Cody, Wyoming Part 2, Westward Ho Part 8b

Cody is Cowboy Country but the new range rider roaming the west is the biker. All across the west roamed bands of steel horses. The clans were outfitted in leather & bandanna regalia but they weren't the outlaw gangs of the 60's & 70's. The bikers encompassed a wide variety of ages and demographics enjoying the freedom of the road and the sun & wind on their faces....and just like men of all stripes, cowboys & bikers also have to wait for their wives as they shop!








We poked around in all the Cody shops. Tourist shops, American Indian shops, Western Wear and Home Furnishing stores.

















Bob looking ridiculous in a Hoss Cartwright hat!


Molly & I actually found a Cambridge style coffee shop in town, The Beta Coffee House. It seemed quite out of place but we loved the coffee!!


We had a great meal one night in a place called Wyoming's Rib & Chop House. Boring name and decor in the restaurant but the food was fine. The most memorial part of the meal, not to diss the food, was watching Michael Phelps win his gold medal in the 100 meter Butterfly. The whole restaurant stopped eating as the race started and watched in anticipated silence for the outcome. Michael was behind in the race. Slowly he began to gain ground and edged into second place as he and his Serbian rival swam for the final wall. We gritted our teeth, our toes curled and our hands clenched as we squinted our eyes and watched the TV ....and Bam!!, Michael lunged. A split second later the finish results popped on screen, #1 Michael Phelps. The room erupted! We didn't know another sole in the place but we all had arms up, voices raised and hearts beating with the pride of America. It was cool to be here in the middle of the country sharing this event.


We also signed up with River Runners for a morning run on the Shoshone River. This was our first ever white water rafting experience. It was really more of a float than a white water experience but never the less we had a rollicking good time. Us four Welches were matched up with a local Wedding Party. The wedding crew had been up howling with coyotes and wolves until the sun came up the night before and they continued to be in rare form on the river. The bride was from Cody but all her friends were from the Idaho college they all attended. We paddled, caused trouble and splashed the other rafts. We discussed every Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard CD I should own. We tipped the raft as we ran white water trying to increase the danger and fawned at the deer we saw foraging in the gorge.

Everywhere we went we found out we were a few days behind the Travel Channel's Samantha Brown. She ran the Shoshone with the River Runners, went to the Cody Nite Rodeo and hit Cassie's too. Check out her Wyoming.


After a couple days we got the call of the wild again. Cody is known as the Eastern Gateway to Yellowstone Park, and it beckoned. I packed the car but before we left I snuck next store to our hotel to take a brief look at Old Trail Town. Old Trail Town is a collection of 26 buildings dating from 1879 to 1901 reflecting the Wyoming frontier and it's colorful historical figures like Jeremiah Johnston, Butch & Sundance and the "Hole in the Wall" Gang. I loved the weathered collection of buildings.



If these walls could talk I'd love to hear the tales they told.

Cody, Wyoming Westward Ho Part 8a

We're headed to Cody, Wyoming. Founded by William F. Cody, Buffalo Bill. I'm not talking about that football team from western NY. I'm talking about the real Buffalo Bill, the original, an American icon, a legend. Time to breathe the same air Cody did.







We drove across southern Montana, skirted Billings and headed south down Route's 310, 72 and 120 into Wyoming and the driest valley I've ever seen. It looked right out of a John Ford movie. It was a brown hardscrabble landscape that stretched west to the vertical wall of the Rockies and east to a wall of bluffs. Sagebrush & tumbleweeds textured the ground that baked under the brilliant deep blue sky.




















Late in the afternoon we crossed the Shoshone River gorge into Cody. Sheridan Ave is the main drag. It's an attractive street populated with buildings built between 1875 and 1949. Buffalo Bill formally founded Cody, Wyoming in 1895. In 1902, he built the Irma Hotel which is named for his daughter and which he called –"just the sweetest hotel that ever was."



















Here's the Irma in 1908.

It was built from uncut boulders scoured from the surrounding area. The Irma Hotel is a living museum, it's a way to walk into the old west, today. It's a place to lay your footsteps over the paths Annie Oakley, Frederic Remington, Calamity Jane and Buffalo Bill himself walked. The hotel is open for business and it's Grill & Silver Saddle Bar are popular with locals and tourists.

























Here we are wandering the halls of the Irma Hotel.











At the end of Sheridan Street is the Buffalo Bill Historic Center. It's a treasure trove of the American West. Going through the Buffalo Bill Museum you can see this guy was something else. He must have been a force of nature. William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody was an American Soldier, Scout, Buffalo Hunter, Entrepreneur and international showman extraordinaire with his Wild West Show. The original museum has grown over the years and is now five museums in one. The Buffalo Bill Museum, the Draper Museum of Natural History, the Cody Firearms Museum, the Whitney Gallery of Western Art and the Plains History Museum. We had time to see the Buffalo Bill Museum, the Gallery of Western Art and a literal "run through" of the Plains History Museum. I want to spend more time there. I'll be back.

We stayed at Cody Cowboy Village. This was a great find. It was a brand new development with a main lodge and an inner and outer group of modern spacious cabins. We stayed in the inside loop. Just outside our door was a small pool. Basically a large hot tub! Outside the "circled wagon" of cabins was a dry landscape of sage and tumbling tumbleweeds....and rabbits, lots of rabbits. We now have a tumbleweed from Cody on our mantle for a souvenir.

















About a half mile from Cody Cowboy Village is the Cody Nite Rodeo Arena. The rodeo was my favorite Cody attraction. Cody calls itself the Rodeo Capital of the World and every night from June 1 to August 31 this dance between man & beast is held. Rodeo permeates the culture out here. Along with football and baseball they even offer rodeo as a high school sport. The bull riding was our favorite. It's by far the most dangerous. Watch the third rider in this video get his hand stuck on the bull. Yikes, his arm is about to get pulled right out of his shoulder socket!!



There were a lot of different events, roping, calf tying, barrel races and even a calf chasing event where the kids in the audience were invited to enter. My son Drew got his Cowboy Up! Watch this video. The rodeo clown was hysterical all night telling funny stories. Here he takes the kids though a warm up excercise before letting the calves loose. The goal here was to grab a ribbon off a calf to win one of two prizes.



One of the surprises of the trip were the number of Europeans on their own Wild West tours. We sat next to a family from Vienna, Austria at the rodeo. They were all decked out in cowboys hats with still and video cameras at the ready. There were French people everywhere we went on the whole trip and the Irma Hotel and Yellowstone lodges (as we'd soon find out) were heavily staffed by Russians and Eastern Europeans. The summer of '08 was before the global financial crisis hit and America was still a 1/2 price sale for anyone living off Euros. I expected cowboys, rednecks, truckers and god fearing folk but if I think about the real history of the west I guess the sound of European tongues has always been here as the peoples of the world migrated across America.... and there's definitely always been French. After all they owned the center of the continent until they sold it to Thomas Jefferson, and French fur traders traversed coast to coast helping to open up all of North America.

We walked back to Cody Cowboy Village after the rodeo really feeling like we'd found where the old west meets the 21st Century. The walk between the rodeo arena and our hotel was through open sage land. There were no lights. The silhouetted Rocky Mountains were at our back. Stars speckled the sky to the east where a faint red glow tipped the hills and ridges that pierced the flatlands. The smell of sage filled our noses and tumbleweeds blew across the path.

As we turned to head back to our cabin Molly & I spotted the lights of Cassie's Dance Hall.




















Cassie Waters, a young widow, sportin' lady, Madam and respected businesswomen opened her establishment in 1922 and it's been a Cody favorite ever since.



















Interior of Cassie's


We got the boys settled into the cabin and Molly pulled on her two-stepping cowboy boots. As the moon rose over Cody we gave the boots a workout accompanied by a little pedal steel, boogie-woogie piano, cold beer and a dance floor full of cowboy hats.

Battle of Little Bighorn, Westward Ho Part 7

We left South Dakota with the sun at our backs and drove across the southern Montana prairie under the occasional but watchful eyes of antelope and deer. Rt 212 west was our "trail ride" for the day. The road switched back & forth between four lane highway and simple two lane country road. We stopped for lunch on a country road stretch in a town who's name I can't remember but if you blinked you'd have missed it. We went into a roadside grocery store where they had a country deli. We loaded up for an in car picnic with homemade sandwiches, chips, soda, water and fried chicken. The gas station across the street pulled quadruple duty as a country craft shop, mini-mart, high school booster store and oh yeah, a gas station. I don't know who used the grocery store and gas station because there was literally no town here and nothing around for miles. In talking to people though you realize distance is measured differently out here. Driving 20-30 miles to get to school or a social event is a common occurrence. Homesteads themselves are separated by miles & miles of rolling prairie. Eventually we entered the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation and the abutting Crow Indian Reservation where arrived at our destination.

The reason we went up to Montana was to see the place where Custer's Last Stand occurred; otherwise known as the Battle of Little Bighorn. This is a place of legend.

















Custer is a name out of my school boy history books. The Battle of Little Bighorn and June 1876 were highwater marks in the American West. The battle marked the last major Native American resistance against the unending encroachment of the Wasi'chu. (the Souix word for white people meaning greedy person). General George Custer led his 7th Calvary against a combined Indian force of Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho who were camped at a bend in the Little Bighorn River. The tribes utterly defeated and destroyed Custer and the US Army. Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse became names of legend, as did Custer.

It was interesting to consider this event and the colorful history of the American West in contrast to where I live now. New England had been settled for 200 years by 1867. My town was 238 years old. Our cemeteries at Old Burial Hill and Waterside were already established and had generations of families installed. Boston and London were building the Victorian style cities we know today. The Sioux and other western tribes could not even have comprehended the tidal wave of change that was slowing choking off their way of life.

I've seen the location of the battle in films and on TV specials but you can't understand the location from seeing it that way. Standing on the rolling and golden brown prairie in August it feels like being on ocean swells. The swells are large enough to allow approaching armies, regiments, clans and tribes to hide out and hide from each other. The landscape felt so good and looked glisteningly beautiful. I wish I could have gotten on a horse and rode out to let it swallow me up.



















The battle occurred across a 7 mile stretch. The park service has put markers up in every location a fallen soldier or Indian was found. We didn't take the time to walk the trails that have been built. I wish we had. Since we were here I wanted to immerse myself in the landscape and the breadth of the clash. The markers really lend gravity to the site and give a human face to the triumph and tragedy.

Custer and his "Last Stand" soldiers from the 7th Calvary are remembered in a cluster of markers where they fell. They are just below the top of Last Stand Hill. A memorial stands at the top for all 200+ soldiers who lost their life there on Battle Ridge.




On the back side of the ridge is the Indian Memorial. The memorial honors the Native Americans who struggled to preserve and defend their homeland and traditional way of life. It also strives to rise above the the cultural conflict promoting Peace through Unity.




The site was amazing. I'm very glad we made the trek there. Historic, mythical, somber, spiritual, environmentally immense with it's amber waves of rolling prairie under brilliant blue skies and a scorching sun. Fascinating.

Northern Black Hills Westward Ho Part 6

Time to head north. We take Highway 87, a 14 mile spectacular drive that pierces needle like granite formations and winds it's way through pine & spruce forests and meadows ringed by birch and aspen. The fact that you can see birch and aspen together is one of the unique aspects of the Black Hills. It's where eastern and western flora and fauna co-mingle. It's literally where east meets west.

This stretch of road is called the Needles Highway. There's a rock formation that looks like the head of a needle that gives it it's name but you also "thread" a lot of caves.
































We stopped at Sylvan Lake and took a wet & rainy walk. It was misty and enchanting. The rock formations that ringed the back side of the lake were like ancient sentinels drawing us in, beckoning us to get out of the car and on foot to explore. We slipped through fallen rock caves and slivers of openings to get behind the lake where we found ourselves in a towering pine forest. Someone had carved a descending staircase from solid rock in one of the crevices we passed through. It all seemed very Tolkien-ish.

































Wet and hungry we head over to Sylvan Lake Lodge, one of five state run places to stay in Custer State Park. We had passable lunch. My son Dylan played piano in the rustic lobby. This was his first public performance and it was in front of more mounted game heads than people but hey. Nourished and warm we hit the winding and rock walled road again and make our way up to the infamous Deadwood.

I was looking forward to Deadwood. The Black Hills gold rush of 1876 gave rise to the lawless town of Deadwood. Gold, gambling and prostitutes were the main industries Wild Bill Hickock and Calamity Jane are two notable residents buried in the boothill cemetery. Wild Bill was shot & murdered in a Saloon here in August 1876.













The town itself is named after the dead trees that were found in it's deep gulch of a valley. It's a National Historic Landmark. The 1880's era building's are well maintained and the two & three story brick & stone facades create a handsome frontier town.













That's where it all fell apart for me though. The town had fallen on hard economic times and opened it's doors wide to gambling in 1989. As you look at the town and street scape Deadwood looks handsome and prosperous. When I went into one of the buildings expecting shops or restaurants I found that all the buildings had been gutted, opened up and connected. Deadwood was a town of fake facades and behind them were huge block long gambling casinos. Oh well.












Here's Deadwood in 1888. Click on the picture to get a larger view.

















And here's a Black Hills Mountain Man 2008. I tried to get a front shot of this authentic character but he was too quick for me.

Not so authentic but fun for the kids and tourists is the Wild Bill shootout.




We were looking to soak up the old west so we bagged off Main St and headed to the Adams Museum. It was full of Deadwood history, a cowboy art show and a girl from Minnesota who had a crush on my son Dylan. :)

With the day growing long we hopped in the car to finish the push to our final destination, Spearfish Canyon. On the way we drove through Deadwood's sister town of Lead (they are literally shoulder to shoulder with each other). We jumped out quickly to see the world's biggest hole in the ground. The Homestake Gold Mine was started during the gold rush of 1876 and before its closing in 2002 it was the oldest, largest and deepest mine in the Western Hemisphere, reaching more than 8000 feet below the town of Lead.

Leaving Lead (pronounced Leed) we were soon on back roads populated with pines, creeks and small ponds. The beauty was relentless. As we neared the canyon more & more stunning "log cabins" appeared in the woods. Beauty always attracts money. :)

Before we knew it we were here. Spearfish Canyon Lodge. The location and setting were sublime. The lodge is located at a crossroads on a flat plain under steeply rising rock walls. It's like being in a river canyon with no water.




















Why did we choose this place? I found out the last scene in Dances With Wolves was filmed in Spearfish Canyon. It was the location of the winter campground of the Sioux. I love that movie. Dances With Wolves was in fact filmed all over western South Dakota. We went back in the canyon and found the actual filming location. The canyon was stunning. Here's how the great architect Frank Lloyd Wright described it on one of his many visits.

"great horizontal rock walls abruptly rising above torrential streams, their stratified surfaces decorated with red pine stems carving stratified branches in horizontal textures over the cream white walls, multiplied red pine trunks and the black green masses of the pine rhythmically repeating patterns, climbing, climbing until the sky disappears or was a narrow rift of blue as the clear water poured over pebbles or pooled under the heavy masses of green at the foot of the grand rock walls."

Nice.

The next day, just outside of Deadwood, we rode past this wagon train. Check it out. It was a 100th anniversary reenactment of the historic Ft. Pierre to Deadwood Trail Wagon Train.

We also stopped at Kevin Costner's Tatanka, Story of the Bison museum. Kevin created the museum after the success of Dances With Wolves to share what he learned while making the movie. Bison are an incredible animal perfectly suited for the extremes of the west. They were also the basis of life for Plains Indians. They used every part of the animal for spiritual inspiration, food, clothing, shelter, household items, tools, weapons, and ceremonial items.

If you've never seen Dances With Wolves or love the spirit and mythology of the American West and Native Americans check it out.




We couldn't be so close to Sturgis and not stop in, so we did. The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally finished a week before we got there so the town was a sleepy little hamlet. It reminded me of Batavia, NY. One main drag lined with shops, some of them empty. Apparently the rally makes so much money businessmen can rent a building with a yearly lease and only open for business during the rally.

It's pedal to the medal as we head out of Sturgis. We're off to Montana and the Battle of Little Bighorn, otherwise know as Custer's Last Stand.

Oh yeah, anybody keeping track of animals out there. We saw a Marmot at Sylvan Lake and Trout & Deer at Spearfish Canyon. :)

Prairie Dogs and Rattlesnakes

It wasn't all Buffalo in South Dakota. There were critters underfoot.



And Prairie Dogs weren't the only one's inhabiting all the holes in the ground!


Whoa! Let's get outta here!