Journal, July
Well, that was certainly unpleasant. I hope everyone will forgive that.
It feels good to be out of Dallas, away from scheming relatives. We drive for two full days to get to Summersville, West Virginia, which is near the Friar's Hole cave system. Then out into the countryside.
We are going to be meeting our friends Rob and Holly, but also several members of the Toronto Caving Group, including Nina, who caved with us in New York. The only members to have arrived when we get to the camp is John and his daughter Stacy. John is a very experienced caver who has no noticeable skill with horizontal caving. We went on a trip with him once, and he got himself lost and had to shout for Lori to come rescue him. Then he tried to find the exit, arguing with all of us that it was to the West, which was correct, but he was pointing east. But what does a compass know? We followed his lead, and...didn't find the exit. A pair of Brits who were accompanying us said, "Has this guy ever been in a cave before?" And they left the group as soon as was feasible. I should have gone with them.
Despite having humiliated himself in this way, John continues to talk down to us. He makes fun of our big tent, but doesn't seem to grasp--even when we tell him--that this is our apartment. But he also makes fun of little apartmennts. Big tents are bad, little apartments are bad. What about big mouths and little brains?
On the morning of the 20th, the trip leader decides that we will do Toothpick cave, which has a short, dry vertical section, which would be good practice for those of us with little vertical experience. We all agree that that sounds fine, and then he tells us that he isn't comfortable taking those of us with little vertical skill.
No wait. That doesn't make sense.
But that is what happened. Rob and Holly, Lori and I set up a rope to do some vertical practice on our own, and makes some notes about who we want to be caving with.
This morning we're invited to do Friar's Hole, which has only two short vertical pits, less than thirty meters each. But we aren't falling for that. Especially since we've got instructions to Buckeye cave, which comes highely recommended.
Buckeye Cave is mostly walking stream passage, with a high ceiling and lots of decorations. It may be my favourite cave now. The only thing like a difficult passage in the main trunk is the Near Siphon, which is thirty feet of careful stooping. If you are careful enough, you can avoid getting your upper body soaked, which is a good thing. Wet upper bodies get hypothermia much more readily than dry upper bodies.
We are joined on this adventure by Greg and Valeria, two more Ontario cavers. Enjoyable caving, though not very demanding. Afterwards, Greg takes us to Beartown State park, which features a boardwalk through a sort of natural maze. Good choice, Greg.
I also saw a black bear cross the road about 100ft from our campsite. He wasn't interested in us at all, and kept moving at a good clip.
We drive further south, and link up with Nina and Richard, some of Greg's friends, and do the Scott's Hollow cave. Scott's Hollow is a massive cave, which begins with a long, rapid descent through breakdown, down to a large river passage. At one part of the passage, there is an amazing double waterfall, of which I have no pictures, because the batteries on my camera were dead. Nina has been in the cave many times before, and is a great guide. It is a beautiful cave, and more strenuous than Buckeye, so we feel more like we've been caving.
Now we get to do some climbing in the New River Gorge!
Or at least, we would get to do some climbing, if it weren't raining enough to give Noah a sense of deja vu. Climbing in the rain isn't particularly dangerous, you just don't get very far, because the holds are too wet to grip.
So we drove around southern W.Va in the rain, and ended up in the same place we started out.
Because it is still wet, we go to Sharps Cave. This cave is large, and is mostly breakdown passage (passage covered with large boulders that have fallen from the ceiling as the cave was formed). The boulders are covered in a thin layer of slick clay, which makes the going a little tiring.
Now we get to do some climbing. We set up a 5.5, which should have been pretty simple, but it is still wet, and so ends up being very challenging. We also set up a 5.9 in a crack called Jaws. This should have been a good deal more difficult, and was.
More Climbing in the New River Gorge. There is a class which has taken over all of the lower grade climbs, so we set up on a 5.8 called , which runs up a crack and has a large overhang to maneuver. Things are still wet, so none of us were able to make it to the top, but it is a very fun climb.
Rob and Holly now have to go back to Toronto, and it is time for us to head West. We hope to stop in our friends in Colombus for a free night, but had forgotten that they are in Japan. Oh, well.
More driving. We had purchased the new Harry Potter book on the way to W.Va, and have been reading it to each other. But we finish it on the way. If you haven't read it yet, and you're wonndering who it is that died, well, I'm sorry to say, it's Hermione. I know that will come as a great shock, but wasn't she kind of getting on your nerves anyway? It is also revealed that Snape is really Harry's father.
We spend the night in a campsite in Wisconsin, with only one other family in the entire park. There is a family of woodcocks sharing our site, and in addition to mosquitoes, ticks, and chiggers. On a hike near our campsite, we saw a Painted Turtle depositing eggs into a nest.
A Barred Owl visited us in the night. At first I didn't mind his hooting, because owls are cool, but after a couple of hours, I was ready for him to shut the hell up. At dawn a Pileated Woodpecker, another cool bird, came by and started working on the nearby trees. It just goes to show that the coolest of birds can be really freaking annoying when you're trying to sleep.
By now I think I've lost track of a couple of days, but I assure you I haven't left off anything important, except for rescuing a massive snapping turtle and seeing a beautiful male Hooded Warbler.
Oh, wait. There was something amusing. On the way around the Gary-Chicago bend, we started looking for a grocery store. We didn't find one until the far side of the sprawl, and this was nestled into a strip mall of high-end recreational shopping. About 75% of the cars were either Lexi, Infinitis, Mercedeses or BMWs. Strips malls of the rich and famous. If you removed the grocery store, there was not one item for sale that anyone actually needs.
By then we were so hungry that we bought a whole roasted chicken from the deli and devoured it in the parking lot like a couple of savages (or 'differently civilised' as they are now called). I thought we might scandalise the rich snobs around us (or 'differently impoverished' as they should be called), but then I remembered from my days serving coffee to their kind that they are too self-absorbed to notice what other people are doing around them. We could have been giving birth and they would not have been troubled.).
We are now visiting Lori's grandmother in Rochester, Minnesota. She is 94 years old, and lives in a retirement home.
Retirement homes have a reputation of being pretty depressing places, and I'm sure many of them are. But this one isn't. The pace is rather slow, but the residents are mostly well-off and in good health for their age. By and large, these are interesting people. They've travelled, they've read books.
Okay, didn't I just make snide comments about wealthy people, and then turn around and enjoy their company? Well, sort of. But there is a huge difference between the people in this retirement home and the sort of people who buy Lincoln Navigators. I don't know where along the line the value of being courteous and considerate got tossed into the dumpster, but I'm guessing it was the baby-boomers. Why the baby boomers are the spoiled single children of American History is open to debate. To their credit, they are very tolerant of people just like them, and of cultural differences that make for quaint restaurants and fashions. No one can take that away from them.
To change the subject, there is a marked difference between Wisconsin-Minnesota and the more easterly states we've visted. Here at the Mississippi's source, you are far less likely to see bumper stickers, confrontational religious grafitti, and jingoistic patriotic parephenalia attached to cars.
Why is that? I have no idea. Most of the people I talked to in these states seemed just as pious and loyal, but they are quieter about it. My first guess was that the Civil War was still affecting Southern culture. They went to war to protect a vile institution and got their assess whupped. You can see that they might have a chip on their shoulder. But this hypothesis doesn't work, because you'll see just as much bumper-sticker religion and ideology in Pennsylvania and Illinois.
We drove up to Minnesota's North Shore, which is beautiful country. Even the town of Duluth is attactive from the highways. Our goal was to do some climbing in Tettagouche state park, which has lovely basalt cliffs.
Unfortunately, the only way you can climb them is to rappel down to near the water's edge and then climb back up. The parks didn't have a guide book for the routes, so you had to just hope that you were good enough to make it back up. If you couldn't, you had to go into Lake Superiour for a cold swim to some place you could walk up.
That is a bit above our level. The cliffs did look like really fun climbing, though.
We drive across Minnesota down the Estern edge of North Dakota, into South Dakota. Almost as soon as you cross the border into South Dakota, you notice that it is different from its northernly neighbour. It has changes of elevation! At the North-East corner, these changes aren't much, but after a few hours across the Euclidian flatlands of N.D., it is appreciable.
We camp in a state park and spend the evening feeding the mosquitos.
Did you know that there are pelicans in South Dakota? We didn't either, but there are lots of them, grand white birds floating in the small lakes and ponds.
We visit a wildlife refuge to look at the birds, then head West. We stop to do some solo climbing at the Palisades (5.0 to 5.2, nothing too dangerous). It seems so long sense we've done any climbing that I wasn't even sure which direction to go (up, isn't it?).
And then the Corn Palace.
We visited the Corn Palace when I was nine years old, and I was impressed. It has all these murals made of different coloured corn on the cob. Each year they pick a theme and create new murals based on the theme. To quote Dave Barry, "It eloquently expresses the concept, 'We are going out of our minds up here'."
Surrounding the Palace is a rampart of souvenir and related trinket stores, many relating to the inexplicable rivalry between Ford and Chevy owners. To me, it seems like prefering measles too small pox. There are a lot of Amish-looking people gathered at the Palace and satellite junk stores. Isn't that kind of against their whole ethos?
We are now in a rather barren part of South Dakota, and the camping is pretty much grassy parking lots for RVs. We opt instead for a cheap hotel. For the first night since we left West Virginia, it doesn't rain.
On the same childhood trip that I visited the Corn Palace, I also visited the Badlands. I remember being quite impressed with the Badlands, and I was still impressed. You can keep the Corn Palace, if I can have the Badlands. It is barren and stark and forbidding and beautiful.
Our next stop is the Black Hills National Forest, which is host to the Mount Rushmore Monument, which as I desparately wanted to see as a kid, and when I finally did see it, I felt like I must be missing something. It looks exactly like the pictures, only bigger. It was a huge project, and required a lot of skill and perseverence. There's nothing like it in the world, to my knowledge. Which is fine.
Driving through the Black Hills on narrow switch backs and one-lane bridges and tunnels, we are slammed by a hailstorm, which makes for interesting driving. Ghost Girl weathers it without protest.
We camp in Custer State Park. Down here, they don't see Custer in the bad light that they do in the rest of the country. I'm not sure why that is, but every place takes their history pretty seriously, I suppose.
Imagine if Joshua Tree National Park were covered in Ponderosa forests instead of Joshua Tree deserts, and you have a pretty good idea of Custer State Park. It is filled with granite boulders and spires, and you are allowed to climb anywhere you like. They claim to have some bolted routes, but don't let them fool you. They are only partial bolted, and there are no anchors at the top.
Still, it is good climbing, if a little scary. When you see granite in most places, it is polished and smooth. In the wild, it is very rough, and you end up leaving some of your skin on each climb. It gives you good motivation not to fall, however. A good scrape down the side of one of these would make those childhood bicycle wipe-outs seem pretty tame.
And falling isn't unlikely, because one difference between the Black Hills and Joshua Tree is moisture. In the Black Hills in the winter, moisture seeps into the cracks in the granite and freezes, expanding. This makes holds a little crumbly. I left serveral inches of my belly on one route, inches I'd planned on keeping for awhile.
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| "Got anything to eat?" |
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Also in the park are herds of Bison, Pronghorn Antelope, Elk, and Mountain Goats. We never got to see the latter two, but we saw the others enough to get jaded. Yeah, yeah, Bison. The park also has a huge prairie dog town, which Lori and I have a fondness for because of the prairie dog that lived with us for a while. They also have "wild" burros. Wild is perhaps too strong a word for them, but certainly pushy fits.
Speaking of wild, we take a wild tour of nearby Wind Cave. It isn't the same as real caving, but it is close. Wind Cave is very interesting, because it is incredibly complex: over two hundred miles of passage crisscrossing a surface area of little over one square mile. There are a lot of geological puzzles about it that they haven't worked out.
Our last night in South Dakota, we had the campground pretty much to ourselves. Until...The RV from Hell. The RV from Hell had maybe a dozen campsites to chose from, but it wanted to be right next to us. It parked, and out jumped Ramsey, Lindsey, Cathy, Avery and one other. How did we know there names? Because for the next five hours, they sulked, whined and bickered so loudly that we learned their names, favourite colours, etc. Lori and I had to raise our voices to talk to each other. The best part was the incriminations of cheating at the Bible game, and the bitter verbal sniping that followed. The parents had four stages of disciplinary methods. When one didn't work (and it rarely did), they proceeded to the next one.
To the owners of that massive Four Winds RV from Hell I have only one thing to say: I have never been more glad to have had a vasectomy than after listening to your kids all evening.
Actual signs seen in South Dakota...no, this would be shooting fish in a barrel. Highway 90 is a major tourist route of the old-timey sort, and it has the mildly pathetic tone of out-of-date hokiness.
However, I sometimes just cannot believe what people will wear written on their shorts right across their butts. Listen, people, when you have words printed on your ass, the words are associated with your ass, and that can alter the meaning. I saw an early adolescent girl with an ass labelled Sweet Thing and an early adolescent boy with an ass labelled Slam Dunk. Parents, what are you thinking?
We break camp and o out to Jewel Cave national monument, where we go on a walking tour of the cave, which is like caving without all the fun. Nice cave, boring tour. Staying on the path is not what caves are for.
Then we leave South Dakota, a little sadly. S.D. is a great place.
We camp in Big Horn National Forest, Wyoming, sharing our campground with a huge bull moose. That was a little unnerving, because they are very large animals with very large antlers, and who knows what they'll get up to? But it was still great seeing one up so close.
Next stop, Yellowstone National Park.
I took a trip to Yellowstone as a teenager, and thought it was one of the coolest places on Earth. This time, I'm dreading fighting the crowds. But even thought it is crowded, the people are generally polite and not in the way.
Registering for a campground is like buying tickets to a Rolling Stones concert. When we finally got up to the marquis, there was only one campsite left, in the group camping (read: loud camping) area. Yuck. The clerk suggested we try another campsite with a more laid back National Forest Service feel. We try it, it works.
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| This looks like a nice refreshing pool, but it is a geyser pool, and runs about 170 degrees Farhenheit. |
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