Tuesday, September 26, 2017

The Wheel Fell Off, The Wheel Fell Off, The Wheel Fell Off!!!

Let me repeat that in case you don't understand complicated recreational vehicle physics.  The. Wheel. Fell. Off.



And here's the thing, when you only have two wheels and one decides to suddenly go rolling down a hillside, your cute, little, single axle Airstream immediately leans severely to one side and you screech to halt on the side of the road.  A windy, mountainous road with little to no shoulder and many, many miles from anyone willing to come to your assistance.

But let's back up, way up.  (Insert sound of cassette tape rewinding in your head, why tape you ask?  Because I'm old.)  If you had been following along with the blog you now realize that it has been a long while since I wrote anything and to be honest I'm writing this post from the comfort of my couch back in Austin and we have been home for a month.  It's taken me this long to go through the Kubler-Ross steps of acceptance and arrive at the realization that the Bambi is still sitting in Fresno, California awaiting repairs and who the hell knows when we will get it back.

I can't dwell on it forever though and I'll give you all the details in a much later post near the end of our trip which is when it happened, but for now I'm gonna try to focus on remembering how much fun we had until we had our near catastrophe or little mishap, you say potato, I say potahto.

Which brings me to where we left off:

Glacier National Park



I mean come on!  What's not to love, you've got your purple mountain majesties, your spacious skies and although I did not see any amber waves of grain there were waves of tourists in the parking lots so it's kinda the same.


That's bear grass and every few years it just explodes and boy did we get lucky because it was exploded all over the place.



Wanna know a secret to getting away from amber waves of tourists?  Get up early and then you can have the whole trail to yourself.  Not even that early really because even though the park was way crowded we had every trail to ourselves walking out each morning as long as we set out before 8:00 a.m.  Walking back, not so much.


It's a long way down that's why there's that handy steel cable to hang on to.  You can see this trail is pretty darn narrow narrow which is fine if you're the only one on it.  But get groups of fellow hikers bunched up here and there can be a bit of a mountain goat standoff to see who is willing to let go of their white-knuckled hold on that cable to walk on the side of the trail that leads to a death-drop.



We took the Highline Trail, probably the most popular in the park, for several miles and the views did not disappoint.  But, if you feel the need to twirl with outstretched arms while singing about hills being alive and such, don't unless you are holding on to a cable.  



Our only regret is that we did not go all the way to the historic Sperry Chalet which we learned later in our trip had burned down due to one of the many fires burning out west.

This was my absolute, most favorite hike in the park except possibly for the next hike we took.  The Grinnell Glacier Trail.


Unfortunately for Fred, but fortunately for me, we encountered this sign about halfway up the trail.


See that last line, in capital letters


And sure enough 3.5 miles ahead there was the snow warning do not cross sign.  You will notice that Fred is on the other side of it because after all it was just a warning a mere suggestion of a hazard if you will.


Right about here along this slippery section of the trail being doused by an icy waterfall is where I questioned my long ago decisions in the marital department.



Can you see what Fred is trying to take a photo of?  Way out there, look closer.


It's a moose, swimming across the middle of this lake.  Can't really identify him that well, without binoculars he's basically anonymoose.

Like I said this was my favorite hike except for the next one we took or maybe the one after that.


This icy, glaciery (it's a word look it up) trail runs right behind the visitor center and you slip slide your way up to a still, snow-melt lake


Along the way your likely to run into very tame mountain goats and


Very wild mountain goats


Back at the visitor center we learned of the devastating effects from the lack of qualified orthodontists in the backcountry

But my favorite, favorite hike was the one we took to Iceberg Lake.


Sure it's awe inspiring but the scenery did not inspire the same kind of awe I felt for the 3 dudes who stripped naked and jumped in while we were admiring the view.  



Fred and I declined the nude bathing option


On the way back we rounded a corner and......


Not sure if this is a grizzly bear or a black bear but he had really big teeth so I know he wasn't a gummy bear



Sometimes after a long hike you just have to reward yourself with a huckleberry margarita.

No visit to Glacier is complete without the early, early morning ritual of trying to get a campsite at first-come, first-served Many Glaciers Campground.  Here's how it works, first you drive to the campground so you can be told it's highly, highly unlikely you will get in, second, you curse and immediately begin strategizing determined as hell that you are in fact gonna get in there, third, and this is the most critical part, you get up way before dawn the next day and drag your butt back down there convinced you will be first in line only to be greeted by this:


Hard to tell but the line snakes around the corner, we were 10th in line of about 20 at 6:00 a.m.

But guess what, don't tell the Dalbey's they can't have something because, like ever other person there, that just makes us want it all the more.  The fourth part of the ritual is the most important:  if you get in, and you will if you get up way before the crack of dawn, always, always smugly walk by the line of anxious, bleary-eyed people waiting in their cars for a spot to open up and give yourselves a high-five and say really loud "Last spot, aha ha ha ha ha!."

Why go to all this trouble, I mean all of Glacier is beautiful so what's so special about Many Glaciers?  Well, first off it isn't the glaciers 'cause those are all melted but look at all the great wildlife  that makes up for that:














Last shot of Glacier but definitely not our last visit



Making a run for the border



How big was that moose we just saw Fred?

Glacier National Park shares a border with Waterton Lakes National Park on the Canadian side.  




Now, I don't want to say that Glacier is better than Waterton 'cause that's not really true.......well, yes actually I do want to say that.  Glacier is better, it's just more dramatic and Waterton has a town right in the middle of their park so it just has a completely different feel to it.  It's definitely beautiful, just tamer overall.  The focus here is primarily on the deep lake which we took a cruise on and a couple of leisurely drives and short hikes but if you have to chose one over the other pick Glacier.


I can't leave Waterton without a shout out to the place we camped at, Crooked Creek Springs Campground, because the owner was such a hoot.  He had mowed out a trail around a creek and as we zigzagged our way through we kept seeing these signs and as we got closer and closer we heard a loud gurgling and peering through the bushes we finally saw this:


The famous Crooked Creek Springs

The gurgling?  Just a pipe emptying into the creek.  Totally got us.

As we were preparing to leave, the campers next door asked us about our next stop and when we said Banff they knotted their foreheads and went "hmmmm, do you know about the fires?"  Um, no what fires?


Uh, oh.

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Santa Rosa and Taos, NM to Ridgeway, CO and Teton Canyon and Red Cliff, WY

So, here I sit in Vancouver, Canada over one month out of Austin getting ready to cross back into the States tomorrow and haven't so much as scribbled a note to myself about our adventures.  Why, you ask?  Well, for the entire month we have essentially been living like animals, the lower orders not the vertebrates, because we have had no appreciable access to wifi or the internet.

Suffice it to say we have dragged the Bambi through seven states and halfway across Canada at this point without anything more dramatic than Fred realizing he had not renewed the Grateful Dead channel on Sirius radio (for the briefest of moments the clouds did part and the angels did sing, for me anyway) and have had as much fun as two people of a certain age can have without purchasing tickets to an amusement park.

As with all our adventures, we drove from Austin to Santa Rosa, NM which is about as far as I will allow Fred to push it for one day.   Santa Rosa, if you didn't know, is a little town on old Route 66 that is a little worn, ok a lot worn, around the edges but it does have one great thing going for it.


Blue Hole

We always stop here, Fred always jumps in, immediately gets out and immediately remarks "Man, that's cold!", it's our thing.

The other place we always stop is Taos, New Mexico at a little trailer park that looks out on the distant Sangre de Cristo mountains.  It also looks out on the microbrew place right next door, each view has it appeal.


Makes you wonder why they stopped here on the great migration west, must have lost a wheel or lacked ambition one

I usually entertain myself by crafting assemblages of sticks and twigs and Fred usually entertains himself with the art of crafting brews.


About two days in Taos is all you really need especially if you have had your fill of New Mexican chili enchiladas and kokopelli flute playing merchandise shipped directly from China so off we headed to Ridgeway State Park in Colorado.


Ridgeway is near Ouray and it's always fun to go the hot springs pools there which are teeming with about 100 adorable, squealing, just-let-out-for-summer-vacation kids all of which I'm sure would consider peeing in a warm pool the height of bad manners.


Fred contemplating string theory or string beans hard to say with him


Dutch oven taters and sausage just in time because right after this gourmet meal was prepared...


Nope, that's not snow it's the weather phenomenon most likely to induce anxiety in any Airstreamers heart.........hail

Lucky for us it didn't last long and did not impede my eternal quest the next day to bring home the perfect rock.


Honestly, is that not one damn fine rock?


This one covered in lichens also stole my heart but I have learned that in Austin they simply roast to death in about a day

I think what Fred would like me to mention about Ridgeway is that it's the gateway to the San Juan mountains, that the hiking is beautiful and trails meander through grassland and pinyon/juniper forests, that there are 140 species of migratory and resident birds.  




 Dipper


Rare black swift nesting in a box canyon in Ouray

All those things are true, but what you really need to be aware of, and this will change your life if you are from the deep south, is that the local Wal-Mart sells boiled peanuts in a can.


Talk about angels singing

Teton Canyon and Red Cliff, Wyoming

Teton Canyon is a mere 500 miles from Ridgeway but since Fred has some deep seated desire to be a long-haul trucker distance between places pretty much is meaningless.  This is usually when I start to whine about these long drives with short stays but it is hard to complain about the views once we settle in.





Caliope hummingbird

Red Cliff, Wyoming


Sandhill Crane


Red-tailed Hawk (juvenile)



Oh sure, you have your spacious skies, your purple mountain majesties above the fruited plains but after a while what you really want is to ramp it up.  There are only so many times you can look up as you're trudging down a flower-filled valley with snow-covered mountains and exclaim "Wow, that's pretty" before you want to look up and exclaim "Holy Shit, this is amazing!".  

Which is what we did, because next up was one of those places - Glacier National Park.