Wyoming

Okay, last of the adventures for a little while. But this one's a real adventure, a big journey that I wish most of you had been on with us, and I'm sure most of you wish you'd been on it too. It was last Saturday the 21st through Monday the 23rd. Wyoming.

Before I start, here's the map I made of everything we did. I pretty much documented all our little spots and stops, for the most part. I totally encourage you to zoom in on some of the placemarks I made, because the satellite imagery is pretty sweet. Like click on "Campsite" and zoom in--you can see right where we camped! You can see the rapids, cliffs, thickets, restaurants, and so on--everything I talk about in the forthcoming novel.

We got up at 4:15 am so we could leave by 5 and be on the road, heading north up the Utah/Idaho/Wyoming state lines. We were going with Dave and Michelle and their kids--this is something they've done the past few years, and they were excited to have some friends so the kids could play together and that sort of thing. So we left early up Provo canyon, paused to get ice in Heber City, then took I-80 east toward Cheyenne. We stopped at Evanston, at this really nice, extravagant McDonald's--it was like a mini-resort, replete with paintings and a fireplace and flatscreens showing CNN in the bathroom--let the kids play, then went on our way north on 89. We watched the sunrise and weaved through the morning haze, past all these little Wyoming towns, with populations of 300 or 500. Cokeville, Afton, Thayne, Etna, Alpine. It was all farmland with mountain and forest in the distance--and then we pass Alpine and we are in the forest. Stretching along the Snake River, the highway is a small empty strip in the Rockies (like driving Highway 50 to Tahoe), the rest is lodgepole pine stands in every direction.

We pull off at West Table, which is basically a parking lot with a concrete boatramp--our rafting put-in for the trip. We have to wait for Dave's friends, who have the rafts and gear. No cell phone reception out here, so we wait. We set up chairs along the rock-ridden rivershore, put on our swimsuits and play. It's about 95 out (uncharacteristically hot, usually it should be around 80). The sun is high overhead, but the water is cold snow runoff and it's refreshing. Here we play, splash, swim and wait, with fully camping-packed cars, for 4 1/2 hours. We never get ahold of nor hear from Dave's buddies, so finally we leave to find a campsite. The preferred spot, Granite Creek, is off-limits this year because a wildfire raged in the wilderness behind it, so instead we drove up Fall Creek Road, a choppy washboard road that cuts up through the forest, and we pulled off three miles later, in this little circular meadow with quiet Fall Creek creeping just beside it. Papery manure littered the grass in spots, and a bushy willow thicket filled all the space to the west. The small foothills of Munger Mountain opened up right in the front of our meadow. Every night I intended to pull some sort of midnight hike up those foothills--except our days ended up being so busy that I always dropped into bed exhausted instead.

It was a beautiful spot, though at dusk the mosquitoes swarmed us, and the willow provided pretty much no shade during the day. So we ended up being there mainly morning and night. Anyway, we set up camp and explored. The boys played in the creek and tried to get me to follow them through the thicket to find a spot where they could spear fish or spy on bears. They were all three shirtless. I consented to go with them. We all had brittle willow walking sticks that we used as machetes to hold back other branches or fend off mosquitoes. We plowed through the thicket and trampled the dung and waded through mud and insects. The branches were most of the time low--very low--so low that I had to squat as far down as possible and waddle through while trying not to get slapped by the bushes. We all got bit and scraped, a little bloodied up. We came to the edge of the creek and circled back, Colin leading the way (he was the ringleader, a huge fan of Man vs. Wild). We could barely hear Dave's radio playing a Yankees game so we knew we were heading in the right direction. And then finally we emerged, the adventure over, and we slapped away more mosquitoes until deciding to go up to Jackson for dinner.

Dave and Michelle liked this place called Bubba's Bar-B-Que (same name as the one in Ennis, Texas, on the shirt Heather gave me, but different business I think). It's one of the common stops, a little hole of a restaurant with a grey poplar out front that the kids climbed and played in for an hour. The food was quick and okay, but it was Wyoming! and so we didn't care. We got water and a bathing suit for Bella at Kmart, then headed back to camp, watching the temperature drop the whole way, as our hundred-degree day faded below fifty. I left the fly off the tent that first night, hoping to stargaze into the empty summer Wyoming skies, but all it afforded us was a massive dowsing of dew and a really cold night.

Dave and I woke up around seven on Sunday and headed down to the Snake again for an 8 am rafting trip. The best part about rafting or swimming in the river so early is that the difference between the air and the water temperatures is miniscule, so the water feels quite warm. The previous day the water felt arctic yet we swam anyway. I was prepared with my full rafting getup, and at 8:50 our 18-foot boatload of eleven took off from West Table. (Dave's friend Chris Bright--a big, orange-headed Corvallis resident who resembled a sasquatch but was kind, gentle and friendly--took the helm as guide. He was an interesting character; he came to our site to camp with us and also rafted with us the next day.) The Snake River is wide and dark, but tame. It flows fast and strong but is devoid of many rocks or that many rapids, so the experience is a bit different from our South Fork American. That first day the whole run took only an hour and twenty minutes. We did lose two Puerto Rican girls at Big Kahuna though. That rapid just attacks you. After we took out and packed the gear, we negotiated with the guys to let us keep the small 12 1/2 foot boat to use the next day, so that Dave and Chris and I could run our own trips and take the families. Back at camp, Michelle and Amy were playing all morning long with the kids, games like Bearzilla. Once Dave and I got back, we loaded everyone up and headed north to the Grand Tetons.

The drive was beautiful. We were surrounded by cottonwoods, quaking aspens, lodgepole pines. The whole area was wild. (Many of the cottonwoods, or waga chun as Black Elk speaks, were planted by dude ranchers to help with irrigation, so they aren't really native to the area. This was told to me by a college-student ranger at Grand Teton later in the day, and it seems to be true, because groves of cottonwood line creeks everywhere.) We passed by a massive, fenced plain, the National Elk Refuge. Then we were on a long straight road with the Rockies to the west, and soon enough we could see the peaks of Middle and Grand Teton and Mount Owen, unmistakable through the hazy sky of summer daytime.

We first stopped at String Lake, a little intestinal-looking southern offshoot of Leigh Lake. It's shallow and surrounded by woods. Right across from us in the middle of the lake there was a pileup of smooth fallen trees, like being by a lumber mill or in a beaver's playground. We chose a little beachy spot to sit in the sun. We weren't there long before deciding to go down to Jenny Lake instead, where we could do a hike that was conducive to children and where there were some bathrooms, because kids can't hold it. Jenny Lake was beautiful, a big watercircle in the pines. I loved the visitor center there (I love lots of visitor centers), they had a huge diorama of the Teton Range and lots of amazing books that I know most of you would love, a big wood stove with chairs around it, and everything was so *interesting*. It was originally Harrison Crandall's artist's cabin; he was a professional photographer who lived and worked in it in the 1920s (you can read more about him here). I'm a sucker for that sort of thing, like museums.

But Jenny Lake was clear and beautiful, and we took a short boatride across it to part of Cascade Canyon trail. We hiked about half a mile up through forest to Hidden Falls, a lush, white waterfall pouring down an outcropping of stepped rocks. Amy and Michelle ran up another half mile to Inspiration Point, where they could look out over the lake and canyon, and Dave and I stayed below and watched the kids collect stones in the cold water. (This is when I had spontaneous cellphone reception and called both Mom and Joey.) We hurried and hiked back down to make it to the boat before six, boated back across Jenny Lake, then swam and nursed babies and visited the visitor center again before driving back south to Jackson.

We decided to eat out again, just for fun, so we proceeded to try and find a suitable restaurant. Jackon's a pretty cool town. A bit resortish, maybe like South Lake Tahoe in some ways. But just some ways. (It's also known as Jackson Hole, but from what I hear, they're trying to up their image, and the "hole" portion of it just has to go. You know the Johnny Cash song--"I'm going to Jackson . . .") We walked through the town a few times. It's cute; there's a central park with big arches made of elk antlers on either corner (these antlers are scavenged from the Refuge after each season--they're not from hunted elk). Lots of lit shops and little stops and places to eat, a lot of wooden, old-western style architecture. So we tried to get some recommendations on where we could eat where kids would be welcome. Teton Steakhouse? No thank you. Some American bistro, some fish n chips place? No, no. After a few more nos and one good recommender, we finally found the Snake River Brewery. Which was so good. It was an old industrial building set a couple blocks off the main strip, with three floors around a winding staircase and ancient arcade games on the top floor. We were super hot and had walked for blocks around this city after parking about a mile away. Great 9 pm food. If you, we, anyone else eats in Jackson, they should eat there.

Back at camp, we put sleeping children into sleeping bags and lay down in the 58 degree night.

The next morning we all got up around 8 and got ready for more rafting. The sun was coming up behind our hills, though we couldn't see it yet, and it was a bit colder out. We brought everything we'd need and left for West Table again. I got to guide the first expedition. There were only six of us: Chris and Dave as lead paddlers, myself in the rear, Amy on the port side, and Jarom and Colin sitting on thwarts in the middle, protected. We had an excellent trip, took us a little longer than Sunday because our crew was so small. But we hit Big Kahuna hard and strong, made Dave swim it. We stopped after Champagne at a cliff on the left. Colin wanted to jump it, but the climb is short and tricky; you have to crawl across a crumbling rocky ledge to get there. At top there's a dead gnarled tree with smooth wood that you can cling to before jumping. But both Jarom and Colin were determined to jump something, so we led them to the underside of the cliff where you can jump about five or six feet down in the dark deep Snake. Jarom wanted me to hold him, but instead we held hands as we jumped in together. We went under a foot or so and then came back up, Jarom screaming out not from fear, but from the water's cold. Even so, he loved the jump. He's very brave. Amy went and jumped it too. Colin did it probably five times. I climbed up to the bigger ledge--maybe thirty feet up--and jumped in from the root of the gnarled tree. It was invigorating--the water's cold isn't even numbing, it's refreshing.

Here're the photos of us going through Big Kahuna:

We took out and strapped the inflated raft to the roof of the Jeep, then piled four adults and two kids into it and drove the eight mile stretch of highway back to West Table where Michelle had been watching all the other kids. We made ready for the next trip, with Dave, Chris, Colin and I again, Michelle and Torin replacing Jarom and Amy. We had run into Dave's friend Justin Jones, a big guy with tons of experience on the Snake, and brought him as well. It was my third Snake trip in two days. When we hit Big Kahuna, all four of the adult males fell in and swam. That wave is gigantic, it just pushes you up vertical, then a second wave slams you from the right so the whole starboard side of the boat gets knocked. The only people who didn't swim this time were Michelle (the one girl) and Torin and Colin (the two children). Amazing. I went under the boat but walked my way out with my fingertips and was back in in a jiffy--seriously I was probably only in the water for five seconds, it's second nature to get back in quickly and start retrieving people. We grabbed everyone else, saved our paddles, then were on our way again. We stopped at the same cliff to jump again, but as we were eddying out, I saw a guy jump from halfway up a pine tree above the gnarled tree. Probably fifty feet plus. "Stupid," an old guide wearing a cowboy hat said. But I couldn't watch this kid do that and not attempt it myself, I just couldn't. So there I went, scaling the rocky ledge, hopping above the gnarled tree, climbing midway up this lodgepole pine until I found a little opening in the branches overlooking the deep moss-colored water, then I readied myself, announced "Coming down!" and leapt far out into the air and just hung there, drifting slowly down until I hit hard with my feet pointing down and my arms at my side. It was a big jump, but I swam to shore and it felt great. Dave said, "All these pictures you take on this trip and you didn't get a picture of that." Oh well. We finished the last section uneventfully, maybe a little tired, then took out and headed back to see Amy and the kids.

Amy was feeling sick. She had gotten this extreme sore throat. And I mean extreme; when we looked at it later on with a flashlight down her throat, you could see this huge spherical cyst-looking mass at the back right. It was swollen and purply and looked very painful. She could hardly talk. We packed up our stuff, packed in the kids, and headed south to Alpine to get pizza. Amy took some advil and we figured we'd see if she got feeling any better. We at pizza at Gunnar's Pizza. It was average food, but poor service--the waitress forgot about us and told the kids where they could and couldn't sit and kind of lectured them. It was funny, at one point the cook came out and heard Colin burp a nice seven-year old boy burp and he turned slowly and said to him, "Honey, that's disgusting." Anyway, they were okay. But Bella and Orion were asleep in the car and Amy was in deep pain, just trying to rest with her head against the window, so we decided we'd go back to camp, pack up and head home. We could be home by about 1 am. Dave and Michelle still had to drive back up to Jackson to return the children's life jackets that we had rented. So we parted ways there at Gunnar's--Chris took a picture of the crew and Justin had the rafting gear that he had to take down to Utah State in Logan to return.

We went back to camp and packed our things. It was sad to leave such beautiful wilderness, but we'd had good fun and were ready to go home, especially if it meant sick Amy sleeping in a bed. Before we were done packing, Michelle and Dave came back and said they'd leave with us too. So we all packed up and left at the same time. We drove those pretty highways, all the way watching a thunderstorm unfold beneath granite clouds in the distance, with lightning shooting down at intervals and lighting up unnamed mountain ranges. We stopped for gas in Thayne and the wind blew dust around us. We took a wrong turn and went too far into Idaho, a 45-minute diversion. I was getting hopefully tired, so in Evanston I had to ask Amy to drive. I tried to stay awake but it was impossible. Finally at 1:30 we were home. Amy put some aspirin back on her massive lump (that's an old sore throat trick that only the veterans know) and within an hour the lump had two small holes eaten through it like acid, like a popped pimple. It made her feel much better, and she went to bed in relative peace, even ended up healing quickly. I had the next day off--the 24th, Pioneer Day in Utah--so we just turned on the swamp cooler and fell asleep.






This is the thicket I was talking about. My view. And this isn't the worst of it.

There's Fall Creek, right next to us.

On the boat across Jenny Lake.

Hidden Falls.

This is Wyoming.

The sweet sweet antlers. Remember--not from hunted elk.




First trip, Monday.

Done.

Second trip, Monday.