Welcome to our “Yellowstone Trip”. This page will describe our Wyoming experiences.

Our last morning in South Dakota was uneventful, we had breakfast, packed the car, paid the bill and were on our way to Devil's Tower about 9 AM. Traffic was pretty light and some of the views were spectacular. Wyoming has lots of cattle ranches and many, many fields of grain. We could see Devil's Tower from the road when we were about 5-7 miles away. It just sits there with relatively flat country all around. We walked the Tower Trail around the base and took many pictures. Being up so much higher than the surrounding area, some of the views were pretty awesome. We saw about 20-25 people climbing up Devil's Tower, even a family with a fairly young child. Who knew there were so many in need of an adrenaline rush!

After our walk-around and lunch we continued on to Buffalo, WY, arriving about 4:30. Expecting a small town, we were surprised to find a number of fast-food restaurant chains and decided that Pizza Hut was the way to end our day. The only down side for today was that Rose discovered her sunglasses were left in Custer. She contacted the motel and learned that they were found and will be returned by mail.

Tomorrow it is up into Montana to the Little Big Horn, scene of Custer's Last Stand and then on to Cody, WY. Stay tuned for another update tomorrow. Then we will be in Yellowstone and without internet access.

Little Big Horn Battlefield National Monument turned out to be one of the most intertesting places we have been thus far. It has the same feel as Gettysburg. And to think it was a very last minute add-on suggested by a friend.

Did you know that not everyone died? Some of the cavalry were further away, realized the Indians outnumbered them and managed to escape the slaughter. A tremendous amount of research has been done to record this battle and they have been able to identify fairly exact locations where soldiers & Indians died. There is an Indian Memorial also, commemorating their efforts to preserve their way of life. It was well worth the extra miles and time spent.

However, having done that, we ended up arriving in Cody, WY about 7:30 PM, somewhat later than expected. The drive over the Big Horn Mountains and through the Big Horn National Forest was beautiful but took longer than expected. We climbed to about 8500' and then, of course, had to descend. Many, Many switchbacks and hairpin turns. Thank goodness Bill was driving. On top of that, part way over the mountain, the road was being rebuilt - from scratch! This was definitely not the fun part of the trip! The views more than compensated for this, however. The Prius didn't even breathe hard on all those mountain inclines and declines. We finally reached the flat valley and cruised in to Cody, watching a rainstorm in the distance. Tomorrow we go out of internet range, but will be back on Friday. Tune in again then for a Yellowstone report.

Created ... August 31, 2009
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