While traveling on the road, hiking trails are our gym. We love to get out in the middle of nowhere for impressive vistas and flirtations with wildlife.
Tower Trail is the de facto hike in Devils Tower National Monument. This easy 1.3 mile paved trail closely circles the base of Devil's Tower with frequent interpretive panels explaining different aspects of the tower's geology, history, and cultural significance.
Cracker Lake Trail is a 12 mile hike deep into Glacier National Park through grizzly territory. The 1,400 foot elevation gain may be less than half of what we experienced in Big Pine but is still considered "strenuous" by many hiking metrics. In the course of the hike, we encountered waterfalls, glaciers, a wide range of ecosystems, a bull moose, and a grizzly bear.
Helena, Montana was a mining town. A lot of towns around here were mining town. Gold was discovered in Confederate Gulch and with each successive discovery, more people poured into the region. Most of the people who remain in Helena have government jobs, be they county, state, or federal. Helena is, after all, the state capitol. It also possesses a pleasant mountain with a moderate hike.
The Norris Geyser Basin in Yellowstone National Park is interesting for many reasons. The Porcelain Basin is one of the most colorful expanses of land in Yellowstone. The variety of thermophiles that thrive in the hot, acidic environments of the basic come in a rich pallet of colors. The steamboat geyser is the worlds tallest active geyser. Unfortunately, it is notoriously unpredictable and infrequent. It does still plop up the occasional sprits of water for hopeful viewers, but that is about it. But for those interested in the macabre, there is also a body here that was never collected.
Olympic National Park is remarkable for its high longitude rainforests. What is possibly even more remarkable is how much you can see in less than a mile loop that is Mosses Trail.
We had heard tails of terror about visiting Obstruction Point. It was a perilous route, in story. In reality, this six mile road is the best groomed single lane dirt trail we have ever driven. Even small cars like a Honda Civic seems to travel the road with little issue. The perilous part is the immediate cliff that we travel along resulting in accelerated heartbreak and some of the best views in all of Olympic National Park.
There are four gun batteries in Fort Ward. One is along the main paved path that most visitors stroll by when exploring this military outpost come public park. The other is concealed by massive trees, elevated well above the main area of the park and accessible from a relatively discreet dirt path. This is where the troubled teens and would be graffiti artists find some solitude to blow off steam and deface historic structures.
"Almost there" can be a promise or a threat. A lot of the deciding factor can come down to if the speaker actually knows if they are "almost there" or not. We didn't know if we were "almost there" when hiking the Big Pine Creek north fork trail. We had a few pictures of trail maps and no scale bar. So we knew there would be some switch backs, a couple waterfalls, and a couple bridges on our way to the glacier fed lakes of the Muir Wilderness Area, but we thought that four water bottles would be enough.
Joshua Tree may be a National Park today, but, back in the day, cattle roamed the scrub brush and miners wandered in search of gold. This history remains in arrested decay along the Wall Street Mill trail in the Wonderland of Rocks.