The Badlands National Park has a wealth of short hikes for visitors to enjoy. The Cliff Shelf Nature Trail is only a half mile boardwalk loop trails through a small juniper forest and sporting views of eroded sandstone buttes.
Badlands National Park can get remarkably hot in the summer. Granted, it's no Death Valley, but the idea of an extended hike in the midday heat is unwelcome. So, the quarter mile loop of the Fossil Exhibit Trail is an opportunity to get out and stretch ones legs without working up a sweat.
Buffalo may wander through Sage Creek Campground. Tent campers are warned that buffalo may try to scratch themselves against the tends. It's all fun and games, though, until the buffalo roles.
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.
Some people think that bacon makes everything better. I maintain that prosciutto makes everything better. Tonight, I wrapped chicken thighs in prosciutto to cook in the cask iron skillet. Having learned from my time consuming first experience of cooking chicken over a campfire, I bought boneless chicken. It was skinless—the prosciutto would make a more flavorful replacement. While I did add some salt and pepper, truly, the prosciutto was what defined the meal.
Going-to-the-Sun road is the premier throughway spanning Glacier National Park—from West Glacier to St. Mary. The road snakes from valley floors to the height of Logan Pass and back down. Along the way are awesome waterfalls, dramatic cliffs, no shortage of massive glaciers, and plenty of wildlife. We encountered both mountain goats and big horned sheep, which only leaves "grizzly bear" on our great outdoors bingo cards.
Well that's just great. There is no grate. Since we couldn't find a camping spot in Glacier National Park, we had to settle on a private camping ground outside of the park. We settled on one what advertised having WiFi but whose router was on the fritz. But, hey, it was somewhere the sleep.
That didn’t take long. We drove in to Glacier National Park to find a camping site and, instead, we found a bear. We really messed up this time. I knew this was high season but naively assumed that whatever challenges…
I was 7 when I came face to face with a bear. It was gigantic. But, then again, I was seven.
After a relatively dismal experience in Yellowstone, our outlooks needed cheering and it was lunch time. So, rather than even attempting to get to Mammoth Hot Springs, we headed west to get out of Yellowstone National Park and into the tourist trap that is West Yellowstone. Yet, along with the jumbo sized McDonalds, massive visitor's center, and ads for wolf and grizzly zoos, West Yellowstone has Las Palmitas.