Nerd Em's Adventures
The camping families ply me with food this morning. The two families are from Minnesota and Denver and have met for a week of camping together. This is their last morning and they are cooking up the last of their food. I can’t eat within an hour of taking my thyroid pill, so they wrap up two huge breakfast burritos for me in foil. Read more
The rain is light and steady. It pools on the top of the tent and runs down the sides in intermittent streams. It is a day to stay in the sleeping bag as long as the bladder will allow.
I pack up the wet tent in drizzle around 10am. We’re not leaving Belle Fourche today, so there is no hurry. My parents have mailed my Montana maps and geology book for me to pick up here at the post office. Since it’s Sunday, it means we need to wait around town until tomorrow to pick them up. Read more
If you talk to a curious stranger long enough, and you’ve answered all the basic logistical questions of where from and to, how many miles you travel in a day, etc., you often get asked “why?”. Why are you doing such a crazy thing? My normal response to this is something about dreams – how we all have something we’ve always wanted to do, and that this is my dream. This is fine most of the time, but I have discovered that some people, sadly, don’t have any dreams. So what I would really love to do is bottle up a day like today and then pour it out like a glittering rainbow when people ask ‘why?’. Because today is precisely but wholly why I ride. Read more
Willa Cather once wrote, “Anyone can love the mountains, but it takes a soul to love the prairie”. Many people will tell you there is not much to see in eastern Montana, but the landscape in the southeast corner is every bit as grand as the Rockies. It is no less magnificent nor smaller in scale. It is just a horizontal grandeur instead of a vertical one. Read more
The fog sits 20 or 30 feet up in the air when I crawl out of the tent. The wind is still. The tent is wet. It is cool and clammy. A tailwind is predicted, as are storms after noon. Let’s get going. I’m looking forward to the ride today because there are no services for 82 miles. That, hopefully, will mean a road without much traffic. Read more
The woman gives me a map of the museum. On it is drawn a bunch of little arrows in an incredibly complex pattern. The little arrows denote a path through the 11 buildings that comprise the Range Riders Museum. If you follow the arrows, you won’t miss a single thing. I look over the directions and then look back at the curator and the other volunteer. “Do you do a sweep of the building at closing, just in case someone misses an arrow”? Read more
The old station wagon creaks and groans as it bounces into the parking lot on old shocks. It’s got a fan-belt problem, too. If I were knowledgeable about vehicles, I might be able to diagnose more issues. It’s pretty sad if a poor car has problems even I can detect.
A small U-Haul truck pulls in next to the station wagon. Two young boys of similar age roll out of the car. They’ve got skinny limbs and big heads with blonde hair. A mom gets out and pulls a baby carrier out of the front seat. A scrappy-looking man wearing sweatpants and a black Iron Maiden t-shirt gets out of the U-Haul and joins them, as they come over and sit down near me at the tables outside of McDonalds. Read more
Yesterday we rode up on the plains for most of the day with occasional glances down into the Yellowstone River valley. Today we’ll ride down in the valley nearly all day.
Our route takes us west on old Highway 10 which was also the Yellowstone Trail – one of the first national highways (along with The National Road and the Lincoln Highway). The river, in this section, saw a lot of traffic, too. You will immediately think Lewis and Clark, but there were French explorers up here a couple years before them in the Yellowstone Valley, many fur trappers and traders (there is an old fort site at the confluence of the Bighorn and Yellowstone Rivers), and lots of Sioux and Cheyenne. Read more
I roll out of Custer early – a steep-ish climb back out of the river valley awaits me first thing. Good morning, legs.
I’m concerned Highway 47 might be busy as a cut-through between I-94 and I-90, so I want to get a few miles in on that shoulderless road before the traffic picks up.
The road sits high in the landscape. It rolls along through sagebrush and grassy fields. A ridge populated with pines and rock outcrops keeps us company off to the right. Way down off to the left is the cleft of the Bighorn River. Read more
In the end, there were no winners. In the end, soldiers and warriors littered battlefields all over the West. In the end, a culture was irrevocably broken and a way of life lost. There were many battlefields and many forts. There were many broken treaties. But the Battle of the Little Bighorn is perhaps the most famous of them all. After visiting so many sites of significance in Western American history on my previous tours, today I’m heading down to put in another piece of the puzzle. Read more