Buffalo Country

Part I- Yellowstone National Park

Yellowstone National Park, the country’s first national park, might also be the best. Nestled in the conflux of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming (thus defining ‘the absolute middle of nowhere’), Yellowstone National Park is situated within the ancient mouth of a supervolcano, a ticking timebomb that features prominently in the (formerly known as) History Channel’s oddball ‘2012’ mythology. While this long-dormant caldera hasn’t shown any signs of serious activity in the last 600,000 years, it’s very presence fuels the geothermal events that make Yellowstone so extraordinary.

Deep below Yellowstone, magma from the Earth’s mantle is pressing upwards, working its way through the rocks and superheating the water table. As the water temperature rises, so too does pressure. When the pressure is high enough, the superheated water will burst forth from the earth as a geyser. The same principles can be applied to something as small as a tea-kettle or as large as a steam locomotive.

More than half of the world’s geothermal sites are within Yellowstone National Park. That’s a pretty amazing claim, but if Wikipedia says it, it must be true! The most extraordinary example of this geothermal activity are the world famous geysers, such as Old Faithful, which sends a 100’ plume of water and vapor into the air every 91 minutes. Other geysers exist in the park; most smaller than Old Faithful and none of them as predictable. The park also contains other features, such as cauldrons (bubbling lakes), mudpots (boiling puddles) and fumaroles (holes in the ground with steam coming out). Some of these are full of mud, others have water stained red, blue, or green by minerals. Some make noise, like Dragon’s Mouth, a small cave-like structure that constantly belches out hot water, smoke, and gurgling growls.

Another unforgettable aspect of Yellowstone National Park were the travertine springs; massive, natural fountains made of hardened minerals that rise up above the surrounding landscape like great roman fountains. Other travertine springs bubble forth from hillsides, coating the slope in a layer of stone that looks like a natural staircase, slick with rain. Finally, some travertine springs rise up with no shape or structure, looking like little more than 15’ tall piles of fat and gristle (Is it too soon to make an Anna Nicole Smith liposuction joke?).

Yellowstone is famous for its bears, but we didn’t see any, only signs warning about their hunger. Interestingly, bears are not the most dangerous animal in Yellowstone; the buffalo injure/kill five times as many tourists each year as the bears. It’s time to step up your game, Yogi.

We saw Buffalo in force here, doing the things that buffalo love, such as standing, stomping, snorting, and chewing pensively. It’s hard to appreciate the size of a buffalo until you see one up close, and the buffalo of Yellowstone are more than happy to accommodate. They have little fear of cars or people, and don’t feel the need to clear the streets to allow cars to pass.

Yellowstone National Park was a great side-trek on our adventure, and I really wish we’d had just a little more time to relax and take in the scenery. Oh well, at least we’ve got pictures and memories!

Part II- Welcome to South Dakota

Do you know South Dakota’s state animal? The Buffalo, perhaps? The Coyote, maybe? The Wolf, or the Bear? No, no, no, and no (but close). It’s the Biker.

Every year, in the first week of August, up to 750,000 Bikers migrate to South Dakota to attend the Sturgis Rally. Although the core of the herd is composed of competent and skillful riders, the majority of the flocks of these magnificent beasts are inexperienced and foolhardy, falling off their bikes and mangling themselves in a vain attempt to impress females and old hands alike. Like buzzards circling above, ambulances from cities hours away wait for the inevitable. At the end of the week, up to 748,000 Bikers ride home to places as far as New Jersey, returning to their humdrum existence for another year. And although you may never read about this seasonal migration in the pages of National Geographic, we witnessed it firsthand.

There are 812,000 South Dakotans. The Sturgis Rally almost doubles the state’s population. Imagine trying to drive, well, anywhere, if the population suddenly and inexplicably doubled. It’s chaos, pure and unadulterated. Keep this in mind as you read our posts about South Dakota.

Part III- South Dakota’s Greatest (and only) Landmark

Mt. Rushmore is pretty much what one would expect: a huge mountain with the faces of four of the most influential US presidents carved into it. In person, I found it to be both smaller and more detailed than I had expected. Mt. Rushmore is art on the largest scale, a beautiful and uplifting tribute to our own American heritage. You can see it in all it’s splendor from the nearby roads: Iron Mountain Road approaches it dead on from the south, providing numerous vistas where the presidents are framed by tunnels and valleys in a truly awesome display of engineering and natural beauty. Needles Highway provides a much closer, more unobstructed view, less magnificent but more camera friendly, since its close enough for your 1.3 megapixel iphone to make out the details.

The racket operated at the foot of the mountain, on the other hand, is a total and utter disappointment- kind of like finding out Topher Grace was in Predator 3. You see, it turns out that Ted Stevens isn’t the only politician that can (could) divert funding and exploit loopholes- Mt. Rushmore’s admissions system is set up in such a way that your mandatory donation does not go to the National Park Service (that manages the site) but rather to an ‘organization’ that ‘oversees’ and ‘maintains’ the parking facilities. What a load of horseshit. To add insult to injury, there isn’t enough parking, thanks to the bikers, but you don’t find that out until after you shell out ten dollars, so instead, you sit in your car for 10 – 30 minutes until you can finally squeeze into a space. After parking, you walk for five minutes to see the exact same thing you can see from the road. Same exact angle, only about 100’ closer (still ½ mile away). There’s no trick, no magic, no bells nor whistles. You just wasted ten dollars and forty minutes to see what you saw on your way in.

Part IV- Even More Caves, Even More Buffalo

Today, we went to Wind Cave National Park and Custer State Park. I didn’t know that Wind Cave even a National Park until we planned this expedition, so I had my reservations going it.

The visitor center was small, and reminiscent of Howe Caverns. Not that Howe Caverns is a bad place, it’s just not what you’d expect from the National Park Service. We signed up for a cave tour and went outside to wait under a pavilion with about 50 other spelunkers-to-be. We were soon joined by our friendly and tomboyish guide, who introduced us to the site and began the tour. We also learned (the hard way) that there were a bunch of unsupervised high school brats on the tour, taking a quick break from nerd camp to enjoy the cave. Chief amongst them on the annoying scale was a loud know-it-all she-geek who insisted on speaking IN A VOICE THIS LOUD SO EVERYONE KNEW HOW SMART AND COOL SHE WAS. By the time we reached the natural entrance (1 minute later), I wanted to toss her in and be done with it. They asked questions like “how is it a natural park if there are buildings in it?”, repeated the tour guide word for word in attempts to out-nerd each other, and refused to shut the hell up when she was trying to speak. As the tour went on, she became decidedly less and less friendly; a sentiment I as a retired teacher can completely sympathize with.

Unfortunately, none of them suffered any catastrophic accidents, lending further evidence to the fact that I don’t have any psychic powers. However, by hanging back at the tail end of the group, we were able to put some distance between us and them and enjoy the natural splendor that surrounded us. Wind Cave is beautiful, entirely distinct from the other caves I’ve been in. It formed under dryer conditions, and thus lacks the familiar stalagmites, stalactites, flowstone, etc. of most other caves. Instead, Wind Cave has an exceedingly rare formation called boxwork- and it has a monopoly on it. 95% of all the boxwork in the world is found in Wind Cave.

Boxwork is made of narrow, delicate ribbons of calcite that hang from the ceiling an inch or two, and run relatively straight in crisscrossing patterns across the entire room. Boxwork forms when calcite hardens in the cracks of broken limestone. When the limestone dissolves, all that remains is the calcite, a negative-image of the cracks that one permeated the stone. Another way to think of it is like this: Imagine that you build a brick wall. As you build it, you fill the cracks between bricks in with mortar. If you then sprayed the wall with an acid that dissolved only the bricks, you would be left with a crisscrossing pattern of mortar- essentially, boxwork.

The tour was pretty short, and we quickly elbowed our way into the elevator to get away from the nerd herd. We adjusted to the 50˚ temperature jump and continued on our way to Custer State Park.

"Hurrah boys, we've got them! We'll finish them up and then go home to our station."

The famous last words of Lt. Colonel G.A. Custer, the disastrously aggressive commander of the US 7^th Cavalry, before splitting his forces into a ‘Hammer and Anvil’ attack routine and attacking an encampment of Lakota, Arapahoe, and Cheyenne in a vainglorious bid to evict them from the gold-rich Black Hills of Dakota. It went down like this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Custer.gif.

Since these were his last words, and since you, dear reader, have the internet and therefore do not live under a rock, I don’t need to tell you that Custer didn’t survive to go back to his station. At least he got a state park named after himself for the Indians efforts.

The Indians are gone, but Custer State Park is home to a huge herd of buffalo- about 1500 individuals. They make the buffalo of Yellowstone look positively modest in comparison, as they have no fear of people or cars whatsoever. They stand near and in the road, and even look both ways before crossing the street. However, they don’t always make it completely across, and tend to stop in the middle of the road, blocking traffic and posing for pictures until a ranger comes by and chases them off. Being within touching (goring) distance of such enormous animals is a pretty amazing experience, making Custer State Park the most memorable part of Wyoming/South Dakota and inspiring the name for this series of posts, ‘Buffalo Country.’

Part V- Buffalo (not NY)

The American Buffalo, Bison Bison, also (and more specifically) known as the Bison, is North America’s largest native mammal. Maybe. I don’t have internet here so I can’t confirm that. But it sounds right, unless Moose are bigger than I imagine. And Polar Bears, too. Anyway, the American Buffalo, Bison Bison, also (and more specifically) known as the Bison, is among North America’s largest native mammals.

Much like the impoverished city at the western tip of New York, buffalo haven’t had it easy. Prior to the arrival of westerners (and horses) in the Americas, the Indians used ‘Buffalo Jumps’ to hunt. ‘Buffalo Jump’ being a PC word for cliff. They would chase an entire herd of Buffalo off a cliff, take what they needed, and leave the rest behind, reminiscent of my 3^rd grade, playing Oregon Trail and reading: ‘You have killed 256,000 pounds of meat. You can only carry 200 back to your wagon.’ Because of these tactics, Buffalo were extremely rare- so rare that Spaniard Hernando de Soto explored the American south in the early 1500’s for four years without ever seeing a single one! However, soon after de Soto’s time, rampant disease would devastate Indian communities, allowing the Buffalo to expand uncontrollably, producing the horizon-to horizon herds of the 1700’s. At this point in time, the American buffalo was the most numerous large mammal on the entire Earth!

It wouldn’t last long. Displaced Indian tribes, forced into sub-marginal and unfamiliar lands, found the Buffalo to be the only reliable source of sustenance available- in the 1830’s the Comanche were killing 280,000 bison annually. Whites joined in on the massacre as well, not only to gather cheap hides (in the pre-rubber era, buffalo skin was as good as it got for belts and pulleys) and meat but also to starve the Indians who relied solely on the herds for survival. By the late 1880’s, the Buffalo were all but extinct- some sources estimate there were less than 200 animals left. Pleas to protect the buffalo initially fell on deaf ears, and a number of private individuals took it upon themselves to save the species. From this small number of wild buffalo- and a few very kinky cows- the modern (and much more ecologically stable) population of buffalo has expanded, and the Buffalo have once more taken the rightful place on the plains. What’s left of them.

Arby's count: 9