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October 1, 2023

Coming Home

Sunset and storm, Grand Tetons National Park

Yellowstone Falls, Yellowstone National Park

Hiking at 100+ F, Badlands NationalPark, South Dakota

Neal Burdick

From early August past Labor Day, we were in other parts of the nation: the Rhode Island shore, the Badlands of South Dakota, Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, Devils Tower of “Close Encounters” fame, an American smorgasbord of points between. Random observations:

• The United States is bigger than you realize until you ride a bus across Wyoming. You watch mile after mile of High Plains grasslands roll by as the deer and the antelope play, starkly beautiful in its own way if you open your eyes to that to which you are not accustomed. And you begin to appreciate why folks out there have no use for Washington, D.C., 2,000 miles away on the ground but infinitely farther in the mind.
  
  
• The Denver airport, only a little smaller than St. Lawrence County, spreads out across the flattest land imaginable. And then you realize, if you transplanted it to the Adirondacks, it would be almost 100 feet farther above sea level than the top of Mt. Marcy.
  
  
• Bison are curious but temperamental creatures. One family brought our tour bus to a halt. Their youngster wanted to play with it, but we got the feeling its father would rather head-butt us. And elk can peacefully graze one moment and kill you with their extravagant antlers the next.
  
  
• Some say mountains are all alike – they sit there and never change. Nope -- like everything else in nature, they’re always changing if you’re patient enough to watch for a millennium or two. They are no more the same than each of us is. The jagged Tetons, looking like gigantic shears ripped them one from the other; the Colorado Rockies, tall and jumbled, patches of last winter’s snow still showing; the ancient, sheer, worn-down Black Hills – none of these is anything like our Adirondacks, geologically, botanically, meteorologically or in any other way. They all have distinct personalities.
  
  
• The Badlands are not bad; they’re just different – rugged, dry, sandy, every color but green. “Bad” is a label we applied, judging the area only by how useful it was to us. Tellingly, it’s also where we consigned the Lakota Sioux people when we wanted the gold under their ancestral home, a home we had promised them by treaty. We forced them, in atrocities of ethnic extermination that we condemn in other times and places, onto the “bad lands.” And we called THEM savages.

Sometimes, we have to get away from the places we know in order to know them better. For us, the means to this end was a Road Scholar tour. We unequivocally recommend them.

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