Thunder Basin

Wyoming's Powder River Basin

WY450 in Wyoming's Powder River Basin

the closed open-range

A dead horse near the highway alludes to the powerful storm the night before.

Driving southwest out of Sundance, we entered the Powder River Basin, an immense open area in northeastern Wyoming where the grasslands began to turn to sagebrush. It is hard to cross this great steppe without goosebumps. The freedom of the open range sweeps through the imagination like an unobstructed wind. -That is, until you try to walk out into it. Huge tracts of this land are publicly owned, and leased by the government to ranchers or corporations specializing in extracting natural recourses. These leases aren't always open to the public, and a vast network of barbed wire holds the land down like a net.

Still, with a map of the Thunder Basin National Grassland, you could wander out into the great mysterious space and let the sun, the wind, or the storms of the high plains take you into another world...

Sundance, where the kid got his name...

Turf Bar, Sundance, WY

rainbow over Sundance Mountain

The Turf Bar fashion generally consisted of bandanas, ponytails, and leather vests. Clutching beer bottles by their necks, several people swayed -eyes closed, faces turned to the ceiling- to heavy metal ballads playing on the juke box. The swaying was more woozy than that of a sober person by far. Unlike many biker bars where so many "bikers" seemingly dress up in weekend costumes, it was more obvious here that they work, drink, smoke and party in these clothes every day.

Jen and I were watched with curiosity until after we'd ordered beers and burgers and were finally asked where we were from. The guffaws at our "New York" answer basically sounded like, "what planet did you say?!?", so I was quick to add that we were on our way to visit my parents in Wyoming. They eased up at this, and the conversation turned to how awesome the plains are and that, yeah upstate New York isn't that bad...

Looking outside I noticed as the storm-front blew east the evening sky took a chance to brighten up before nightfall. Inside, the barmaid hung up the phone and reported that her brother's barn, sitting deep in a valley twenty miles north of town, had been vaporized by the tornado a half-hour earlier.

The wrath finally catches up...

threat

mammatus clouds

end of the storm...

The power went out in the Wyoming Welcome Center before the storm hit. Nasty weather had been threatening most of the afternoon, but this time it was accompanied by a tornado warning. We found a motel (a series of what look like mobile homes cut into smaller units) to spend the night in Sundance, a small mining town in northeastern Wyoming. We turned on the T.V. in time to read in the warning scrolling across the screen that a tornado had been spotted 15 miles northwest of town -heading east.

The local bar had to be safer than our little box, but on our way there the sky turned green and opened up with 1" hail and slamming gusts of wind. A bank drive-through overhang provided the only emergency shelter we could get to until the worst of it passed.

The plains aren't so innocent...

minuteman missile

peering down into a missile silo

seemingly doomed herd of cattle

The high plains apparently served as a good location for intercontinental ballistic missile silos because the ground elevation there would have saved a lot of launch energy and flight time for the missiles. Advancements in nuclear weapon technology have rendered most of the silos (constructed in the 1960s) obsolete, but the one pictured above has been converted into the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site. The tiny museum with a short film occupies a trailer, but the silo is well worth stopping to peer into.

The missile in that silo would have reached its targeted communities in 30 minutes. 30 minutes says two things: 1) the missiles are very fast, and 2) the population of families, cooks, farmers, steelworkers, students, prisoners, office workers, nurses, artists, criminals, bartenders, hairdressers, and street vendors, etc. making their livings in the areas targeted are in so many ways very close to us -just over the horizon.

Great Plains scavenger hunt item #9: missile silo

A missile silo is an underground, vertical cylindrical container for the storage and launching of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). They typically have the missile some distance under the surface, protected by a large "blast door" on top.

-Wikipedia

Superstorm

advancing storm over western South Dakota

advancing storm over a gas station

advancing storm reaching for a pickup truck

The storm that loomed in from the west threatened us through much of western South Dakota. Once we got back onto the interstate toward Wyoming the speed limit let us accelerate to 80+ miles per hour. It was like leaving the dark basement as a kid: if you walk calmly, the basement doesn't scare you, but if you start to run you get goosebumps and freak out and run faster. This storm reached out its tentacles as soon as we started running.

Mammatus clouds

mammatocumulus (mammary cloud)

mammatocumulus (mammary cloud)

As we left the Badlands we were headed for an approaching storm that darkened the western sky. These mammatus (mammary for obvious reasons) clouds, when appearing underneath cumulonimbus clouds as shown above, are a sign of a particularly violent (and possibly tornadic) thunderstorm. A weather professor in college once told me he refused to board a plane when he saw these outside an airport in Colorado Springs. The flight was later cancelled.

Scenic overlook

approaching storm

Badlands National Park

looking east beyond "the wall"

scenic overlook

I like to imagine how the above photograph turned out. Wherever it's being displayed now, instead of showing what the badlands look like, it tells the story of that family's visit there together in the summer of 2009.

I remember growing up reliving vacations and events by looking through all the photo albums my mom put together. As I grew older my own memory of our vacations blended with the story contained in those pictures until I could no longer distinguish between them. The blurring doesn't matter -each enhances the other.

(By the way, I think the railings designed for safety should also be designed with personal photos like this one in mind.)

What planet?

badlands

Jen hiking the badlands

badlands clay

badlands

Despite Jen's injured knee, we set off for a short hike through the wilderness of baked-hard mud. Shadows and colors were almost eliminated by the high mid-afternoon sun. For all the austere beauty that the prairie holds surrounding this serrated 100-mile interruption, here it is the beauty of martian dreams.

Great Plains scavenger hunt item #8: Badlands of South Dakota

For half a million years, water and wind have sculpted fantastic rock art in southwestern South Dakota, mesmerizing visitors to Badlands National Park. Life is scarce in these stark buttes. But a surrounding ocean of grasslands includes healthy numbers of buffalo, coyotes, pronghorn, and birds of prey. Here the prairie endures.

-National Geographic

Below the badlands

Badlands National Park

a prehistoric predator

...used to live here.

The badlands were a seabed in the dinosaurs’ day

Then the growing rockies poured the sea away

As it cooled and dried

the mammals grazed and died

Now we read their story under the prairie hay

O.K., sorry about that. It is a good place for fossils, though...

Entering the badlands

Heading east out of Rapid City toward the Badlands, we crossed 75 miles of flat, crusty rangeland. The sun was high enough to eliminate all shadows, and the highway road crews we passed were hidden until the last moment by silver mirages. The intensity of the baked landscape was broken only once in two hours when we drove across the Cheyenne River floodplain lined with cottonwood trees. Finally, a parking lot filled with RVs and several families having lunches under small wooden shelters signaled that we had arrived in Badlands National Park.

Our disembodied presidents

George Washington, carved

picturing Washington's profile

In the morning we drove by Mount Rushmore on our way out of the Black Hills. As we descended into Rapid City, we were awed at how much kitch lined the highway. If the Black Hills weren't enough for your family, here there is mini-golf, a Mystery Spot, Bear Country USA (a bear zoo), reptile gardens, a presidential wax museum, a Chuckwagon supper-show, a maze, gemstone panning, and much more!

The one place that managed to draw us in was a pull-off with three new giant presidential heads, Kennedy, Reagan and the one pictured below. They were standing there to promote and raise money for an eventual presidential "trail". All of the presidents would (as the dream goes) be spread out in the woods over a hillside, connected by a hiking trail. Can anyone guess who the mystery president is below? The chance to moon him having been fulfilled, we continued on our way.

guess who...

Our quiet campsite

morning clean-up

our tiny campfire

Having pushed our luck driving through the Black Hills, and waiting too late to find a campground, we almost had to spend the night in a KOA. It looked like a smoky city packed in with buses, RVs, campers and giant wall-tents. In the center was a three-story building with floor-to-ceiling windows, through which we could see a giant chandelier. With prices to justify camping with a chandelier, we drove away prepared to sleep in the car. At the last moment before dark we found a small thickly wooded state campground with several vacancies left. We spent a beautiful dark night with a trickling stream just beyond our site.

Into the Black Hills

The Needles

a bison in Wind Cave National Park

The Needles Highway

As we drove north into South Dakota and threaded our way into the Black Hills via the Needles Highway, it was like a safari as we passed prairie dog towns, hawks, bison, mule deer, antelope, and bighorn sheep.

Museum of the Fur Trade

inside a trading post

traders' artifacts

museum "baidarka" model

fur traders' rifles

The Museum of the Fur Trade, a private museum outside Chadron, Nebraska, was a fun stop, though I'm sure not all the fun was the museum's intent. The displays, covering the fur trade throughout North America from the first Europeans to the multi-national Hudson's Bay Company, were pretty extensive and interesting. However, they could do without the introductory film which used historic reenactments that were shot in the 1930s and in which the Indians greeted the white men with "How!"

Agate Fossil Beds NM

the Niobrara River crossing the Agate Fossil Beds National Monument

a daphoenodon pursuing a daeodon

mixed-grass prairie, Agate Fossil Beds National Monument

For a while growing up, a new book arrived in the mail once a month from a series by National Geographic. My favorite one was about the Age of Mammals. Somehow I could relate more to the bizarre looking giant boars and tiny horses on savannas than dinosaurs in jungles.

The Niobrara river valley in which the Agate Fossil Beds National Monument sits looks similar to how it did 20 million years ago. It's so easy to go outside here and, with your imagination, watch a nature show on the "plains of Africa" in in which these bone-crushing scavengers and beardogs scrambled for survival as their watering holes dried up.

Great Plains scavenger hunt item #7: Cenozoic era fossils

The Cenozoic Era is the age of new life. During the Cenozoic, mammals diverged from a few small, simple, generalized forms into a diverse collection of terrestrial, marine, and flying animals, giving this period its other name, the Age of Mammals, despite the fact that birds still outnumbered mammals two to one. The Cenozoic is just as much the age of savannas, the age of co-dependent flowering plants and insects, and the age of birds. Grass also played a very important role in this epoch, shaping the evolution of the birds and mammals that fed on it.