Crazy and More Rush

Friday 31^st May –last night we stayed in Rapid City, South Dakota, a pleasant town with a definite main street. Despite the wind, we looked around for a while before choosing an interesting restaurant with Californian-European cuisine.

 Before our 9 am start today we managed to get a cheap and tasty breakfast in a café one block away (hotel restaurant rather on the elaborate side).  We left our central location and drove south into the Black Hills. These are named for their dark green, coniferous forest and rugged terrain of granites and metamorphic rocks, reminiscent of parts of Scotland. The area has a rich history of Indian settlement, and mining (Gold Rush) and is now a popular tourist location.

Two impressive attractions awaited us. First, we went to Crazy Horse, the world’s largest rock sculpture and national memorial to the Native American peoples.  This was designed in 1947 by sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski who worked on it until his death in 1982. The statue will be about 250 feet high when finished and has involved the removal of millions of tons of pink granite, a truly awe-inspiring achievement.  Work continues by a non-profit foundation run by his widow and 7 of his 10 children. The sculpture depicts Sioux Indian Crazy Horse, who was stabbed at Fort Robinson in 1877 by an American soldier while under a flag of truce. There is a large visitor centre, Native Indian museum and collection of work by Ziolkowski. See www.crazyhorsememorial.org.

 Pushed for a time and having barely done the place justice, we continued to Mount Rushmore in the same area. This is another rock sculpture, of the heads of former presidents Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln, again in granite, but on a completely different scale – the heads being 10s of feet high and completed in a few years before 1941. (Remember the scene in Hitchcock’s film North by North-West?) This was designed by Gutzon Borglum, assisted for a short time by a young Korczak Ziolkowski. This is national monument and has the dignity and structure appropriate to such a construction.

The visit was marred by ferocious winds again, and as we left the site, rain began to fall. We returned to Rapid City and here some of the party continued on the optional visit to the Badlands National Park, about 90 miles to the south-east. Briefly we debated if it was worth pressing on with the trip in driving rain and poor visibility, but some time later our persistence was rewarding by yet a third incredible sight in the same day. The Badlands are a receding front of sharply eroded buttes, pinnacles and spires of multi-coloured sandstones and siltstones, marking the boundary between the high and low prairies.

 Despite the bad weather, there was plenty to marvel at, as we called at the visitor centre and took the 30-mile scenic drive. It was 7 pm before we returned to Rapid City after a remarkable day, certainly a highlight of our tour. Another early start tomorrow and back into Wyoming.

Rockies and Fort Laramie

On Day 3 (29/5) we departed our hotel in Denver at 8 am in light rain. We drove North along the I25 as far as Loveland, and then turned west where the scenery became more interesting. Flat-lying sedimentary rocks changed to steeply dipping slates as we entered the impressive, winding Big Thompson Canyon. The vegetation was varied – pine, spruce, silver birch and aspen with leaves just breaking. The rocks changed again into gneisses and finally granite. 

Our first stop was Estes Park, at 7500 feet altitude, the gateway to the Rocky Mountains National Park. A park in this area refers to a flat area between peaks. Many of the peaks in the park are over 14,000 feet (3 times the height of Ben Nevis). Even at ground level here we noticed the effects of altitude – shortage of breath and a slower pace of movement. Many of the access roads are only seasonal and still blocked by snow. We returned to Estes Park, a pleasant town of 6000 people with the usual services and gift shops, for lunch and met this fellow on the way.

We returned down the winding gorge to Loveland, and spent the remainder of the afternoon on the journey North to Cheyenne, just into Wyoming. We stopped at a visitor centre to stock up on maps and information leaflets. Our hotel for the night was Little America, a country-club style establishment with a golf course, and Tony promptly went for a swim in the outdoor pool – sunny but breezy.

Day 4, Thursday, dawned sunny but windy, another 8 am start. En route we stopped at a supermarket in Cheyenne to buy a picnic lunch for our visit to Fort Laramie. The Great Plains landscape was evident on this part of the journey – gently undulating grasslands with occasional bluffs or outcrops of pale rocks ((siltstones?), occasional grazing cattle and pronghorns, a type of wild antelope. We drove North again on I25 and then turned East on to I26 to Guernsey, a small garrison town on the North Platte River. Mid-morning we stopped at the nearby Oregon Trail Ruts, a national historic landmark. These are remnants of the original ruts worn in the bedrock by wagons of the pioneers and settlers migrating to the West, in the mid-19^th century.  There were camps in this area where settlers found a way across the river. From here we soon reached Fort Laramie (not to be confused with Laramie), another historic site close to the junction of the Laramie and North Platter Rivers. Originally set up as a trading post, Fort Laramie was a government post from 1849 to 1890, and saw many movements of people travelling west, as well as conflicts with the native Indian peoples. Today it consists of some ruined buildings and some reconstructed, such as the cavalry barracks and the captains’ house. Although a very interesting site, the visit was marred by what can only be described as vicious winds!

The afternoon was spent driving in heavy rain into South Dakota and towards the Black Hills along I79. Our stop for the next 2 nights is the Adoba Eco Hotel in Rapid City, another windy location! The weather forecast for the next few days does not look good.

Hi there folks. Our trip started on Monday 27^th May with a comfortable mid-morning car journey to London Heathrow, courtesy of Titan Travel. We jetted off around 4.30 pm on British Airways to Denver, a flight of around 9 hours 40 minutes, passed by various complimentary drinks, snacks and movies. On landing in Denver, with a backdrop of the Rockies, we queued for an hour to get through immigration and then met up with our tour manager and group.  We had a half-hour drive through the dusk, to reach the city of Denver and our hotel, the Sheraton Downtown.  After navigating the vast marble halls and corridors of this conference hotel, we found our room about 9.30 pm local time (7 hours behind UK time, equivalent to 4.30am!). A quick sortie into the local precinct revealed most cafes to be closed, even Starbucks, so after a quick drink, we were glad to retire for the night.

Tuesday dawned warm and sunny. A hearty breakfast buffet in the hotel made up for the deficiencies of the evening before. Our morning coach tour took us around the Lower Downtown area (LoDo) and to the State Capitol building. Famed for its dome coated in gold leaf, the roof is currently swathed in scaffolding and white polythene undergoing renovation. The famous ‘mile high’ altitude of this city is measured at the thirteenth step at the front of the building.  We had a short visit around this area, marked with various national monuments.

From the steps of the Capitol Building

 Then we headed out of town west towards Golden (site of the 19^th century gold rush) in the foothills of the Rockies. We noted various geological and landform features of interest en route. Our destination was Lookout Mountain, a natural viewpoint and site of the burial in 1917 of ‘Buffalo’ Bill Cody, who spent the last years of his life here. The town of Cody, in Wyoming, is still trying to claim back his body!

In the afternoon we took the free electric bus down the adjacent 16^th Street Mall. This is a tree-lined pedestrian precinct of shops, bars and restaurants leading north-west to the South Platte River on which the city was founded. Here we found pleasant parks, walkways and cycle trails.

After a welcome siesta in our room (jetlag beginning to register), we sauntered out to dinner at Maggiano’s, a nearby atmospheric Italian restaurant (can’t face those 12 ounce steaks yet!). Thus finished a pleasant day in Denver, a modern, clean and stylish city. Tomorrow we depart at 8 am!

The grand tour of the Rocky Mountain National Parks

Sunday, 19th May 2013

Major effort - set a blog!

So one week to go and things are getting into gear.

Passports and tickets checked;
Visa courtesy of ESTA - very pricey;
Packing list - checked and approved (after 3rd edition);
Extracted current temperatures at forthcoming locations - pretty cold 
10 Centigrade!  Revise packing list - edition 4.

Some of Dakota's badlands taken on a previous visit

Small mountains in a semi-arid landscape

A nice vegetation sequence

So the next blog will hopefully be from Denver