Mountain Time

We have been slowly making our way across the mountainous west, crossing time zones and continental divides in search of the next best view. Let me tell you, you can see pretty far from 10,000 feet! Juniper is not a fan of the climbs though (our poor little mule), so when we reached Jackson hole, we gave her a rest and took to the hills on foot. The Tetons are right there, Towering over everything with their dramatic cliffs and cloud scraping peaks, but we headed just east of them into the Gros Ventre Wilderness for some communing with the Elks, Coyotes, Wildflowers, and scattered summer Glaciers. It was quite a hike out to Torquoise lake (round trip somewhere around 20-30 miles, reaching around 9,000 feet a few times), tucked into the the hills like the little jewel it was named for, but much needed after days of sitting on our butts. Ziggy ran circles around us the entire time as we summitted passes, and 4 days later is still barely walking (poor stiff doggy).
We headed into Yellowstone next...Buffalo, Bears, and Moose, oh my! no kidding, theres an amazing amount of wildlife there. Around each bend in the road is a new scene, a different ecosystem, unreal formations of land, water, and creature. It is a crazy beautiful Park, but a Park nonetheless, with so many tourists, and everything costing too much (although comparable to Seattle!). We stayed one night and headed out into middle of Wyoming. Daniel had childhood memories of a place called Thermopolis (Hot spring county, so you see the draw). We pulled into a little town in the middle of the desert famous for its unusual volume of hot springs bursting from the ground. We headed straight for the funky little RV park he remembered from when he was thirteen (all the springs are pretty much privatized there, now, although back in the day it was Shoshone territory), The Fountain of Youth! A wonderfully kitchy Americana site owned by a nondenominational missionary minister named Ron (whose younger days were spent as a musician in Seattle, its a small world after all). The spring was discovered by oil prospectors, who were disappointed to strike hot water instead of black gold, and now fills two swimmimg pools with the 1,300,000 gallons of mineral rich piping hot water per day while Johnny Cash and the Steve Miller band plays on an old radio. Its a funky little place, known only to a lucky few, with no shame in its tackyness (the spring sprays out of a strange volcano shaped rock at one end of the the swimming pools, and RVs fill the ajoining campsite) . We loved it. Good people, quarter showers, and sulfur water....mmmmm.

We are headed into plains country now, hot and dry, Lakota holy land. Juniper keeps on truckin' and we have left the craggy mountains of the west behind. We now enter the heartland of America.