Deep in the Earth, high in the sky and all that wet in between

This is what I should have been doing all along:

Local caffeination-station of the day: Bully Blends

Brew Deets: Boasts SD's only Fair-Trade Certified coffee roaster, roasting their own coffee daily

Distinctive Feature: They are also an all-day beer pub

City: Rapid City, SD

Distinctive Feature: They like the café/beer-pub combo. They also like putting statues of famous men in very engaging postures smack dab in the middle of every street corner.

Local Healthy Foodie Hoodie: Breadroot

Local Product Feature: Hope Hummus: Thai Coconut Curry from Boulder, CO - Completely incredibly, with spice but a sweet coconut sidenote

I think I will go back and edit some posts. Anyhow, carrying on.

If there were to be a particular geological feature to define the trip thus far, it would be rocks. I could wax some metaphorical explanation about heat and pressure and molding the landscape and eroding layers but really…its just that they have been everywhere. I mean, its not like its hard for rocks to be everywhere. Our particular activities have just reiterated how everywhere they really are. Plus, they are really damn cool (or I have just been temporarily possessed by our very spectacular and most recent ranger guide.)

So, of course now you want to know how damn cool they are, right? Right.

Up until now (blog-wise, not big time-scaley-wise) rocks have been building up and up and up. But the day we left the Badlands which bore all of their layers as markers of time, we ventured down, down down where the amazement of rock was in where it used to lie.

Now, I’m no spelunker but I have ventured into my fair share of caves. While the history of each cave’s exploration was different and I was in awe of my position deep within the earth each time, I naively thought the geology pretty much told the same stories. There were always stalagtites and stalagmites and boxy formations that were named after some mythical tomb or some large space that was named after something royal. So I imagined that I would simply be getting a refreshment course during our Wind Cave excursion.

 Luckily, my assumptions were kept to myself because I probably would have insulted our Ranger, Jerry. One of the first things explained to us was how unique each cave was. And wind cave was no different. It boasted over 130 miles of tunnels (projected to grow rapidly as they uncover 1-2 miles every year and believe they currently know only 5% of it), one of the most navigationally complex  systems on earth and a very unique feature. This feature is called Boxwork. To emphasize this complex geology around us, Jerry continuously reiterated that her explanations were very “elementary” and the Ionic physics of it all gets much more complicated. Essentially, boxwork was like the lines in between bricks if you were to remove the bricks themselves. Where most caves grow their formation by a slow dripping of water that calcifies the growing forms, boxwork actually formed before the cave itself. Billions of years ago the area was under tropical conditions and the Limestone that now makes up the cave was under lots of pressure. This forced the limestone to crack over time and calcite deposits in the minerals crystallized this complex line work in the cracks. Eventually, water rich in carbonic acid began to eat away at the limestone, forming cave tunnels while leaving the calcified lines. While boxwork does appear in other parts of the world, it is believed that Wind Cave is home to 95% of the rare formation.

Another impressive bit about the caves was its layering. I had never been in such a topsy turvy design. Jerry demonstrated a perfect replication of the map I had been ogling before the tour by holding up a tightly clumped wad of yarn. That’s was pretty much what it was. Three levels of clumpy yarn.

To get into the caves, we had the privilege of taking the 10-person capacity elevator which was put in in the 1930’s by the Civilian Conservation Corps. Mother and I later saw what a luxury this was when, after the tour, we went to take a look at the natural opening, first discovered by Natives before 1880 when they felt cold air that could breathe hats off of heads coming from a nearby hole. The way the wind blows is determined by the pressure outside. If it is high, the air is forced in, if it is low, the wind blows out of the cave. That day we had low pressure so we got to experience the same gust that was felt when the hole was first discovered. And this is where the first explorers decided to dive in:

You want me to go in where???

The first to own the land of Wind Cave was Jess McDonald in 1890. While Jesse was soon disappointed to learn that the Limestone-rich area had zero mining value, is son Alvin fell in love with cave exploring. During the tour, Jerry spoke about some of her own Surveying journeys and shared one particular one that she almost went on back in 2008 where a pile of candles and matches were discovered. The surveying team continued on that day to find more passages that led to an open “room” where Alvin had carved his name on the wall and dated it July 1873.

Even though Alvin had gotten pretty far into the cave’s depths, it was not until 1903 that Theodore Roosevelt signed a bill that made Wind Cave a national park, consequently making it the first protected cave as well. From there, the cave exploration quickly expanded and around the same time the elevators were put in, so was a neat cement flooring for tours. The CCC brought in the cement in rubber tire tubes on their backs…at 60lbs a load! Surprisingly enough, this proved to be the most effective way to go about the task up into current times. Only now the load size has reduced to 20lbs.

No tour is complete without doing the whole “This is what the early explorers experienced“ shpeel so before we made our final trek, Jerry sat us down on some long benches in the “Fairgrounds“ room. When the lights went off, total silence was requested to really experience the disorientation. Unfortunately, there were a lot of restless youngins on the tour that took the request as a challenge so that part was over with fast. But then Jerry lit a large candle in a tin and shone it around to recreate the first lighted conditions. As she turned it, the light hit a small dot on a far wall of the cave and she explained that those were “survey stations“. I found stations to be a funny word for such a small territory and imagined the explorers shrinking like “honey I shrunk the kids“ when they disappeared into the caves to do research. But really, those little pieces of reflective tape had huge responsibilities for long stretches of space. Each one was marked with a different number and mapped into the official database. When any surveyer wanted to figure out a route, they would look at a map and make note of each small twist and turn they had to make to hop from number to number. This actually made the idea of navigating such a place more fathomable to me but I still could never bring myself to venture into such compact spaces. With the average size passage of the system being 6x6”, many passages were much much smaller. Forget fear of heights or fear of dark or fear of monnsters or ghosts or crowds. Small spaces is number one on my list.

Back on the surface, there wasn’t much time to hang around (but mother did finally get to see her Bison and a passing view of the Crazy Horse Monument which I'd already ventured to a couple of times before)

She insisted on a picture even though I have
 dozens floating around.

Five hours away, my mom’s old Graduate School friend MarieElaine and her husband Joe were waiting for us. I had met the two of them in my travels a couple of years ago but mother had not seen MarieElaine in 35 years. We had hoped to have a chance to join them for dinner but not long into our drive, the big, unpredictable sky started to do its big unpredictable thing and moments later, we were in a torrential downpour. I was ecstatic and began leafing through the cloud book that my friend Thomas had gifted me, discovering that we were under a miles long stretch of Nimbostratus cloud.

Okay, I'm done being interested in your sky show.

My fascination continued to thrive as I tried to pick out what some of the more distinctive, earlier formations had been but eventually, we just found ourselves in a huge, depressing smog of grey and wet. Looking at the weather, it seemed we were traveling in perfect unison with the storm itself and as we pulled into Miles City, the rain pummeled down with us into low dips and side streets, actually forcing us to drive through small ponds in some areas. We remained in decent spirits but my fascination had long since faded, replaced with a bit of anxiety as our car sort of swayed in the growing winds.

Nevertheless, we arrived to hosts prepared to run out to use with rain jackets and umbrellas. We all curled up in chairs in the dining room with large glasses of wine and MarieElaine eagerly laid out platters of all the food they’d had for dinner, followed up with fruit and chocolates and a local rice pudding. It didn’t take much between the food and the wine for me to drift into a stupor and I said goodnight long before anyone else after realizing I was nodding dimwittedly at conversations I wasn’t actually following along. It was mother’s turn to visit anyhow.

After the sleepless night in the badlands, it wasn’t difficult to sleep the night through. But as always, I was up with the sun. Mother was up also early because we had a lot to get done. Our last destination was Glacier National Park and although it would be the place we intended to spend the longest amount of time, any accommodations for it had slipped through our fingers. After politely carrying on some conversation with Joe since he’d brought out breakfast and MarieElaine had already headed to work, we hopped online and began to trail down the list of lodges and cabins, trying to scour through the lavish prices to find something that would treat our (my mother’s) wallet well in addition to our selves. By the time we had settled on a place – a small cabin 8 miles south of the west entrance – we were well into late morning. Joe was soft-spoken and patient yet either out of an obligatory feeling or his social nature, seemed to continuously bring up conversation that would cause us to linger a few minutes more. Our mind had already been made up that we would not make it to the park that day but still I wanted to feel like we had made some headway. We still had at least another nine hours to go and if we weren’t going to get there that day, I wanted to be sure we’d have plenty of time the next day to begin our Glacier adventure.

We made it up to Bozeman in the early afternoon and stopped for lunch at their co-op. My experience of Bozeman a couple of years ago consisted of that same lunch stop followed by hours of wandering and sitting in various coffee shops before going stir-crazy from the sluggish indoctrination of city society and heading out of town, driving anywhere to stop for the night as long as it got me away from storefront windows. It isn’t that I am completely a non-city person. But they have their place and that particular trip was not it. I feared the same pull that would halt our progress but as we finished lunch, a sharp pain grabbed my stomach, leaving me rather impaired for decision making. Having stayed up to reminisce with MarieElaine the night before, mother had hit her first road-weary day and was equally complacent and hazy. We began to wander the streets at a zombie sort of pace. Mother had tried a few times to get a hold of her friend Lisa who was in town for grad school so I figured we could use that as a directional cue. If we didn’t hear back from her by the time we had finished walking and picked up some things at the co-op, then we would continue to drive.

Back at the Co-op, I was having difficulty finding much of what I needed. They were a lot sparser than I had remembered. Then as we were checking out, our cashier made mention of their main location down the road. We were completely dumbfounded. The building towered two stories, with local musicians in the lawn and a giant second floor patio, deli, café not to mention all of the temptations that were void at the downtown nook. Mother committed to wait in the car but when I emerged after what had to be nearly a half an hour, I found her eyeing the deli. How easily our lackluster moping fell away with a foodie discovery.

It wasn’t until we were on the road to Butte that we heard from Lisa. She happened to be on the road back from Butte after her weekly three-day stint at the State Hospital near town. We laughed through our amused weariness. The little excitement that we had shared together was just enough to lift us into a mobility of plowing forward, of doing what needs to be done. Even after cleaning out the car and fumbling through scrambled luggage, I ended up staying up for hours, writing into night. That point when you cross road weariness is the same point where you realize there has been more than just a two-hour time zone change. You are in travel time now.