On Our Way to Yellowstone

We are back in the Black Hills after a fantastic trip to Yellowstone National Park.  If any of you are Facebook friends with Alycia or Lindsey Jablonski, you have already seen some of their beautiful pictures of the trip.  They met us in Custer, and we hit the road, with Devil's Tower our first stop. 

My brother, Jeff and his wife, Kathy, were meeting us there.  We were staying at the KOA Devil's Tower, right at the entrance to the monument.  Every night they play the movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" on the deck.  On Saturday, we drove up to the visitor's center so we could hike the trail around the Tower.  One of the names the Native Americans have for it is Bear Lodge, and they have many legends about the origin of the butte. 

The trail around the Tower is a little over 1 1/4 miles.  Of course, I took pictures of it from every angle, and it was interesting to see the differences in the landscape as we went around.

 Here are Jeff & Kathy in front of the monument

And, here are Ron & I with Alycia & Lindsey facing the monument.

One of the most fascinating things to watch was the climbers, way, way up on the walls of Devil's Tower.  Like this guy -

Just kidding - but Jeff had to get in the act. 

There is actually the remnants of a wooden ladder used to climb the Tower back in 1893 by William Rogers and William Rippley that you can see with binoculars.

 

We left Devil's Tower early the next morning and headed west, through the Little Bighorn Mountains. 

They were beautiful, but the downhill grade was a little hard on our brakes - they got pretty overheated. We stopped and enjoyed the view, then prayed till we got down the mountain.

It was onward through Ten Sleep, Worland and Cody, Wyoming till we got to the entrance of our first national park - Yellowstone.  More to come later!