Trekkin'

The beginning of our trek East was through no-man's land as we drove up to Casper, WY and saw close to one million Pronghorn along the way. Jealous? Thought so. Cuz, that's about all we saw while driving. Along the way we stopped to see Devil's Gate, WY which was pretty neat and they had a good little church station there and Independence Rock was right next door. That was a long day and luckily there was a little swim time after setting up camp. Then we were on further into the middle of nowhere to see Devil's Tower and we did a short hike around it, which was just over a mile I believe. It was way cool to see the 'potato mountain' that I learned about on "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". We learned about the main Indian legend regarding the unique rock formation and the science hypotheses behind it. Pretty sweet stuff. Another cool thing about Devil's Tower was that the campsite was super close to a large field which was Full of Prairie Dogs. I'd just been reading a book to the kids a few months back about Lewis and Clark and their discovery of Prairie Dogs so it was cool to see them in action. They are SO cute! There were also several deer to be seen when we went on a stroll there after dinner. We also saw the biggest, fattest, juiciest caterpillar in the world and were glad to catch sight of it before one of our shoes did. Seriously, I'll never forget how big it was. And it was beautifully colored. Awesome.

Well, then we were getting deeper into nowhere and saw Mt. Rushmore, which was way cool and they have an amazing museum there to learn about the idea and making of the faces. If you go I recommend the informational movie they have. I never knew the main guy in charge of the sculpture was a member of the LDS church, Gutzon Borglum. Way cool. Then we happened upon the 2nd longest cave in the world, Jewel Cave, SD. We went on a 1 1/2 hour cave tour and saw the longest piece of bacon ever. Like 26 feet long or something. Incredible! The picture above of little J squeezing through the concrete block is what you have to be able to get through to go on one of the more serious spelunking expeditions.

Well, as if we couldn't get further out of touch with civilization we went through Badlands. Man, they were BAD. Nothing but cute little prairie dogs, big horn sheep, Buffalo and fossils. We were lucky and caught a large majority of a ranger lesson about different fossils found in the area. We were glad not to become such, as we had plenty of water and didn't stick around terribly long. The large bison in the above picture was actually scratching his tummy on those wooden posts. So funny. Oh, and we were setting up camp in the dark there and got freaked out seeing a HUGE spider. I so do not like setting up camp in the dark. The rest of our journey, other than Ohio (below), is unfilmed cuz it was mostly driving and hanging out with friends in Iowa. We were happy both cars, all 5 of us and our stuff all made it safe and sound. Housing when we got here was a miracle and friends were most helpful. Yay for wonderful adventures!!