Days 95-99, August 23-27, Wyoming to Minnesota to Iowa (Outer Limits)

Consider this a blog post from the Outer Limits.  As much as at any time since I left Pennsylvania in mid-May, I feel that I may soon have an alien encounter.  This feeling started on Monday afternoon when, after departing Chip and Julie’s cabin in Meeteetse, I crossed the Bighorn Mountains and guided Excalibur into eastern Wyoming.  At the crummy little town of Moorcroft, which has sort of a witchy-sounding name, I took a side road that I’ve never traveled before, and by evening I was gazing at Devils Tower.  You may remember Devils Tower from the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” as the place where Richard Dreyfus and a bunch of other soulful characters were summoned by aliens who communicated with humans via bright lights and weird (but now iconic) musical themes.

I always thought Devils Tower was situated on a relatively flat plain and could be seen from far away.  Perhaps that is true if your point of view is from a certain direction, but from the Moorcroft approach you don’t actually get a good view of the tower until you’re a few miles away, after much winding along bluffs and criss-crossing the lovely Belle Fourche River, which creates a green and serpentine valley beneath red-walled cliffs.  The base of the Tower sits in a depression near the river.  As the Tower came into view and I began to appreciate its large dimensions, I pondered whether I had been summoned there.  It looked like a place that aliens might decide to visit, and I thought it would be pretty exciting to be there when that happened.  That assumes, of course, that aliens don’t carry viruses that will destroy us like those carried by Europeans into the New World, as Stephen Hawking has suggested.  In any event, I soon determined that I must not have been summoned by aliens because I drove on by without feeling any unusual  gravitational attraction.  I would have stopped to take a picture of the Tower but the sun was shining from the wrong direction through a smoky haze and my photo would surely have been disappointing.  I’m sure there are many excellent pictures of Devils Tower to be found on the internet by those who care to Google it.

Not far beyond the Tower I drove up and a long ridge and into a patch of National Forest close to the South Dakota border, found a campground on a small lake, and set up Camelot amidst a few families whose rowdy kids were polite enough to settle down when darkness fell.  I had peaceful sleep and rose early to witness the sun lighting up the cliffs on the west side of the lake, trout rising here and there, and two deer moseying by my back door.  I was soon on my way, slowly winding my way down dirt roads back to the main highway.  The winding was slow primarily because of all the cattle on the road.  Something I’ve learned about National Forests in countless hours traveling through them this summer – most of them, especially in the west, contain a remarkable number of open-range cattle.  I don’t know how the ranchers track them all down at the appropriate times, but I guess they do.

Back on the highway as I crossed the South Dakota border, I came upon a large owl perched in the middle of my lane.  It wasn’t the first time I’ve encountered large raptors in similar positions, but historically they’ve always flown away the moment they spotted me approaching.  But the owl held his position.  Behind the wheel of a three-quarter ton truck with a loaded camper, I had the distinct advantage in this game of chicken.  Perhaps the owl divined that I am not the type of person who willingly runs down exquisite creates of air and darkness.  Perhaps the owl was Merlin (see “The Sword in the Stone” by T.H. White, or the Disney movie of the same name).  O maybe he was an alien.  Or just stupid.  Whichever it was, I spared him, swerving across a yellow line to avoid him by inches.  Quickly reentering my lane, I glanced in my rearview mirror and saw that the owl never moved except to swivel his round head and continue to gaze at me with ultimate dispassion.

Before I started my trip last May, I had a pretty good idea about my general route, which was dictated in part by plans I had made with friends and family to be in certain places at certain times.  I’ve taken an odd detour here and there between known meeting sites, but by and large I’ve known where I was headed.  Not so during this period between the fly-in from Alaska and my next rendezvous with Trish in Iowa on September 2.  I decided on the flight from Anchorage to Missoula that I would aim generally east when I arrived there.  While in Meeteetse I formed the idea of spending some time in the lake country of Minnesota.  But when I stopped for gas in Belle Fourche, South Dakota, I suddenly felt the pull of North Dakota and turned north.  Was it an alien summoning?  Not likely.  More likely it was that a glance at my map showed some highlighted areas that I didn’t know existed.  I think I know my geography pretty well, especially U.S. geography, including the locations of most national parks.  But somehow it had escaped my attention that there’s a national park in western North Dakota named after Theodore Roosevelt.  Which is logical, I learned, since Roosevelt grew up in that part of the country.  The “badlands” that appear throughout this region of the country are prominent in western North Dakota, and I decided to get a look at them.

When you gaze upon something like the crazy crayon canyons that envelope the Little Missouri River, throwing a long, colorful scarf over the National Grasslands and vast ranches in the surprising state of North Dakota, it’s easy to understand how such an environment might shape the mind of a young man like Teddy Roosevelt and influence him to become one of the earliest champions of natural conservation and our National Parks system.  After taking a look at the dynamic landscapes in the park named for the Rough Rider President – bully! – I decided to camp at the nearby Little Missouri River State Park.  As the sun set shortly after my arrival, lingering behind an orange ribbon on the western horizon, I popped up the walls of Camelot to view the vast canyon that formed under cliffs only ten yards or so from my windows.  It was so dramatic and unfamiliar – another alien sight.  As night took control of the skies I turned my binoculars to the heavens to observe the jewel-like double star Albiero and other wonders standing out in the Milky Way.  Except for the stars I could detect no lights save one situated on a bluff beyond a far wall of the canyon.  With my binoculars I could make out glistening blue and white lights on a manmade tower that appeared to be part of an oil or gas facility, which are common in the area.  If my imagination were stronger than my slavishness to reality, I would have seen there a spaceship, ready to launch into the clear cosmos above.  It certainly looked like a night view of the launchpad at Cape Canaveral.  The highway that is supposed to cross the canyon north of Killdeer and west of the park was closed.  That highway leads to that bright site across the canyon.  Was it really closed due to flood damage as reported?  Or had the government quarantined the site as it did Devils Tower in “Close Encounters?”  You be the judge.

Due to the aforementioned road closure, I had to backtrack south through Killdeer, ND in the next morning in order to proceed east.  Again I did not have a clear vision of my next destination, but when I stopped for gas I inspected the map and noticed that north central North Dakota is heavily spotted with lakes.  Again, something I didn’t know about this state – much of it was once covered by the same vast glacial lake that also covered most of Minnesota and Wisconsin.  When the ice age ended, the receding glaciers scoured out countless lakes and ponds in this area.  I didn’t figure that out until this evening, but I had a pretty good inkling of it as I drove around Lake Sakakawea (a reservoir that forms where the Missouri River and the Little Missouri River join) and northeast to Devils Lake, passing numerous smaller lakes and ponds along the way.  I was greatly surprised by the amount of wetlands in North Dakota.  Previously I had only visited a small corner of the state, and I pictured the rest of it as a sprawling, semi-arid prairie.  Much of it is a sprawling prairie, in fact, but the mostly-manicured  grasslands host a wide variety of crops and are crawling with combines and hay-balers, and most remarkably are punctuated by so many bodies of water that I was rarely out of sight of one or more.

Among the most common of the crops I saw, and certainly the most beautiful of them, were sunflowers.  All along my route from the southwest corner of the state to the northeast region, great fields of sunflowers light up the prairie.  In the mornings, their hundreds of thousands of faces uniformly peer up at the low sun like rows of gleaming satellite dishes receiving transmissions from distant planets.  As the sun rises higher their chins fall as if they are satiated with light and heat and wish only that the cool evening would arrive.  Trish and I have grown several varieties of sunflowers and we admire them, but our little groves barely hint at the glory of hundreds of acres of these majestic beings all crowded together sporting open and hopeful stares, waiting to be transported.

I had thought of camping at Devils Lake but the prairie wind was steady and stiff from the south (coincidentally, perhaps, the Neil Young album “Prairie Wind” qued up on my IPod), and the lake’s waters were frothy and overflowing their banks.  The effects of the abnormally wet spring are still very evident throughout the region.  These conditions made Devils Lake unappealing so I drove on for another hour or so to Turtle River State Park, just west of Grand Forks.  In the park office I ran into a couple from Alberta who had made the same decision for the same reasons. I am camped near the Turtle River as I write this.  Camelot is enveloped in thick trees because the park sits just inside the transition zone where the western prairies, which were once carpeted by great buffalo herds, give way to the creeping northern forests.  The trees are bustling in the strong breeze, but Camelot is well-protected.  I look outside and see the wide ribbons of diffused light painted on a black canvas by the spiral arms of our galaxy.  Somewhere up there are other creatures, I believe.  They could be denizens of distant planets, or angels, or cherubim and seraphim perhaps.  Something is out there . . . in the Outer Limits.

Post-script.  I didn't have a good internet connection when I wrote the post above, and fishing on the Turtle River is not a good option in the summer, so I decided to drive into western Minnesota on Friday.  Late in the afternoon I settled into a campground in Lake Shetek State Park in the southwest part of the state.  The park is lovely and sits on a beautiful lake, the largest one in southwestern Minnesota.  Unfortunately the best campground is closed for improvements, so I was directed by the park office to a campground that is wide open on a windy slope.  I patiently ignored the neighbors sitting outside their very large RVs and cackling until well after dark.  When I got up this morning the neighbors were still sleeping, so I took a long walk around the park and the lakeshore, including a stroll across a causeway to Loon Island, which is part of the park.  The causeway to the island was constructed by a WPA crew back in the mid-30s, during the height of the Great Depression.  Say what you will about the efficacy of government stimulus programs, but if you spend much time in our nation's parklands, as I have this year, you have to appreciate all the great stuff that was built by government workers back in that era when other jobs were very hard to find.  It's impressive that after 80 years, so much of what the WPA achieved is still enjoyed by many Americans.  The WPA constructed some really cool things, and it's unfortunate that too many of them are now falling into disrepair.

There were no aliens in western Minnesota as far as I could tell.  I drove down to Iowa after my park walk this morning, passing near Sibley and the highest point in Iowa.  I read somewhere long ago that the highest point in Iowa is the site of a hog lot.  That's possible but it looked to me like just another cornfield with no visible swine.  Honestly, it was hard to make out which spot exactly was the high spot.  It's not really tall relative to its surroundings - it just sits in a part of the state, right on the border with Minnesota, that is generally higher in elevation than the rest of the state.  The Des Moines River originates near there (in fact, at the aforementioned Lake Shetek) and flows southeast across the entire state, which gives a pretty good clue about elevation patterns in Iowa.  Curiously, and not by my design or with any forethought, I have driven by the highest points in several states during the past week.  No aliens at any of them, at least none that I could see.  Not counting myself.