Yellowstone Adventure, Part 6

From this point, I probably shouldn't call it a Yellowstone Adventure, as we left early before light to go to home via South Dakota.  Seeing Yellowstone as the sun came up was another whole experience in and of itself.  Seeing all the waters misting and steaming in the very early light while it was very cool (in the 30's) was pretty amazing.  As usual, the pictures are sooo disappointing compared to the real deal...

We left the park out the north east side, through Cooke City, then took Bear Tooth Pass in Montana.  At the risk of being repetitive, it was truly amazing.  It was so high, so stark and barren it really made me impressed with God's work, but also his gift of wanting to overcome obstacles.  If someone hauled my sorry backside up those mountains on a mule a 100 years ago and told me we would build a road over it, I'd have thought he was plumb loco!  Couldn't be done!  But they did it; there wasn't much traffic on it though.  

I thought it was cool that all along the side of the road there were these 20' sticks sticking out of the ground; we presumed that they were for helping the road crews find the road.  I was talking to a friend of mine that lives near Hutch that is originally from that area that said he was there on that road the first day it opened up this spring, about the middle of May.  He confirmed our suspicions with this photo below, if you look closely, you can see the sticks poking through the top of the snow.  The jeep offers some good reference.  Remember this is in late May, and the road is perfectly clear, so presumably the snow has melted some already...

Once we got through and over the pass, it was a lot of driving (ugh) through Montana and Wyoming.  Really pretty country, but I was sick of driving by this point.  We did stop at the Battle of Little Big Horn site, and it was pretty cool, but we were of course in a big fat hurry.

They had a really cool museum with lots of information in it with models built of the battle scenes.  The boys were super into it.  I had a hard time appreciating any of it, as I was brought up to hate General Custer (this was before it was cool to hate General Custer for killing Indians) because of a death he apparently inflicted upon some ancient ancestor of mine due to some grave act of cowardliness on Custer's part.  My mom doesn't hate anybody; but she hates General Custer!

We then traveled to Devil's Tower.  By now my patience is wearing thin, and I just want to see the inside of my hotel room and relax with a cold beverage while the kids splash in the pool.  When I pulled up to the little kiosk, the ranger came out and told me it would take 10 bucks to get in, I asked him what I could do inside the gate that I couldn't do outside.  He no more than got the last syllable finished of telling me "you can drive right up to the base of it" when he heard my tires screeching out a U-turn.  I slowed down enough to take this "through the windshield" shot.

   

Ugh, so not worth it...  Not after a week in Yellowstone!  Anyway, we made it to Rapid City, South Dakota and grabbed a quick bite, then headed to the hotel.  I drove about 12-13 hours that day with 4 kids.  I was beat!