Where the Buffalo Roam

Yellowstone National Park

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson...I hate to advocate drugs, liquor, violence or insanity to anyone. But in my case it's worked.

Mrs. Phred snuck up on this bison with her bad foot and took this great picture...the park ranger told her to stop harassing the buffalo....

There is a hotspot deep below Yellowstone which causes all the geysers, mud pots, hot springs and fumaroles. The hotspot remains stationary and the continental plate drifts over it to the northeast.

The three Yellowstone super eruptions occurred 2.1 million, 1.3 million, and 640,000 years ago, One was 2,500 times as powerful as Mt. St Helens. If you do the math, you might conclude that we are due for another.

We spent all day in Yellowstone, looking at animals and geology...

Today Mrs. Phred is getting her foot Xrayed...

I did a little bicyling and bought a ten day Montana fishing license...

In the morning we will head for Canyon Ferry lake a few hours north...I want to catch and eat some cut throat trout....

Mrs. Phred has a fractured bone in her right foot. It will be four-six weeks before she can hike or play tennis....

She is being nice and blaming herself for not expecting something to fall out of the luggage compartment onto her foot...actually, I did a bad job packing....

We have a line on some outstanding Bar-B-Q outside of Austin, Texas....Maybe later this year on the way back?

The sky here is more blue...it might be the 9,000 foot elevation that puts us above 3/4ths of the atmosphere....

The people wait for "old faithful"...it goes off about once an hour...

Guys Don't Ask For Directions

Cave of the Winds National Park

In Hot Springs, South Dakota they are excavating mammoth remains. They are down about 20 feet and so far they've found 56 skeletons. An underground cave collapsed here 27,000 years ago. A sinkhole formed and an artesian warm spring made a slippery trap for wooly and Colombian mammoths. All 56 of the mammoths so far have been young males. Like elephants, mammoths are thought to have had matriarchal societies. These young, inexperienced boys died of starvation or exhaustion after the old girls kicked them out. They died in a trap that lasted about 700 years.


The mammoths died out when a clever little bipedal animal came over the Siberian land bridge and used stone lances to hunt them to extinction. Without people, the mammoths ranged North America for about 200 million years. My first SCUBA dive in 1964 was a search for mastodon and mammoth teeth in the muddy St. Marks river in Florida. The numerous Florida sinkholes lead to underground caverns full of mammoth bones. Flat feet are not ideal for climbing out of water hazards.



The Cave of The Winds National Park is more interesting above ground than below. The park supports a number of pronghorn antelope, buffalo and prairie dogs. The combination of prarie grass and forest is lovely.






The Cave of the Winds has an interesting and unique feature called "boxworks". 95% of the known boxworks in the world are in this cave. Boxworks have no known economic value. So far these caves have 128.47 miles of explored features. There are none of the usual stalagmites, stalagtites or soda straws...only these strange and fragile boxlike features...A young boy named Kyle finds a snake in the grass outside the cave entrance...the natural entrance sucks in or discharges air depending on the air pressure changes that occur outside...The Winds blow in the entrance..a young man named MacDonald explored miles of the cave in the late 1800s with candles and string. This site was named as the 8th National Park by President Theodore Roosevelt...it was thought to be an ideal area for the nearly extinct buffalo to recover.

What Have You Accomplished?

Custer, South Dakota

Sixty years ago the Crazy Horse carving was begun in 1948 by sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski. When finished it will be the largest sculpture in the world, 641 feet wide and 563 feet high. It will be taller than the pyramids and much more enduring, carved as it is from the hardest granite in North America. By comparison, the carvings on nearby Mt. Rushmore would fit into Crazy Horse's head.


The memorial was commissioned by some of the same elderly Oglala Lakota chiefs that rode with Crazy Horse against Custer. Korczak arrived nearly broke and initially lived in a tent nearby. He built 758 steps up the mountain and began removing 80 million tons of granite with a jackhammer and dy
namite. The statue is about 5% complete after sixty years. There is no fixed timetable for completion.


Korczak acquired a used 4,000 pound "Buda" air compressor and ran lines up the mountain to power his jackhammer. The Buda was cranky. One day he climbed down the 758 steps nine times to restart the hand-crank engine. Korczak died in 1982, before even the head fully emerged from the mountain. He left behind a wife and ten children to carry on his work.


This memorial is really for Chief Crazy Horse, not Korczak. Crazy Horse was bayoneted in the back by an American soldier while under a flag of truce. It was one of those "he won the battle and lost the war" stories.


Korczak was fanatic about free enterprise. He turned down several offers of $10 million or more of government assistance, preferring to fund the project from private donations and admission to a visitor center.

It's cold here this year. The temperature gets up to about 52 F. We're staying another day to see the Cave of the Winds National Park, some in situ mammoth skulls down in Hot Springs and maybe the Agate Fossil National Monument in northeast Nebraska. I never even knew we had a National Monument for agate fossils.


There is a lot to see in the Crazy Horse visitor center. They have a fine collection of native art and many photographs, sculptures and paintings.


In nearby Custer State Park we find buffalo and mountain goats. The goats are not native to the area. Six of them were imported in 1924. By 1928, they had all escaped and now there is a herd of about 400 goats living in the "Black Hills". They call it the Black Hills because the predominate tree, the Ponderosa Pine, has a needle with a flat side that doesn't reflect much light. It makes this ancient 150 mile long mountain range appear black from a distance.


We want to see Deadwood and Sturgis before we continue. Deadwood is where Wild Bill Hickok was assassinated. Sturgis is the site of the big motorcycle rally. Somewhere around here is a field called Little Bighorn.

In the Corner of Some Foreign Field

Winnipeg, Manitoba – June 19, 2007

One good thing about Winnipeg is the free parking for visitors. We walk though a park near the railroad station and over the bridge to the French Quarter, the community of St. Boniface. We learn that four Gray Nuns made a long canoe trip from Montreal to settle here in the early 1800s.

The bridge between St. Boniface and Winnipeg was deliberately severed in 1905, which hints at trouble between the two communities. Now all the traffic signs are unfailingly in both French and English, so relations seem to have been repaired.

We have a fine lunch buffet on at revolving restaurant on the 31st floor of a hotel. I take a three hour nap afterward. The campground is ten miles from downtown in the middle of a newly planted, vast, flat field. The sky changes frequently with rainbows, hot air balloons, thunderclouds, sun and lightning bolts. It’s pleasantly cool at night, about 10 C.

We grill the wild Alaska Sockeye Salmon for dinner. There’s enough left for a salad tomorrow.

Wynard Provincial Park, Saskatchewan – June 20, 2007

We made about 400 miles today. It’s still 410 to Edmonton, Alberta. The two lane road is empty and smooth. The view is mostly of huge agricultural fields, farm equipment dealers and huge silos and granaries.

The Dakota plains, 300 miles south, has similar views so this should not be a surprise. Dinner is breaded fried catfish. I try to buy an $8 bottle of wine, but it’s $15 during LB Hours and $21 after that. Liquor Board hours, I learn, end at 6 PM. We settle for a cheaper bottle of California Red.

No one in town has a non-citizen fishing license. If they had one though, it would be $39.76 for a three-day non-citizen license. We consider diverting North to the Prince Albert National Park. After discussion, we decide to press on to Skagway.

Elk Island National Park, Alberta – June 21, 2007

There are hundreds of buffalo wandering about. We also see a wolf on the side of the road. We have internet and look for tennis courts in nearby Edmonton. We find ten and decide to spend a couple of days playing tennis. Here are some buffalo.

Edmonton has the world’s largest shopping mall, complete with indoor waterslides.


Our mail is on the way to Skagway, Alaska. Here are some more buffalo pictures. Skagway has a population of 962.

The beginning of the Alcan Highway, at Dawson Creek, is another 400 miles.