Thursday, 2 September 2021
This post will cover our arrival in the campground Wednesday until our departure on Friday. First the mundane, then the Tower.
The mundane
Though we've been on Mountain Time for several days, my critters haven't adjusted and get anxious because they think I'm an hour late fixing their dinner. I know they'll get used to it, but I still feel like a bad mother when they stare accusingly at me.
My arm is still very sore, believe it or not, even after almost 2 full months. But I'm using it much as I normally did, so I suppose pain is to be expected. But I'm beginning to think Dexter did some serious damage to me, because of the positions I feel pain in. My original analogy was to the Rack (as in torture), but I'm thinking now it was whatever's the step just before dislocation. Incredible, really, that it should be taking so long to heal, but it is healing.
After my not-so-positive experience with Taco John's, I decided to make my own "street tacos," which still weren't like any street tacos I had in Mexico but were pretty good. I bought a couple of boneless pork chops and some small flour tortillas and some McCormick's original flavor mix and they turned out okay.
I'm running out of the medications I give the dogs each month - one pill for ticks, one pill for heartworms, both of those for fleas - and I knew Chewy.com would require a prescription before they'd send me more. And I knew any vet would require an office visit to be sure the dogs were healthy before they'd write a prescription, which meant I couldn't go see our vet in Austin. So I made an appointment with a vet who could squeeze us in in Casper, where we'll be spending a few days over Labor Day weekend. While I was at it, I made an appointment with a dog groomer in Casper - they haven't had baths since June when we were at Anna and David's, and Gracie's got so much excess hair it stands out in tufts from her coat.
And I managed to get 6 or 7 posts written for South Dakota, which still means I'm behind, but not as badly behind as I was after leaving North Dakota.
I saw a camper in the campground that had a message written on the back: "The kids can't move back home if they don't know where it is."
Oddly enough, the campground was nearly full on Wednesday night (usually the lightest night of the week) and half empty on Thursday (usually the 3rd heaviest night).
I had trouble walking the dogs in the mornings - both of the early walks. Thursday, we kept seeing a doe and her 2 fawns everywhere we tried to walk. Friday, they were joined by several other deer. I'd take the dogs down one road, see deer up ahead, turn around and go to another road, see the same deer have moved up ahead again, try a third road, see different deer, try a fourth road, see still more deer.
Actually, once it was sweet - 2 of the deer looked like young ones who were gamboling - no other word for it - across a large grassy area in the campground. They got fairly close to us, stopped suddenly and stared, then turned around and ran away, then stopped and started bouncing around with each other again. My dogs look like that when they're playing together, except my dogs go on to wrestle with each other. I can't see deer wrestling, because of those long spindly legs and hard hooves they've got.
And oddly, when we got back near our campsite after seeing so many deer, there wasn't a deer in sight. It was as if they'd all evaporated.
David told me he'd mailed me an envelope of mail, and the post office said it'd arrive on August 31st. I checked at the office both Thursday and Friday and they couldn't find anything for me. They suggested I ask at the post office. This turned out to be far easier to do than I'd thought, because the post office was just on the other side of the driveway at the entrance to the KOA. And sure enough, they had it. I was so relieved to see it that I didn't point out to them that it was addressed to me at the KOA and ask why it couldn't have been delivered to the KOA about 100' away. It'll have to be just one of those mysteries surrounding the Devil's Tower.
Devil's Tower
Here's what I saw when I checked in on Wednesday afternoon:
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| All day it had been overcast with low light levels, which is why the tower looks a little hazy - because it is. The wire fence on the right side is the edge of my campsite. A huge old cottonwood kept me from getting a view from the RV. |
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| This view was taken not long after the sun showed up on Thursday morning. |
Then in the afternoon, I went to a different part of the campground for these photos.
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| I wanted to show how close the campground is to the Tower. |
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| I took this to show the red rocks that enclose that part of the campground. They mark the edge of the Belle Fourche River, which runs along the campground edge near the Tower. |
There were several areas of that green grass, which were heavily used by people with tents. Thursday morning, we found at least 3 dozen bikers had camped in this area, many in the cabins but many in tents. Some with usual tents and others with imaginative variations. I saw one that looked like he'd suspended a hammock from 2 poles and covered it with a tarp across those same poles. Another was covered with what might have been a tent, but it was the same size and shape as the person inside it. The area where the young deer were gamboling looked like this photo above and was 2 fields to the left of it.
I was absolutely fascinated by the Tower, for some reason, though not nearly as thoroughly as Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The last climactic scenes of that movie, by the way, were filmed here, where the campground is now. And in honor and acknowledgement of that fact, the campground has a showing of the movie every evening. Really. They've set up a little outdoor "theater" with folding chairs and a big-screen TV and they play the video every night at dusk. I'd have liked to see it again, but I just can't stay awake long enough - especially because I'm still at least partly on Central Time myself.
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| another viewpoint |
Physically, the Tower is 867' from base to summit. The summit is 5,112' above sea level and stands 1,267' above the Belle Fourche River.
Pres. Theodore Roosevelt designated Devil's Tower as our first National Monument on September 24, 1906. TR spent a lot of time in southwestern North Dakota, and I imagine he'd have come this much farther southwest to see the Tower for himself.
But here's what's amazing to me: scientists still don't know how the Tower was formed. This National Park Service page https://www.nps.gov/tower-formation shows 4 different theories that have been proposed. They also note that the same erosion process that all these theories depend on has managed to destroy the evidence that might show which, if any, is the correct one.
That same page talks about the columns that make the Tower look striated, and how rare these columns are, geologically. And it explains the reason for those red rocks my photos show above. A very useful page.
Another page gives an overview of the Native American connection to the Tower https://www.nps.gov/history-culture/american-indians and directs those interested to other information sources. I was especially interested to see the description of the park service efforts to balance the competing interests of Indians, for whom this is a sacred place, and rock climbers, for whom this is an unusual challenge, and regular tourists like me, who just come to gawk and maybe to learn more.
And for some additional information, here's the Wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/Devils-Tower
The entrance to the national park is reached by a road I could see easily from my campsite. The visitor center is only a mile or so up the road. As far as I could tell online, the visitor center isn't much beyond what I found online and the main point for me going there would be to get closer to the Tower.
After spending a day and a half being as close to the Tower as I already was, I decided I really didn't want to go up there. I just couldn't see that I'd gain anything by getting even closer than I was, if the cost to do that was being around a bunch of people who may or may not have been wearing masks or have been vaccinated. So I never got any closer than these photos show. And that was good enough for me.
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