Showing posts with label road trips. Show all posts
Showing posts with label road trips. Show all posts
Friday, August 13, 2010
Scenery as art
Road Trip! North Dakota and Minnesota
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The storm last night blew eastward at a rate of about 35 mph, hitting the Twin Cities before dawn, and moving into western Wisconsin in the morning. Another (others) blew up in their places, however. Yesterday I was escaping the weather, my 75 mph easily beating the storm; today, I was chasing into it -- this time, catching up. I still managed to duck just south of the storms (which hit Mille Lacs hard -- the large lake next to the "a" in Minnesota in the map above).
Still, I arrived at Prosapia Dommus ("family home") just in time to unload the car and participate in this week's Popcorn Dialogues. (More about that some other day.) I have driven 1,849 miles since Tuesday (technically, since HomoDommi drove many of the miles the first day, I've driven 1,427 miles since Wednesday afternoon).
Here are some more photos:
The storm last night blew eastward at a rate of about 35 mph, hitting the Twin Cities before dawn, and moving into western Wisconsin in the morning. Another (others) blew up in their places, however. Yesterday I was escaping the weather, my 75 mph easily beating the storm; today, I was chasing into it -- this time, catching up. I still managed to duck just south of the storms (which hit Mille Lacs hard -- the large lake next to the "a" in Minnesota in the map above).
Still, I arrived at Prosapia Dommus ("family home") just in time to unload the car and participate in this week's Popcorn Dialogues. (More about that some other day.) I have driven 1,849 miles since Tuesday (technically, since HomoDommi drove many of the miles the first day, I've driven 1,427 miles since Wednesday afternoon).
Here are some more photos:
A close up of flowers in the Gallatin National Forest. Looking, IIRC, north. I took several photos of the immense, glacier-covered mountains in the distance, but none of them show up.
Park City, Montana, is in the chasm between the line of the tops of dark trees and the buttes in the distance. This is maybe 30 miles west of Billings, Montana, looking southwest.
A rainbow north of the highway, over eastern Montana, round about Glendive.
The National Grasslands of the North Dakota Prairie. The wind here was blowing so hard, I lost my footing trying to walk back to my car. I love this territory, and every time I drive through it hurriedly, wonder why I don't stop for a proper hike. It is always windy (based on three different trips through).
The last photo of last night's storm, taken around Williston, ND.
At a rest stop in North Dakota. This felt like Caledonia (southern Minnesota) to me, although about 500 miles northwest of it.
Driving into another storm, this time in Minnesota, today.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Road Trip! Montana
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The standard speed limit in Idaho, Montana and North Dakota is 75 mph. This may not be good for gas conservation, but it sure is good for the person who has to cross these states in 2-1/2 days. (Normally, 75 mph would be good for more fatal car accidents, but there are so few cars on these roads that I doubt that's much of an issue -- aside, I suppose, from one-car accidents. I reckon I spent five of the thirteen hours I drove today with no other cars in sight, except occasionally on the west-going side of the divided freeway.)
So I started today a little ways west of Yellowstone Park; drove up through the Targhee National Forest, and past the Harriman State Park (of Idaho, not New York) -- originally a cattle ranch purchased about 1900 by a wealthy railroad baron, Somebody Harriman, it gradually became a family retreat for his family and the Guggenheims. His brother (or his son) donated it to the state of Idaho in 1977, and it laid the foundation for the whole Idaho park system.
I took photos, but forgot my camera in the car tonight, and so I'll post them tomorrow (if any turned out). Instead, here's one from Wikipedia, of the next forest after the Harriman State Park -- the Gallatin National Forest.
Eventually, I drove out of the "Yellowstone Ecosystem", as it's called, north to Bozeman and the relatively less impressive environs of the interstate motorway (I-90/I-94 at that point). I have driven that route many times, and always remember eastern Montana as long boring stretches of flat nothing, punctuated by oil drills in the distance. Today, at least (at 75 mph), it was a progressively changing dramatic landscape: tree-covered mountains (the Glacier Range of the Rockies in the far northwest, the Crazy Mountain range to the northeast, the grand Absarokee Range -- and Grand Tetons beyond -- south in Yellowstone Park) melted into greenish bluffs studded with gamboling horses and blown-out trees, which in turn hardened into the multicolored striations of painted hills (I can't find any names for the area online, but they are clearly the northern cousins of the Badlands in South Dakota). As the sun neared the western horizon, I raced through the softer hills of the National Grasslands of the Little Missouri.
Not boring or dull or ugly at all. Except that there's a lot of miles of buttes and grasslands.
I had intended to stop the night in Dickinson, ND, and pushed myself through tiredness and low level worry to arrive there about just before sunset (about 8:30). For the last 200 miles I had been racing just south of major thunderstorms -- the radio blared alarms every 30 minutes or so, about the large hail and damaging winds (possibly tornados) to be had, and how everyone in the path should seek shelter immediately. I was never in the path, but didn't want to slow down to let the storm notice my little Mini tootling through its district.
Apparently everyone else on this empty road decided to stop, in Dickinson, too. I personally went to four hotels, and then phoned another five or so -- every one was filled with travelers preferring to wait out the storm. People were standing outside in the parking lots, watching the black thunderclouds and sheet lightning turn slowly from its westward march to start tumbling back southeast towards us, blanketing the remaining twilight about half an hour early. The wind was high, and there was that literal electricity in the air, an urgency and excitement. I called ahead to Bismarck, pretty much the next town on the highway -- an hour and a half further east -- and got a room.
Without stopping to eat, I dove onto the highway to drive through black night (no street lights on I-94 in North Dakota, and no major towns, either) to the Bismarck Radisson, where I'm writing this. The storm did notice me, and has followed. Although I didn't experience a drop of rain when I was driving, buckets are dumping from the thundering sky now, about an hour after I parked my car in the hotel garage.
The standard speed limit in Idaho, Montana and North Dakota is 75 mph. This may not be good for gas conservation, but it sure is good for the person who has to cross these states in 2-1/2 days. (Normally, 75 mph would be good for more fatal car accidents, but there are so few cars on these roads that I doubt that's much of an issue -- aside, I suppose, from one-car accidents. I reckon I spent five of the thirteen hours I drove today with no other cars in sight, except occasionally on the west-going side of the divided freeway.)
So I started today a little ways west of Yellowstone Park; drove up through the Targhee National Forest, and past the Harriman State Park (of Idaho, not New York) -- originally a cattle ranch purchased about 1900 by a wealthy railroad baron, Somebody Harriman, it gradually became a family retreat for his family and the Guggenheims. His brother (or his son) donated it to the state of Idaho in 1977, and it laid the foundation for the whole Idaho park system.
I took photos, but forgot my camera in the car tonight, and so I'll post them tomorrow (if any turned out). Instead, here's one from Wikipedia, of the next forest after the Harriman State Park -- the Gallatin National Forest.
Gallatin National Forest (photo from US Forest Service). What this photo doesn't show is the lovely blue-green rivers that run through it and the Targhee Forest, full of trout fisherman today.
Eventually, I drove out of the "Yellowstone Ecosystem", as it's called, north to Bozeman and the relatively less impressive environs of the interstate motorway (I-90/I-94 at that point). I have driven that route many times, and always remember eastern Montana as long boring stretches of flat nothing, punctuated by oil drills in the distance. Today, at least (at 75 mph), it was a progressively changing dramatic landscape: tree-covered mountains (the Glacier Range of the Rockies in the far northwest, the Crazy Mountain range to the northeast, the grand Absarokee Range -- and Grand Tetons beyond -- south in Yellowstone Park) melted into greenish bluffs studded with gamboling horses and blown-out trees, which in turn hardened into the multicolored striations of painted hills (I can't find any names for the area online, but they are clearly the northern cousins of the Badlands in South Dakota). As the sun neared the western horizon, I raced through the softer hills of the National Grasslands of the Little Missouri.
(The National Grasslands of the Dakota Prairie -- photo from the US Forest Service again.)
Not boring or dull or ugly at all. Except that there's a lot of miles of buttes and grasslands.
I had intended to stop the night in Dickinson, ND, and pushed myself through tiredness and low level worry to arrive there about just before sunset (about 8:30). For the last 200 miles I had been racing just south of major thunderstorms -- the radio blared alarms every 30 minutes or so, about the large hail and damaging winds (possibly tornados) to be had, and how everyone in the path should seek shelter immediately. I was never in the path, but didn't want to slow down to let the storm notice my little Mini tootling through its district.
Apparently everyone else on this empty road decided to stop, in Dickinson, too. I personally went to four hotels, and then phoned another five or so -- every one was filled with travelers preferring to wait out the storm. People were standing outside in the parking lots, watching the black thunderclouds and sheet lightning turn slowly from its westward march to start tumbling back southeast towards us, blanketing the remaining twilight about half an hour early. The wind was high, and there was that literal electricity in the air, an urgency and excitement. I called ahead to Bismarck, pretty much the next town on the highway -- an hour and a half further east -- and got a room.
Without stopping to eat, I dove onto the highway to drive through black night (no street lights on I-94 in North Dakota, and no major towns, either) to the Bismarck Radisson, where I'm writing this. The storm did notice me, and has followed. Although I didn't experience a drop of rain when I was driving, buckets are dumping from the thundering sky now, about an hour after I parked my car in the hotel garage.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Road Trip! Route 20
Yesterday, HomoDommi, the children and I drove from Portland to their home in Boise. We got off late, ran into the annoyingly ubiquitous American Economic Recovery Act Interstate Construction and Traffic Stoppage along I-84, and arrived late to Boise. Nothing much to speak of, except to mention how much I love the windmills along that section of the world.
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Today I drove from Boise, Idaho, to Rexburg, Idaho. I had intended to get as far as Bozeman, Montana, but I got off to a late start -- due to forgetting to set my clock ahead from Oregon time, and to losing necessary charging cords and needing to get new ones. I reached Rexburg less than an hour before sunset -- rather than drive the next (planned) 3.5 hours in the dark, through the mountains, tired -- I chose instead to stop for the night and take that demanding and beautiful drive tomorrow morning.
But today -- today I drove Route 20 across Central Idaho. Route 20, the Cattus Dommus household learned from last Sunday's Oregonian, crosses the whole U.S.A, from the Pacific Coast (Newport, OR) to Boston, ending in Kenmore Square. The bit I did today skirted the foothills of the dry and treeless Sawtooth Mountain Range, tiptoed along the north side of the desolate lava plains of the Craters of the Moon, and plowed straight through a large region of "Sagebrush Steppe" also known as the Idaho National Laboratory -- once the home to over 50 Nuclear Test Reactors, now an environmental research area investigating the regrowth of rare sagebrush after fires. (FemmeDommi probably knows a lot more than I do about that area -- I've heard her mutter about sagebrush and environmental protection).
I will part company with Rte. 20 early tomorrow, when it turns east through Yellowstone, and I veer north to Interstate 90, avoiding holiday crowds. Tomorrow's plan is ambitious -- 9+ hours to get me through Montana just over the border into North Dakota. I plan to stop the night in Dickinson, where my grandparents started their married life one hundred years ago, on a farm with a realio-trulio sod house. (Unless I'm mis-remembering that story).
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Today I drove from Boise, Idaho, to Rexburg, Idaho. I had intended to get as far as Bozeman, Montana, but I got off to a late start -- due to forgetting to set my clock ahead from Oregon time, and to losing necessary charging cords and needing to get new ones. I reached Rexburg less than an hour before sunset -- rather than drive the next (planned) 3.5 hours in the dark, through the mountains, tired -- I chose instead to stop for the night and take that demanding and beautiful drive tomorrow morning.
But today -- today I drove Route 20 across Central Idaho. Route 20, the Cattus Dommus household learned from last Sunday's Oregonian, crosses the whole U.S.A, from the Pacific Coast (Newport, OR) to Boston, ending in Kenmore Square. The bit I did today skirted the foothills of the dry and treeless Sawtooth Mountain Range, tiptoed along the north side of the desolate lava plains of the Craters of the Moon, and plowed straight through a large region of "Sagebrush Steppe" also known as the Idaho National Laboratory -- once the home to over 50 Nuclear Test Reactors, now an environmental research area investigating the regrowth of rare sagebrush after fires. (FemmeDommi probably knows a lot more than I do about that area -- I've heard her mutter about sagebrush and environmental protection).
This is the scene looking west from almost the top of a pass (elevation 5500 feet), along the edge of the Sawtooth National Forest. Presumably this shows us Castle Rock, but I don't know which it is. The road in the distance is part of the Goodale's Cutoff -- a "shortcut" on the Oregon Trail.
Pioneers had at times level ground only 10 feet wide -- not much wider than their wagons -- amongst the scattered, black rock that is now the Craters of the Moon National Monument. It's weird -- out of nowhere, suddenly you're in 600 square miles of strewn, lifeless lava. I didn't take the time to stop at the Visitor's Center -- which appears quite extensive and with many hikes attached (well worth a visit later, however). Goodale's Cutoff took the pioneers right through the difficult-to-navigate lava fields -- a trade-off for the lessened likelihood of being ambushed by Shoshone.
The Big Southern Butte is the largest of three buttes that rise up out of the Snake River Plain. It was used as a landmark for Oregon Trail pioneers to head for, to make Goodale's Cutoff. Between me and the Butte is some desolate territory, the sagebrush steppe, used for 50 years as a Nuclear Reactor Test grounds, and to store nuclear waste.
I will part company with Rte. 20 early tomorrow, when it turns east through Yellowstone, and I veer north to Interstate 90, avoiding holiday crowds. Tomorrow's plan is ambitious -- 9+ hours to get me through Montana just over the border into North Dakota. I plan to stop the night in Dickinson, where my grandparents started their married life one hundred years ago, on a farm with a realio-trulio sod house. (Unless I'm mis-remembering that story).
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