Posts

Journal entries from the road, and lesson logs from the table — newest first.

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  2026-10-01 They sold the barracks for a dollar apiece

  The barracks at Heart Mountain were auctioned off to homesteaders after the war. The camp held more than 14,000 Japanese Americans and left behind three hospital buildings and a chimney you can see from the highway.

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  2026-09-17 We lost them for thirty minutes off Fossil Exhibit Trail

  Big and Little went off the boardwalk into the formations at Badlands and were gone about half an hour. We got them back with many hoots.

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  2026-09-15 Second in line at 7:05

  We got underground at Wind Cave because we sat on the visitor center concrete for fifty-five minutes. The couple ahead of us was leaving the Black Hills that afternoon.

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  2026-09-12 Three rocks off Thunderhead Mountain

  You can pick up rocks at Crazy Horse Memorial, so Big and Little took three, and one of them is going in the mail.

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  2026-09-09 The bison had the trail before we did

  A herd was grazing on Buckhorn Trail half a mile in, so we turned around. The rest of the day, in the North Unit and down in Medora, followed from that.

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  2026-09-01 All of recorded history fits under a fingernail

  The dig we picked started eight miles down an unpaved road, so we drove to Fossil Butte instead. Along the fence there, every nine inches is a million years, and everything anybody ever wrote down fits in a gap you can barely get a fingernail into.

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  2026-08-30 The oldest cinder cones are the ones with trees on them

  We drove west from Idaho Falls past Atomic City, walked out to the tree molds, and climbed the loose cinder of Inferno Cone. From the top you can sort the cones by how much has grown back on them.

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  2026-08-27 Four days under the Tetons and we never went up

  We spent four days at the foot of a range that starts without foothills and stayed on the valley floor the whole time. A boat across the bottom of the wall, a rocky beach, a man selling flutes, and a moose in the willows.

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  2026-08-25 A hawk took a pika in front of the cabins

  A hawk we could not name killed a pika in the rocks outside the Roosevelt dining hall. Big and Little went out after dinner and stacked sticks where it happened.

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  2026-08-16 The mountain stayed in the cloud

  Two days of rain on the west side of Glacier, a whiteout at the top of Going-to-the-Sun Road, and then a third day that gave up a grizzly, a bald eagle, a moose, and twelve miles of broken road in to Many Glacier.

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  2026-07-26 The morning the eagle had breakfast

  A week around the Olympic loop on US 101: lavender in Sequim, a crab boil at Lake Crescent, an eagle hunting off a Makah beach, and a six-mile walk up the Hoh to look for one square inch of silence.

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  2026-07-06 We got up early for the Skyline Trail

  A full park on Sunday, an early start on Monday, marmots and mountain goats on the Skyline Trail, and momos in Ashford served by a man who has climbed the mountain dozens of times.

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  2026-07-04 The mountain came out over the Elbe train

  Fog on the drive up from St. Helens country, a clear sighting of Rainier from the open-air car, peaches like water balloons, and a firework barge going together on Mineral Lake.

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  2026-06-27 Our first big adventures: the South loop

  Eighteen days from Portland south to Lassen, Lava Beds, and Crater Lake, then back through Bend, and an air conditioner with its own ideas about when to run.

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  2026-06-23 A small Crater Lake on the beach at Diamond Lake

  A day off the rim: shallow water, a sandcastle version of the lake next door, and the drive back to camp in the long Cascade light.

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  2026-05-16 Odometer math

  Estimating arrival times, average speeds, and fuel range, using the dashboard as a worksheet.