Day 3 (8/21), Pegasus Revealed

My morning started at 4AM, to the frightening sound of a mad man stomping toward my tent. There are always moments when camping, in which you fixate on certain sounds and scare yourself by thinking of the different things they can be (bigfoot, a bear, the Blair Witch, etc). Usually, when rational thinking takes over, you can say to yourself, "Oh, that's just a pine cone falling from a tree, not bigfoot throwing things at me." Or, there are other times, such as hearing sniffing sounds and faint growls, when you can say, "Shit, that could be a bear." Well, the mad man walking toward my tent was an example of the latter. The steps, obviously from a biped, could be heard in the distance, slowly getting louder and louder. Judging by the sound, I could tell that something was definitely walking in my direction...and with purpose, I might add. He finally reached the campsite. Not wanting to overreact (by jumping out of my tent and flashing a knife, for example) or wake the other three, I laid silently in my tent, hoping that the mad man would not do a jig on me or light my tent on fire (normal thoughts, right?). Luckily, the mad man had second thoughts and just continued walking through the campsite. The adrenaline rush from lurking mad men, coupled with another night of rain and a leaking tent, made it hard to fall back asleep.

At the first hint of daylight, I hopped out of my tent and walked to the showers. I could not wait, as my stinky butt-sweat (the result of sitting in a warm car for prolonged periods of time) was beginning to really gross me out. When I got to the restroom area, I had a hard time finding the showers. I looked all over, but with no results. How could this be? I thought this place had showers. After finally coming to grips with the prospect of not showering, I took a wash rag and went to town in the bathroom sink. When done, I dried up and patted myself down with baby powder (this is the only way to conquer the bum-sweat).

When I returned to camp, everybody was up and trying to air out their soggy tents. Nate confirmed that someone did indeed walk through the site in the middle of the night. However, when looking around, I realized that I had placed my tent right in the middle of a path that connected the main road to the other campsites (see what late-night arrivals to camp do), thus making the mad man not so mad.

After packing up the car (a morning routine that became quite annoying), we checked out the map and planned our route for the day. As we were already half a day behind, we decided we had to make it to Mt. Rushmore (and see it) by night fall. But first, we had to see what Yellowstone had to offer. Our first stop was the Mammoth Hot Springs. The springs, which are essentially a series of small vents for thermal activity under ground, sport streams of steaming/boiling water, terraced landscapes formed by the calcification of minerals, charred trees, and a god-awful smell of sulfur farts. The wooden walkway that leads you through the springs, let us see what is, basically, volcanic activity up close and personal. Aside from the smell, it was pretty cool.

As we drove through the park, we passed a series of thermal ponds, open meadows, and forested hills. Fresh off the disappointment of not finding a "real" bear in Glacier, we were intent on finding one in Yellowstone (Yogi or Booboo would have sufficed). This did not happen, though, as the buffalo and mule deer dominated the park. After taking a bunch of pictures of buffalo along the way, we had one more stop to make before leaving the park: Old Faithful. The most famous of all geysers, Old Faithful is another thermal vent like the hot springs. However, whereas the springs have no underground constriction (and are in a state of continual spew), geysers face some constriction beneath ground and, when the pressure builds, will spew at intervals. Old Faithful, surrounded by hundreds of onlookers, erupts about every 90 minutes. At its peak, the boiling water, heated from the magma below ground, rises to an average of 145 feet. After a minute and half, the spray subsided and the onlookers clapped and cheered. It was with some of these onlookers, that our travelling companion rooster, Pegasus (stolen from a friend's backyard), got some of his first exposure (photo opp) on the trip. Nobody could understand why we were carrying around a fake rooster, so we told the story of how we stole him from a friend and sought to take as many pictures of him as we travelled across the country. Highly amused, the cheering tourists just had to take a picture with him.

As time was ticking, and we had already seen the main attractions, it was time to leave Yellowstone and make our way to Mt. Rushmore. The drive to South Dakota was long and hot (more bum sweat). We drove through Big Horn National Forest, as well as a bunch of small towns in central and eastern Wyoming. To keep ourselves entertained, we played "BOMB." The objective in BOMB is to tout your movie knowledge. The first person says a movie, with the next naming an actor from that movie, followed by the next person who must then say a another movie with that actor. The first person to get stumped, without repeating any actors or movies, earns a letter. The first person to spell "BOMB" loses. This only kept us entertained for little while.

When BOMB lost its appeal, the Canadian Club Whiskey took its place...or at least for Nate and Maggie, who went to town on the bottle while Stacey pretended she wasn't falling asleep at the wheel, and I stayed awake and sober out of concern that I might have to drive. As was customary for our trip thus far, we didn't even cross the border into South Dakota until after sundown. We realized that we were again going to miss our target by quite a few hours. So, this meant that Mt. Rushmore would have to wait until the next morning. Our priority now was to find a camping spot. Lucky for us, Stacey, while falling asleep and screeching around the twisty, Black Hills roads, stumbled across "North America's best campground, hands down." So says the Jewish man from Chicago who offered to shine his car's headlights on our site while we set up camp. This dude was solid. Not only did he offer to brighten our campground, but he donated hot embers from his fire so we could get one of our own going. He was wrong about one thing, though: no way could this place be mistaken for "America's best campground." The Game Lodge campground wasn't a dump by any means. However, the expansive lawns with paved roads cutting through them, as well as the abundance of RVs and lack of space, did not make for a very outdoorsy experience.

The Game Lodge did have showers, though. So as we pitched our tents, we could not have been happier with our campground. In no time, our tents were up and we were finishing the bottle of whiskey, along with the warm beers that had sat in front of the car's sun-beaten, back window all day. As we sat around the campfire, Maggie asked us to tell her stories about ghosts and some our most shameful tales from growing up. At the end of the night, we were grateful for two things. First, we knew we could look forward to showers in the morning. Second, there were no clouds in the sky, nor any rain in the forecast. We had our first clear sky of the trip. It was so nice out, Maggie and I decided to sleep outside of our tents. By far, that was the best sleep that I had had on the first three days of the trip.