in hotter weather for the next few days, until I get to either Green River Lakes (if I decide I’m willing to be completely out of contact for several days) or the Grand Teton area.

Molas Lake

Monday, June 27
I'm feeling sad and lonely this evening. My sister, Sarah, has gotten the results of her PET scan and it appears that her multiple myeloma, which has been in remission for the last four and a half years, may be coming back. If it is, it's in a very early stage, and most likely can be knocked back with chemotherapy -- but it's not happy news, even so, and it feels hard right now to be so far away from her.

Tuesday, June 28
After I got the weight-distributing plates put on the back door of the van, we headed north toward Silverton. We’re now camped at Molas Lake Park, a Town of Silverton park about six miles south of town. It's a dramatically beautiful setting, a fairly small lake surrounded by mountains, most of which still have some snow on them. In close to the lake it's a mix of meadows and spruce forest.

My practice of getting up before the sun rises has fallen by the wayside – partly because it gets light very early, partly because it’s pretty cold here in the mountains before the sun rises – but mostly because I love lying in bed and taking my sweet time getting up.

This morning I was doing exactly that, listening to BBC World Service on my XM Satellite radio (my second choice for morning listening – when I can get it I listen to NPR’s Morning Edition). At about 7:30 a.m., when the sun had been up for half an hour or so, I heard a tapping sound. I couldn’t think what it could be, and as I listened to it more, it sounded like something dripping. I had visions of all sorts of things that might be disintegrating in the camper, but when I got up and tracked it down, it was water dripping from the raised penthouse roof of the van, as the heavy frost melted in the sun.

The haze from the wildfires in Arizona and Utah isn’t as bad here as it was yesterday morning in Durango, but it’s enough to make a difference in the clarity of the view, and there’s a faint smell of smoke that I don’t think is coming from campfires.

Thursday, June 30
This morning I rented a canoe and paddled around the lake. I took Jacob with me, but riding in a tippy canoe with a slippery bottom that he couldn’t get a purchase on with his paws was not his idea of a good way to spend his time. First I had to convince him that he had to stay in the canoe. Once he got that idea, he was quite good, sitting still with his head on my knee, but I couldn’t get him to ride in the front of the canoe, where I really wanted him to provide ballast. We started our ride at the opposite end of the lake from my campsite, so when we got to that end of the lake I let Jake out and tied him up at the campsite while I continued around the lake. He’s gotten to be so good; even when a string of horses and riders went right past the campsite, he just barked once.

I talked with Sarah this afternoon. She's feeling much more positive than she was on Monday,and is looking forward to FGC (Friends General Conference, a yearly gathering of unprogrammed, liberal Friends, for those of you who are not Quakers). It was good to talk with her.

I will probably leave here on Saturday, heading north toward Wyoming.