Ryan was all about helping Grammie at our gas stop today! She may be short, but she can figure out how to climb anywhere link a monkey! I don't even want to talk to you about the condition of the front of our car. All kinds of bugs from all over the country have made their mark for sure. Gross.
We left perfectly on time at 8am in hopes that with our gas and rest stops we would be into our next stop by early afternoon. At each of those stops people started conversations with us about our journey. Today's drive took us out of the plains and into the mountains and back again. I wasn't sure what the landscape was going to look like once we got there. I can tell you we were ecstatic to finally be seeing blue sky and real clouds after weeks of gray and smoke.
Our campground was first come, first serve so as we pulled into the park we decided to stake our claim for a site first. Grammie drove right by the campground and headed straight to the Visitor's Center as we usually do. We picked a site we thought would be good for us and close to what she would chose, left a chair, a few sleeping bags, and a tent on by the driveway and paid for it. By this point Grammie and Ryan were really wondering where we were! We met them at the Visitor's Center, grabbed junior ranger books, post cards and explored. We were at Devil's Tower today.
There were no programs this afternoon or evening as it's now past Labor Day so the park service changes their schedule. We decided to get Grammie a site, set up, and have dinner. While everyone set up I made caprese sandwiches so we'd all be set up, fed, and ready to go hike around the tower.
Our first stop was a very interesting sculpture near the entrance of our campground. It is a peace "smoke signal" sculpture created b a Japanese artist who was drawn to the native american culture in our country. I'm not sure if there are more now, but it was the third of it's kind in the world with the first being at the Vatican and the second where Buddha grew up. Ryan had the camera for these shots.
The placement of the sculpture was just perfect to have it framed around Devil's Tower.
Just beyond the sculpture were the prairie dogs. I believe the kids could have stayed here the rest of the day. There were signs all around asking people not to feed them, but they all were begging and watching us to see if we still would. Ryan took about 75 pictures of these little guys.
We made it to the Tower trail with about an hour until sunset so I thought this would be the perfect time to hike. I noticed Laney frowning and found out she wasn't feeling very well. The adults took turns throughout the hike checking on her and encouraging her to continue. We were enjoying the trail and glancing up at the tower every few hundred feet to see how the view changed.
Just before halfway around Dave was hearing voices and looked up to find a climber about 2/3 up the tower. Once we all spotted him we found his partner just above him too. We headed down a side trail to the scopes to find them and figure out if they were climbing up or rappelling down. Our eagle eye Ryan set the scope so we could all watch them as they appeared to be climbing up.
It started getting dark so we continued along the trail trying to read the interpretive signs along the way. We were poorly equipped without flashlights and we made just as it was really getting dark. Laney was not happy at all so we headed back to the campsite to all go to bed. On the way home Ryan spotted the climbers headlamps still on the tower which created a bunch of questions for me. Could you camp up there? How late do they allow you to start climbing? We would have to find out in the morning.
Once we got back to the campsite, we all retired in our respective areas to read and snooze. We would be moving on to South Dakota in the morning on our shift south.
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