Back home from the Big Horns!

Winter has come and gone for me in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming, and at the Bear Lodge Resort.

After spending about six months there through the winter, I’ve come back to Florida for a one-month soujern before starting my next adventure in Thailand.

Wyoming was quite the experience, and not surprising, riddled with countless adventures. Some good, some not so good, but all were a learning experience and I’m glad I did it.

It’s kind of overwhelming to look back and re-examine the overall experience, or to objectively decide which moments stood out, because the overall theme there was grandness. Overwhelming and grand. Broad, sweeping vistas. Broad personalities. Broad, hard living but it was a blast.

Since I’ve been back however, it’s been the easy life, the kind of fun I almost feel guilty about enjoying as much as I have.

I will vividly remember the first time I got sunburned after arriving back in Florida, and shocked at how easy it was. I went from an environment covered in a blanket of snow, warm coats and blistering winds to breezy shores, cold springs and warm nights and I think I’ve really swallowed the travel pill from this experience…

I will certainly remember my brother’s spectacular wedding and how proud I felt for him to begin that amazing new chapter of his life. I’ll always cherish the wonderful moments I got to spend with my parents, having fun and just being around them, which I had sorely missed in Wyoming.

Some of my favorite moments about being back home have been trying to explain to someone what I “do” or “where I’m living” and I’ve always had to respond with, “well…it’s kind of a gray area…I think…I’m not really living anywhere, and as far as what I do…I’d have to say I’m in the middle of a bunch of hairbrained adventures and I’m doing whatever those adventures entail.”

Soon, in a few days actually, I’ll be teaching English in Thailand. I have a visa for one year and I’m not really sure when I’ll be ready to hang up the towel and come back to the United States. I may stay in Thailand for longer, or I may visit other countries, teaching English around the world as a means of extended (and income-generating) travel.

But as for Wyoming, I got my first taste of real travel, and was fortunate enough to understand some of the nuances and profundity of traveling, and I’m still very interested in what experiences and opportunities will be presented on this new chapter of adventures.

Daydreaming…

Most days I begin my journey to work or back home through this snowy wilderness:

To my right:

and to my left:

and behind:

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I get to work and during the week, when we’re not busy, I daydream about what it’s going to be like when I get home, what my brother’s wedding is going to be like, how big my little nephew Max is going to be, the first thing I’m going to do when I get in the car from the Orlando airport (Beto’s for Dinner- a subtle reminder for you Dad), how nostalgic it’ll be visiting Jacksonville again, and finally – and significantly, what my experiences in Thailand are going to be like.

Right now I’m struggling to get a handle on what all the requirments are for me to get my working visa there, when to send it and generally how to coordinate everything so there aren’t any headaches like the last time I tried…

I’ve been gmail chatting with some admins from the American TESOL Institute and I’ve learned about the hotel I’ll be living in Phuket for about a month after I get there.

When shit hits the fan at work, or when I pick myself up from the snow after an icy crash landing, or when I’m woken up by drunken throttle-jockey snowmobilers at 2:30 in the morning, I just have to think about where I’m going to be living in Thailand.

From the All Seasons Naiharn Phuket Resort:

___________________________________________________

It’s nice to know I’ll be going to the sun-drenched coast of the Andaman Sea from the snowy blankets of Wyoming in about two-and-a-half months, before a wonderful and well-needed respite in Florida.

Goodbye, Grace.

The past few days have been heart wrenching, and today, I found out I lost the most significant professional mentor I’ve ever had. My former editor at the Ponte Vedra Recorder, Grace Hayes, recently passed away after a short and surprising illness. She was 60.

I’m still shocked at the news, and her loss imparts an even more significant loss for the communities of St. Johns County, Florida, where she had been an integral part of the social, political and cultural fabrics of many communities there. She was a wonderful person and will be sorely missed by many.

She gave me my first break as a professional journalist, entrusted me with a lot of responsibility early and had high expectations, and a confidence in me and my abilities that really got me through several difficult assignments and challenges, leading me to two state reporting awards that I attribute solely to her unswerving guidance.

Writing professionally to large audiences produces a very profound vulnerability, one that tests the very foundation of my self confidence, and is something I experience countless times. No matter how busy she was, at any point approaching deadline, she would always swivel her chair to face me when I walked into her office for guidance, and every time our eyes met, she wore a look that communicated undivided attention. I would sit in the metal-framed, gray-tweed chair across from her and she would always wait for me to speak first. There was a point to the visit and she expected you to get to it. She always knew when I had a problem or needed guidance and she would quickly shore up the breach in my self confidence, or provide a new path around a fouled-up assignment.

She was brilliant. She had a brilliant personality and an utterly dry sense of humor that she shared often. In our office she was the mother hen and we were her chicks, and she had no problem rattling the cage when needed either, but it was always with patience and to-the-point style.

She meant a lot to us and to the community, and it deeply hearts my heart to know my mentor and the mentor of my former colleagues has passed on.

Goodbye Grace, I miss you terribly.

You can read her obituary and the comments left by many that loved and miss her in this Recorder article.

A tree hunt, another snowmobile lesson and a White Christmas.

Once again, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything here. We’ve had Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s, the comings and goings of guests and employees and the arrival of our “snow machine season.”

The arrival of the busy season means six-day-plus working weeks, getting called in to fill in for people that quit under pressure or “went home sick” and all that baggage, but at least I got to have the 8th of January off, which I requested off as soon as I found out the Gators were to play in the national championship.

The Christmas season here was a great one and very positive for the employees, and even though homesickness was going around like an epidemic, the atmosphere was still warm and familial.

The highlight of December here was the annual snowmobile ride/tree hunt, where all the employees got to go out on brand new snow machines and hunt Christmas trees, and also happened to be one of the first occasions where the trails were open and ride-able.

We got all geared up, were assigned our snowmobiles and we slowly took off in a single file line, ultimately stretching at least a mile. Almost immediately, we had our first significant accident, when a friend of mine panicked, mashed the throttle and launched into a powerline pole, totaling the sled and sending her off to a hospital in Montana via helicopter, where she’s still recovering.

Snow machines are fun and exhilarating but are extremely dangerous, and freak accidents do happen…

After she was stablized and taken down the mountain, we continued our journey on the trail heading south from the lodge. Although this was the third time I’ve been out, it was probably the least troublesome considering I stuck to the trails. I rode a 600cc Polaris RMK, one of the 50 or so new machines purchased for the new season.

Trail P has a few good stretches of flat land for really getting on the throttle, and when I had the chance, I’d hunch down behind the small snow shield and with a flick of my thumb on the throttle, the machine would rip to 80 mph in a matter of seconds, the front skies bouncing and gliding over the snow, and as quickly as I made it to 80, I’d back down to 20 or 30, bounding down a ravine and over a creek before mashing the throttle back up the other side, launching to the crest where I’d stand the skies up in a “wheelie,” if you could call it that.

By traditional standards, the P trail is incredibly tame and would probably bore more experienced riders, but for me, it was a great opportunity to really explore the performance of the machine in an appropriate environment (as opposed to the wild mountains and terrain that Craig brought me to the past few times.)

We eventually made it to the tree pasture where some folks set up a bonfire and prepared some hot chocolate and hot dogs.

Surprising to us rookies was the fact that, on a snowmobile, the snow appears deceptively flat and compact, like the surface of a road or trail, but unlike a road or trail, our snow was about two-feet deep, and caught a lot of us by surprise when we stepped or fell off.

The tree hunt was organized so that everyone went about and upon finding a tree, attached a ribbon to it, and judges would determine the three best trees. We were given the hint that an almost sure winner would be a short-needle Blue Spruce, but that they were rare in this area. Instead, the entrees were short- and long-needle pines, from seven to nearly 14 or 15 feet tall, and full. My buddy Dan won first place with his tree, a full, long needle pine that rose from the floor to about a foot beneath the vaulted ceiling of the Great Room.

I was fortunate enough to stumble upon the tree decorating session on my next day off, and it was almost thereputic and nostalgic to help decorate the tree with some close friends and some good holiday music. The trees were unvieled a few days before Christmas and it was one of the most impressive displays I’ve seen. It was definitely a memorable experience to see these magnificent trees decorated by my friends and I, and looked beautiful framed by the decades-old logs that formed the room’s walls…

A clog in the tubes, snowmobiling and a generous roughneck.

I’ve missed you guys.

It’s been a hot minute since I’ve posted here and the subject above is all there is to it…

Sort of…

It all started when someone hijacked our interwebs and downloaded a bunch of movies, effectively cutting us off for awhile while we recouped our monthly bandwidth allowance (we use a satellite provider…).

The tubes is unclogged and I can now access the newfangled interwebs again!

In the meantime, we’ve been enjoying probably the slowest, calmest and most boring month of the year here at the lodge in terms of business. There have been days when I’ve woken, showered, shaved, overcome a hangover, only to go to work in the dinning room to serve guests their gravy-laden hunks of beef only to stand still for eight hours with no tables… Eight hours behind the desk without one single customer.

Either that or I’ve tended bar in the Bear’s Den, slinging drinks to mostly employees who mostly recycle their paychecks back to the owners via Coors Light drafts and double shots of Jagermeister, or cans of Busch and warm shots of tequila, or any combination of ‘combo platters’ that my friends and I have started calling the different ’shot and a beer’ combos.

When I’m not working, I’ve been out on the mountains riding snowmobiles with my buddy Craig, a roughneck with Neighbors Drilling. Because I didn’t know at first either, a roughneck is a crewman on any numerous types of oil or natural gas platforms out here in Wyoming. The work is tough and rigorous, but the pay is great, and after Craig works the spring and summer seasons, earning about a hundred grand, he comes over to the lodge with his little trailer and camps out during the winter so he can ’sled’ (snowmobile) during the off season.

When Craig’s on the rig, he’s a derrick hand, meaning he’s up on the tower feeding 30 foot lengths of drilling pipe through the rig down toward the payoff (sometimes 10,000 feet down), the thin layer of sediment housing the remains of the most profound and recent mass-extinction event, predominantly when the massive meteor hit about 65 million years ago. Depending on the depth of the layer, it’s either liquid oil or natural gas. If the layer is closer to the surface of the earth, it’s liquid oil, if it’s deeper, the compression and pressure convert the deposit to natural gas, which is more common in Wyoming, but the payoffs that we’ve (the entire world’s drilling efforts) been slurping is from that layer.

According to him, the term ‘roughneck’ comes from the old days, when crewmen had to carry the lengths of pipe over their shoulders, giving them callouses on their necks over time, hence the term ‘roughnecks.’

Anyhow, he’s a 30-year-old roughneck just looking to have a good time over the winter, and having grown up in nearby Cody, he’s been sledding his whole life, which explains his ability… and his generosity in taking me out on his expensive sleds. Here he is, and what appears to be him helping move the back of my sled out of the pile-up from the road, he’s actually humping the sled because I’m trying to take a picture of him…

I suck at snowmobiling. Sledding is hard as hell…it’s both just like Jet Skiing and at the same time nothing like it.

Here’s Craig and his sled in front of a nice little rock formation near the top of Hunt Mountain:

Water is more forgiving than compact snow, or a large rock, or a tree or a cow moose protecting her calf. You don’t get ’stuck’ in water unless you run out of gas. When you’re sledding, you might be balling over powder 10 feet thick and it might be perpendicular to a mountain with a 45+ degree grade, meaning you’re leaning out on one of the running boards with both hands on the end of one side of your handle bars like you’re on a racing sailing yacht trying not to tip over or tumble down the mountain. That’s called ’side hilling’ and it’s just as common as riding on flat land, because up here, there aren’t too many opportunities to ball out on flat land.

The snow’s not even deep yet though… Sledding is really hard. The most complicated aspect is learning to feel the inclines, declines and slopes, and knowing when and how to transition your body weight accordingly. If you’re not experienced, it’s easy to get stuck, and when you get stuck, you have to dig your sled out, move it over as much as you can (a few inches to a foot), dig it out again, move it again, dig it out again, move it again, dig it out again, move it again, then you might be able to ride out if your track sticks. And your sled weighs almost 700 pounds too.

Here’s a gulch we were sledding across, and my photos don’t do enough justice to the real angles we were hitting, but ultimately, there’s much worse out there, but this was extremely difficult for me and I got severely stuck toward the bottom of the ravine. First, you can see our tracks cutting back and forth:

But the lower you got in the ravine, the tighter the angle got between the incline and decline of each side, and I misjudged the trough and instead of shooting up the hill after crossing the trough, the skis of my sled impacted with the sheer upward slope, acting like a wall instead of a ramp and I rolled the damn sled on it’s track… but I bailed first into waist-deep powder, watching gas and oil pour out through the handlebar joint, wondering how I was going to roll this f@$*er back on her track and how much the damage was going to cost me…

Fortunately, there was no significant damage and after about two hours of hardcore digging between me and Craig (hands and feet in several cubic yards of snow) we got her back on her track and able to make it back up the ravine, but unfortunately, I didn’t think to take a photo of it upside down…

However, here are photos looking up the ravine and looking down the ravine from where I was stuck, and while the slope doesn’t look that severe, I was standing in almost-chest-deep powder:

Ultimately, we ended up making our way to the top of Hunt Mountain, one of the largest mountains in the Big Horn National Forest, and from there we were able to see all the way across the Big Horn Basin toward the cut in the western mountains that take you into Yellowstone. * Stampa, if you’re reading this, pay real close attention to the horizon and you can see the cut that we drove through on the outskirts of Cody on our way to Yellowstone… It’s about in the middle of the picture.

Turning exactly 180 degrees, I took a photo encompassing most of the eastern section of the Big Horns:

The experience was difficult, but memorable and something that will stick with me forever, and I can’t wait to do it again…

Sorry again about the delay in posts, but stay tuned about info on our Thanksgiving dinner, the Bear Lodge Bad Boys Raffle and attempts to strike it rich panning for gold in the local streams…

Job Wanted: Requirments – thick skin.

One of the best perks of working here at the lodge is the diversity among the employees here. You’re all more or less stuck up on top of a mountain together, that living and working together and spending so much time together creates what I can only imagine is an extremely-dysfunctional-family environment, where there’s tolerance, sometimes mutual support, love, hate, bonding, fighting and a shit ton of alcohol as the adhesive among all these elements.

There are about 40 employees here and there are about 40 wildly different personalities that are stuck with each other for about 16 hours a day. The employees here are from all walks of life and are all ages.

Sociologists have more or less abandoned the term “melting pot” when describing America’s diversity, instead favoring the term “salad bowl,” the connotation implying a mixture of mutually exclusive elements that make up a whole defined not by a characteristic of melting into one compound, but blending into a mixture that maintains and celebrates the unique character of the components, and it’s a description that I agree with and it’s the same here.

You’ve got reformed meth addicts, drunks, a racist here and there, bible thumpers, general misfits, cowboys, loggers (mountain men), rough necks (oil field workers), college students earning seasonal wages in between semesters, general adventurers and wanderers (which I most closely align with), bums passing through, challeneged individuals, sled heads (snowmobile junkies working here for the sledding opportunities), greasy truck stop cooks and lifelong beer wenches. Oh, and assholes.

So you need thick skin to work here. Really thick. It seems you’re constantly tested with the range of personalities, and throw in alcohol and isolation and you get to liberally sprinkle conflict on this “salad” like so many stale bacon bits.

Arguments and shouting matches are common and frequent, narcing and snitching is common and frequent, fights are infrequent but not uncommon, andif you’ve got thick skin here, you realize it’s just our dysfunctional family going through the motions, and somehow it’s okay, as long as you’ve got your shit squared away when the rest is hitting the fan.

Since I’ve been here I’ve learned and discovered quite a bit about myself. I learned I prefer drinking Jack Daniel’s neat, that I love hiking, that I’m physically unconditioned for hiking, I’m scared of bears more than I’ve ever been scared of alligators, I don’t need nearly as many possessions in my life, not to sweat the small stuff, that I miss my family more than life itself and that the key to a happy life is thick skin and humility in the face of belligerence.

I keep talking about thick skin but it’s sometimes difficult to just tell someone they need it, or what it is. A good friend of mine and a former Marine sniper with ages of experience and humility (the kind that almost 10 years of hard combat experience provides) said tonight the phrase, “engage your mind before you engage your mouth” which is a critical component, and in doing just so, teaches you that people often don’t engage their mind before their mouth and inevitably fire off some asshole remark or dig. Multiply that by 40 and you need a mechanism to let it roll off your back. Some folks use their fists, their words or a dismissive sigh.

I’ve learned this place has a high turnover rate and I’ve already seen it. Three people have quit since I’ve been here and each one left because “it” got to them. I use quotes because “it” defines all the frustrations and conflicts that come with our “tossed salad” of personalities. There are a few on the brink even, and one of them has been a good friend since she came and it’d be sad to see her leave, but some people just aren’t interested in finding their thick skin.

I’m here until April, so I’ve been super keen on finding mine, and I’ve learned that I’ll have a much better time with it than without it.

Hiking the Twin Buttes…

Yesterday I had the day off and, as I’ve been doing nearly everyday, I decided to go for a hike.

This time, I wanted to be better prepared, as I’d committed to hiking to the tip top of one of the Twin Buttes. That meant water, better clothing for temperature extremes and an orange knit hat for safety as it’s in the middle of hunting season.

I decided to use my backpack that I’d been traveling with, and at the bottom I put my half-gallon bottle of water, a pair of dry socks, then my large waterproof jacket on top of that, my fleece half-zip pullover on top of that and then my tripod. Everything fit well and I suited up and headed out the door.

I walked along our barbed wire fence until I found the ladder we put over it for this occasion and climbed over.

My plan was to walk north to the North Tongue River then follow the river downstream to the west, eventually entering the valley beneath the Twin Buttes.

Since I was by myself, I decided to try and do a little picture book story for this post:

I came to a clearing in a relatively new section of a pine forest and played around with my timer feature for a little self portrait action before the trip really kicked off:

I was definitely glad there was no one else in the forest to point out how goofy I looked, but that’s not why I was there.

I made it to the river and started hiking/climbing its bank to the west, trying not to fall in:

looking upriver:

looking downriver, where I walked:

Further down the river, the riverbanks gave way to large rock walls and waterfalls. I crossed at a makeshift bridge created for a Forest Service cabin just down the river. I crossed there and rock-climbed up the northern wall to get out of the valley. You can just see the makeshift bridge at the bottom of the rock wall.

From there I walked along the top of the rock face before setting off north toward the valley under the Twin Buttes.

As I approached the valley, I saw another Forest Service cabin. These cabins are small and made of logs and some of them don’t have any electricity or running water, but they look perfect among the trees, hills and mountains. What a great place to spend a summer.

Just beyond the cabin and off to the right began the valley under my destination. So far I’d been hiking about two hours.

Here I came to one of very few barbed wire fences. I ripped a damn hole in my jeans climbing over it.

It seems that here in the mountains, either it’s snowing or the sky is perfectly clear. The valley was over this ridge.

Past a small pine forest the Twin Buttes appeared before me. My target is the one closest and I think is the biggest.

The wind was really blowing through the valley and ripped all the fragrant sage leaves and their dried flowers from the branches, leaving a graveyard of bare, grey branches reaching up through the grasses, who were themselves blown over almost horizontally in the wind.

I reached the base of the buttes and began working my way up, at one point reaching a cut in the rock wall that I climbed up. It was the most difficult this far so I took a photo from the top to remember it by.

I wound my up the back of the butte and was surprised to find how densely wooded the route was, so to avoid getting lost I stuck to the edge of the butte.

Eventually I reached a clearing in the woods, discovering that it was finally the top of the butte. The wind was howling up there and I was happy to find that there was a considerable shelf of rock before the edge.

Who knows how many countless numbers of people have hiked that butte, or have done hikes more difficult, but that was a definite achievement for me and I was proud of myself. So I commemorated with a self portrait on the edge of the butte.

So what do you do there…?

I love getting this question, because it gives me a chance to kind-of verbally reaffirm that I’m living in a really interesting, different and fun environment.

I also like the fact that I can answer that question in many different ways. What do I do for fun? What do I do for a job? What do I do in my personal time?

The great thing is that, like at no other time in my life, the answers to those questions relate to one another more than ever before.

I came up here to work, but it’s a working vacation. I live where I work and I also go hang out at ‘work’ when I’m not working, and when I am working, I’m often hanging out and doing fun things with people that aren’t at work, or people that are working, just not with me, or sometimes with me.

My job duties up here are still materializing, but so far, I’ve tended bar, served in the dinning room, worked as a line cook in the kitchen and washed dishes. I feel like I’m on vacation but I just have to occasionally go and put some time in.

For fun I go hiking or walking outside with friends, hang out at the lodge with people that are working just for company, listen to music or watch TV in my room, occasionally surf the Web to check up on my friends and family back home or party and get shit-faced drunk in the snow fields with the bums I work with.

I think my favorite is hiking, because it’s so completely different than anywhere else I’ve experienced. Being in the middle of a national forest that’s also a mountain range, no one has to drive to a trail head. I literally gear up for whatever the weather demands, open up my door, close it behind me and simply decide which direction I’m going to start walking. I’ll walk through an alpine and lodge-pole pine forest, around a frozen lake or over a creek to get to a clearing and then I’ll just look around for a hill or mountain to climb.

Our hiking decisions always go like this:

“Look at those huge rocks over there! You wanna go over there and climb ‘em?”

“Sure!”

That’s it. I love that! We stumble across any myriad of animal tracks in the snow and we’ll ponder what tracks they are, how fresh they are and whether or not we want to follow them. The other day Kate, her dog Hannah and I were walking through the forest in the morning and we saw some hunters taking their kill down from the bear pole. It turned out that a bear (probably the same one that goes through our garbage) had still managed to reach up and snatch a few of their carcasses. We just kind of shrugged, told them sorry and headed on, only to stumble across deep, round, bloody tracks in the snow. Curious, we followed the tracks amazed at the fact that we were witnessing evidence of this bear that had dragged a bloody carcass through the snow and then not 100 yards further we stumbled upon the remains of one of the elk.

It was really interesting to see all this raw …nature… unfolding before our eyes, but reality set in and we decided it probably wasn’t a good idea to follow bear tracks because of the chances of actually catching up with it. So we turned around and went the other way, toward the massive Twin Buttes which you can see in the photo further above in this post.

We usually hike to whatever climbing challenge we see or we’ll just walk in a broad loop, but it’s just a simple walk and I love being out there. I even got to build my first snowman with Jenni and Allie, on the top of a large rock formation that overlooked a broad valley.

Work is fun too because I’m usually around my friends and we’re cutting up and joking with each other while we’re rolling silverware, or dicing tomatoes, washing dishes or pouring drinks. It’s very common for people who aren’t working to come in and just chill with you while you work, which is okay here and I do it too. At the bar, you’ll see a bartender work until the end of his/her shift, clock out, then walk around to the other side of the bar and order a drink from the reliever. This place is just very fluid.

In my little apartment in the employee dorms, I enjoy the fact that we get satellite TV and all the hundreds of channels, but my favorite is that we also get all the Sirius Satellite music channels and when I’m alone in my room I’m usually laying on my bed (because there’s no other furniture to sit on) and I’ll listen to the Indie/College Rock station and read or write (like I’m doing now).

I also love taking photos with the camera that my sister and brother-in-law got for me when I visited them in Birmingham. It’s a great camera and I’m so thankful for the waterproof, freezeproof and shockproof features of the camera, because they came in handy when, one night, Jenni and Allie tackled me into a snow bank and I dropped my camera, where it promptly disappeared in the snow.

I feverishly searched for it for three days and two nights before I borrowed a metal detector from a co-worker. Allie swept the detector while I was on my hands and knees in the snow searching through the areas that blipped on the detector. We registered a significant metal presence and I reached through the snow and plucked out the camera, where it had sat for three days and two nights buried under the snow and ice. I brushed off the snow from the LCD screen, turned it on and took a photo of the girls celebrating the find.

So that’s kind of a broad introduction into the stuff I do up here, but I’ll start posting individual experiences that really stand out…

Killing Shit…

So here I am, fresh on the near tip top of the Big Horn Mountains. I’m more than a mile and a half up in the air than I was when I stood, ankle deep, in the Atlantic Ocean not more than a month ago.

Whereas people who lived along the eastern edge of the North American Continent were content about living their lives and feeling the sand between their toes, the sun on their cheeks, their nephews or grandsons playing in the sand and waves, the people up here in Wyoming like to kill stuff.

It’s wierd and I don’t subscribe. Sorry Wyoming folk, I don’t believe in killing shit. The other day I saw a White-Tail Deer hanging from a bear pole in the front of the lodge and it literally got shot through its ass, which apparently is the same as a “bulls-eye” if you’re throwing darts. Fuck your bulls-eye, I’d rather see a White-Tail Deer in the wild, even tracking it, or stalking it, but pulling the trigger? Never.

Hunters here pay more than $1,000 to kill these beautiful animals, in fees and permit costs. Not all of them are lucky, and I’m glad. Imagine the situation where you’ve hiked five or 10 miles or more, through your scope you view a 12-point buck, or a bull elk. It’s the dominate male in the herd or it’s a loner, either way it’s impressive. I’d rather stalk it and follow its impressive tracks as silent as possible than wait for the moment when I can blow it’s fucking brains out. Or shoot it through its ass, which carries all the wierd psychological undertones with the kill.

It’s just a new world up here is all. And maybe I can learn something from these people. I’m still trying to figure it out, but there’s a nest of us who reject the ‘norm’ here and instead love seeing the mountains, rolling hills and alpine forests for what they are, and not as an opportunity to kill shit.

Day 11: Yellowstone to Bear Lodge Resort – Final Day of the Road Trip!

Although we swatted away sheets of ice that weighed down the walls of our tent, we fell asleep warm.

It wasn’t until about 2 a.m. that the chill crept in. It crept in through the tent and then found its way through our sleeping bags, multiple layers of clothing, even our bags and ultimately our skin.

This morning was a cold morning, and the chill lent an urgency to our travels that has been, so far, nonexistent. We needed to get to a warm room, preferably one that had a breakfast buffet with an entire pan of semi-cooked bacon, one with cheesy, fake-scrambled eggs and link sausage.

Such was the main dining room of the Old Faithful Inn (or Lodge or some such bullshit). They had hot coffee, scones, all that buffet crap and some fruit to boot. It was good and we stuffed ourselves.

We even found out how to scam free showers (they were charging an exorbitant $3.50 for hot showers) but we decided that it was about time to drop me off back at the lodge in Burgess Junction on about the very top of the Big Horn Mountains…so we didn’t shower.

We actually never saw Old Faithful, that big ass geyser that’s not so faithful anymore but still draws a crap ton of folks. I’ve seen it in so many photos and videos that I couldn’t give an iota of shit, and we had to hit the road.

We took the loop north to Mammoth (springs?) – something Mammoth relating to the park, that while the trip up there was beautiful, I missed that which gave the area its Mammoth moniker. The highlight was granite outcroppings along the road that we climbed like goats.

The best way I can describe this odd, tumultuous formation of granite boulders is to imagine someone taking large, brittle chunks of then-fresh-and-brittle granite, breaking it between the balls of their palms into various smaller chunks before rolling it like a fistful of dice against a mountain wall. That’s it. There’s no sense to it. It’ didn’t break off from some larger formation, it’s just a hodgepodge of granite boulders and we pulled over so we could climb it.

Simply climbing these rocks was probably the best experience I had in Yellowstone because it was the most interactive, and that’s one of the problems with Yellowstone: it’s difficult to interact with the surroundings because they’re either protected or extremely dangerous, or often both.

We got back in the car and headed to the Mammoth Springs and then on and out of the park on the way back to the lodge.

The way back to Burgess Junction and the Lodge was interesting emotionally, as with each mile ticking down and our little GPS car symbol getting closer to the destination, I knew my leg of our road trip was quickly coming to an end…

Whereas the first time I’d passed the lodge I felt apprehensive and nervous, this time I felt excited and eager.

After our stay in Yellowstone I was in one of those moods that I desperately needed to find an unsecured WiFi network that I could use, mostly for the reason that I found out the DSLR camera that I bought from a friend doesn’t work and that I’ll most likely have to send it in to Nikon for costly repairs, and I needed to do some research about it.

That whole situation created a broad undercurrent of crap I had to deal with on our travels and one that I didn’t really want to express over this blog, but I feel that I got ripped off from someone who I thought was a friend and who was going to at least provide some support for the situation, but that never happened.

I’m so glad I’ve had so many great opportunities to use the camera my sister and brother-in-law got for me, which I’ve used hundreds of times on this trip so far.

Anyhow, after Stampa got his oil changed in Cody, it was on to the lodge. We passed Greybull and Shell again and they’re truly beautiful little villages abutting the foothills of the giant Big Horn Mountains.

The sun was setting to our backs and the light played out across the face of the mountains, painting the rock with brilliant burnt oranges, crimson and muddy browns that popped against the contrast of the still shockingly clear blue sky above. Montana claims the “big sky” label but it’s impossible not to think the same for this part of the country. The sheer vastness of the terrain is overwhelming when you see gently descending prairies that offer views of greater distances than flat ones, all bordered by mountains that abruptly rise more than 8,000 feet above sea level.

We passed our amazing campsite along Shell Creek and wound our way back up Highway 14 through the national forest, passing the same cows, elk and deer that grazed the mountains.

Before long the sun had set further and further beneath the Big Horns and we crested the final hill on the way to the lodge. There’s no doubt that my heart began beating faster, but I was excited this time, one of which for the fact that I was going to sleep in a bed for the first time in a few days and that I had a nice hot shower to look forward to.

We pulled into the parking lot and cheered and hollered that we finally made it. We pulled in, got out and walked into one of the main doors, this one leading into the restaurant and gift shop area (the other leads into the bar).

Not knowing really where to go or who to talk to, I walked up to the front desk/server counter and approached one of the servers and a cute girl behind the desk and told them who I was and what I was doing there. They were definitely excited to meet a new employee and were enthusiastic about the fact that I would enjoy it here and get along with most people and all that, so it was a great welcoming experience for me.

The restaurant had closed for the night but we went into the bar, had a couple pints of Moose Drool (an awesome Montana beer) and ate a little of the employee meal, which foreshadowed the quality of the food they give us…basically crap and leftovers for the most part.

Because we arrived early, they gave us a free hotel room for the night which was awesome. Back at the front desk, Stampa had got himself in a nice conversation with some of the people that were standing there, asking about our trip and so on, so I saw the time as a great opportunity to better meet some of the people there so I asked the cute girl Jenni behind the desk if she wanted to meet up at our room after she got off work to chat and hang out, which she did after Stampa and I had settled into the room and showered.

After a great convo with Jenni in her room (Stampa had already fallen asleep), I returned back to my room and fell hard asleep.

We woke up early the next morning and I got the rest of my stuff out of Stampa’s car before sending him off on his way to Salt Lake City along the way to San Diego and San Francisco.

It was weird and a little difficult to see his car drive off, but I stood outside my door until the car disappeared behind a hill on the way back down to Sheridan.

I walked back inside the room and it really began to dawn on me that I was here and that my first road trip had ended and that it was a wild success and a great ride. I’ll be here until April and I sat there wondering what kinds of things I was going to experience, what types of people I was going to meet and what sights I would see before boarding the Greyhound in April.