I love the western united states. I love the mountains, I love the dry heat and I especially love the infinite possibility that the overwhelmingly vast emptiness bestows. Ever since we turned west from New York City every mile that passed beneath our wheels has been bringing us closer to that dry air and that never ending sky. After many hundreds of miles of pancake flat corn fields and cross winds that threatened to rip the bikes clean off the roof of the car – the mountains that we were slowly closing in on didn’t rise out of the horizon but sunk beneath it, a horizon line giving way to spectacularly eroded earth beyond. We had reached the Badlands.
The flat prairie had fallen away into bizarre formations of dirt and soft, porous stone. Sharp peaks and deep gashes of colorfully banded earth were everywhere. We slept a few hundred yards from the place, nine years ago, I camped with thirty of my high school classmates on Coast to Coast. We hiked through the wild formations, buffeted by the prairie winds, pausing here and there to watch deer, who stood their ground, curiously staring back at us. And, on our way out of the park, we stopped to watch the prairie dogs digging and barking, keeping watch and socializing.
But, it was in the Black Hills that the unmistakable “out west” feeling finally took over. The drive between the Badlands and the Black Hills is a scant 60 miles, but it is in those miles that the mountains finally begin to rear up – faint, almost transparent, blue teeth clinging to the horizon, growing steadily in the windshield and becoming more opaque, more real with every passing minute. The prairie, which had resumed again past the oddity that is the Badlands, gave way to Ponderosa pine forests and we climbed out of the heat and the wind, into a world of stark primary colors. Clear blue sky, unbroken by clouds; deep green and brown of the dense evergreen forests and the unmistakable grey ramparts of granite high above. The place reminded both of us of Yosemite: The smell of pine and sunshine was everywhere (as were the buffalo – something definitely lacking in Yosemite) and we rejoiced in the cool mountain air and quickly set about getting our fill.
One (very steep) mountain bike ride and one unintentionally long hike (I’ll give you two guesses who the idea of a lengthy hike belonged to) and two very lovely nights snuggled warmly in sleeping bags (instead of laying, sweating on top of them) and we’re eight hours into a twelve hour drive towards Missoula, Montana; and a little knot of former Blacksburg residents…
