Ehmann Family: COWYNESD

Sandwiched between the eclipse was a round trip road trip from Denver to the Black Hills

There they are, rising from the plains. Full disclosure, much of my Rocky Mountain high going into this trip was due to 2 John McPhee works, his North American geology series Annals of the Former World, and a later article on Wyoming's Powder River Basin coal trains.

the resemblance is uncanny

Up in Estes Park, the trout were not as accommodating as the bass in Summit Lake

Alluvial fan in Rocky Mountain National Park

photo credit: Erin

Pothole bench

Now Wyoming has learned a thing or two about branding its image

and the University of Wyoming's apparel shop in Cheyenne was an inspired find

Our first coal train, heading east on the Union Pacific's triple-track mainline in Nebraska

That's what we came to see

Bison!

and more

they're everywhere

Palmer Gulch KOA had it all

weird carvings

a bouncy bladder

and a stable. The 1-hour trail ride was perfect.

Erin's horse TJ taking a bio break

Wind Cave and Jewel Cave, they may actually be one cave system, but two very crowded NPS sites

Both are dry caves and lack stalactites

even the rangers look like cowboys out here

Rushmore in the morning

I know Erin, why do they have large-grained pink granite from Minnesota on the Avenue of Flags leading to the monument? Rushmore could never have been carved from that. The site was chosen for its durable, fine-grained, white granite.

Thanks to Hamilton, we're not a fan of Jefferson. Do you really think Thomas was out in the kitchen with the slaves mixing up the ice cream? "A civics lesson from a slaver, hey neighbor, your debts are paid 'cause you don’t pay for labor".

and if it weren't for the Three-Fifths Compromise giving Southern states electoral votes for their slave populations, Adams would have won a second term and TJ never would have been President. At least he got the worst spot on the mountain.

Better living through chemistry

We stopped at Wall Drug and partook in the free ice water

I guess this is why jackalopes are so hard to find in the wild

see what I mean

Too bad the hordes at Wall Drug missed this site, dedicated to the arming and decommissioning of thousands of nuclear ICBMs on the Great Plains

Pax Nuclearis is facing the greatest threat of its time

They had an a silo to view from above. If we'd put a security clearance request in early enough, we could have toured the command control and let the kids act out the 2-person launch sequence. No thank you.

Decorating the blast door must have been a diversion for the missilemen

By the time we were kids in school in the 80s, they must have concluded that "duck and cover" wasn't going to save you from nuclear holocaust

Tessie, stop ordering nuclear missile pizzas on the red phone

It was hot in the Badlands

I love how this landscape alters perception. Tessie looks like she's 30 feet tall!

Now we're at Reptile Gardens

where there were a few gators

and many, many snakes

this was as close as Tessie got

definitely not reptiles, but they are cute

The most famous igneous intrusion in North America, and also the first National Monument designated by TR

Gillette is the center of the Powder River basin, which produces 40% of the country's coal

maybe it was coal-subsidized, but the hotel had an indoor waterpark with nobody in it

Looks like Erin's had enough driving

Last stop was Fort Laramie, back on the Oregon Trail, the Mormon Trail, the California Trail, and the Pony Express Trail

You can tune out now if you're not interested in seeing more of Big Coal

Since the coal is 60-100 down, it's impossible to see the black from the roadside

This mine has shipped over 520 million tons of coal to power plants throughout the US

one its customers in Macon, Georgia is the largest coal-fired power plant in the US. That's a long trip. C'mon Georgia, can't you use peanut power or something?

Even though it's a strip mine, the landscape looked surprisingly orderly

beginning of the line for the coal trains

and there they go. From Annals of the Former World:
"This strip mine, no less than an erupting volcano, was a point in the world where geologic time and human time overtly commingled. Ordinarily, the close relationship between the two is masked: human time, full of beepers and board meetings, sirens and Senate caucuses, all happening in microtemporal units that physicists call picoseconds; geologic time, with its forty-six hundred million years, delivering a message that living creatures prefer to return unopened to the sender. In this place, though, geology had come up out of its depths to join the present world, and, as Love would put it, all hell had broken loose. “How people look at it depends on whose ox is being gored,” he said. “If you’re in a brownout, you think it’s great. If you’re downwind, you don’t. Wyoming’s ox is being gored."