June 30, Spearfish to Shell, WY

Left Spearfish around 9:45 a.m., later than we kinda wanted, but we also knew we had a short-ish day ahead of us. Next stop was Shell, Wyoming, which is up and over the Bighorn mountain range.

I took the first shift of driving, because I kinda suck at real mountain driving, up and down the twisty, one-lane highways. So I got to drive for about 4 hours on I-90 west across what was left of South Dakota and into Wyoming. The hills got taller, and taller, and still taller. Hills and valleys, and obnoxiously-red rock trending into fluorescent orange. Tiny cows and tiny horses and the occasional antelope on the prairies. So tiny because they were so far away and the hills we saw them from were hundreds (?) of feet up from them.

 

Can’t remember exactly where, but at the top of one of those rises, I saw something that looked like a weird cloud formation. But it wasn’t. It was The Mountains. Jim noted how excited I was to see The Mountains. Like my Mom, that time she said she “got ripped off” because she didn’t see any mountains for so long as we traveled out west. I couldn’t help but think of one of my favorite John Mayer songs, 3x5: “…skies are painted in the cowboy cliché/and strange, how clouds that look like mountains in the sky are next to mountains anyway…” and about how you just cannot capture how beautiful the mountains are, how lovely the scenery is, how the hot breeze feels, how the pines smell, in a measly little camera frame. Jim can’t stop commenting how it reminds him of his Idaho home.

 

Stopped for lunch at a hot-as-Hades little rest area off the highway. We got there on the early side of noon, and it was a good thing, because everyone else traveling along that way had the same idea. I whipped up a quick lunch for us, which we ate in the trailer, even though it was a little toasty. A cute little T@B (a super small car-towable trailer) had parked just in front of us by the time we were done, so I had to back it up a little to avoid driving into them. I wasn’t fussed about it, which was nice.

 

Somewhere in Sheridan we stopped for gas and Jim took over the driving. Thank goodness. Because then, sh*t got real. That kind of mountain driving I am not good at. At least not experienced in doing. He IS good at it, and loves doing it. And it’s a good thing, because this was 7 miles at a stretch of Due Up with little respite in between climbs. Just looking up to see where the road might be, I’m thinking, yeah, this is ridiculous and scary, and he’s just curious and happy about it all. Anyway, the road went ever on and up and on and up, until we finally hit the summit. And then there was like this big flat plain up there. You’d think a mountain is a pointy thing, up one side and down the other. But no. Not sure how long we were on that plain. Even stopped at a visitor’s center on top of the mountain, walked with the dogs near these cool twin buttes.

 

Then came the downhill. Holy rollercoaster. It was so steep in some places that I was really glad we’d come up the other side of those mountains. The curves on the climb up were rated at 30-35 mph, but the ones going downhill were often 20 mph. Happy to know that first and second gear are enough to hold us and this overloaded trailer back from utter demise. And then came the falls, Shell Creek falls? SO dramatic. This giant canyon opens up and this little creek is hauling boogie through it and over 300 feet of old rock, down into the skinniest, un-navigable crick I’ve ever seen. Scary as heck to go down the stairs to the overlook to take a peek at what’s there. Lizard brain says NO as you approach the chain link fence and the suspension bridge thing from one side of the platform to the other to get the better view. I was glad we’d left the dogs in the car for this one. There were other dogs in the area, plus Lili would not have enjoyed the height or the noise of the falls.

 

An aside: I cannot recall whether I’ve ever been through this pass. I went to Yellowstone/Glacier with my folks at least a couple of times, but I have no idea whether we ever came this way. I will curse myself for a long time if I came this way and didn’t enjoy it as much as I did today.

 

After the falls, we were treated to Elephant Rock and yet more colorful rock, and crazy layers of rock going in different directions, and signs that told us how old the rock was, as we descended (a lot) through this canyon, finally to the bottom of it, where we were on the level with the creek. Not long after that we were here in Shell, which is a shell of a town. Everyone seems to have chickens, probably the only way to get eggs around here.

 

It rained briefly, which was a blessing in this heat. We had a double and sometimes triple rainbow going in the storm. Lili was not impressed. It was in the 90s when we got here, and the AC couldn’t quite keep up. We are SO grateful for the new vents we installed just before we left, the air-blasting erPods (a trademarkable name of ‘air pods,' but for Airstream vents rather than in-ear entertainment. They are fiendishly expensive made-in-America replacements for the laughable units our RV came with). Our fridge is resting now at 50 degrees (we only know this because the digital thermometer I tried to bring ended up in the cooler, got wet, and then got packed in rice yesterday when we found it, and it’s miraculously working again). We had a no-cook dinner of chickpeas and tuna and our new favorite lime-garlic-olive oil dressing, with celery and green onions and parsley and whatever else we could throw at it, with bread and crackers. I am loving our vodka tonics right now, and the fact that the sun has dramatically set behind the clouds. I sent Jim out to take a photo, since he had the better camera and the ability to use exposure compensation (I’m not great with it; I know it should be used but can never remember which way to dial it when staring at the sun).

 

Last thing to note is the differences among the campgrounds we have seen so far. First night was a local park, paid up, pull in, no host or nothin’. The sign didn’t even indicate that it was our site for the night, though the dates were wrong on the hung sign so we were not worried. Gorgeous scenery with the dam flowing like a beast. Spearfish was so different – so large, crammed in close to one another, kids and dogs and ATVs everywhere, but it felt like a community. Plus the lovely hospitality and concierge services of Lanna. And the pool did not suck. Laundry and clean bathrooms. This campsite at Shell is “self-service” – pull in, get your paperwork and pretend wifi password and bathroom code. Follow a map that’s in the wrong direction for your electrical hookup on your trailer, then realize after twice round the park that we need to pull through the Other Way to get it right. Because DO NOT DRIVE ON THE GRASS. Which is fine. Also, do not drive into the fifth-wheel that’s in front of your campsite in order to pull in remotely straight. Ugh. Bathrooms are clean but on septic and they smell weird – best guess is that the showers also run into the septic and the fragrance flows back up into the restroom/shower area. Not perfect, but functional. Hard to know sight-unseen what we’re getting into on any particular night. But happy for a spot to park and chill the F out.

We will leave tomorrow by 8:30 a.m. (ha) to get to Cody to meet up with P & D & their son C. Then on to Yellowstone, God help us. God help us all indeed. (oh, calm down, I say now.)