Let’s see…where were we? Ah, yes…The Saracen’s Head Inn, The Village of Highworth, Wiltshire County, England. Sunday, The 24th of September, 2006. And not an altogether English morning at all, according to the inn keeper.

The sky was pale blue and decorated only occasionally with little white clouds. The air was crisp, still, and smelled lightly of fall. The world around us glittered with dew, and a flight of crows made its way north, to points unknown as we lugged our bags out to the car.


Highworth

It was a fairly late morning, despite having been sound asleep by 9:00 the previous night. I was still a little jet lagged, I think, and there wasn’t a huge English breakfast calling us downstairs early like there had been at St. David’s (I believe we made due with granola bars and bottled water in the car). We’d have been moving much earlier if we’d known what lie in store for us.

We’d glimpsed a small portion of the Cotswold’s (at light speed from the train) the day before and thought it might be worth a little detour en route to Southern Wales. We consulted a few guide books that we had dragged across the Atlantic with us and decided to head north via the A361, then drift slowly through the countryside to the village of Bibury.

Somewhere near Coln St Aldwyns it became clear that we hadn’t budgeted enough time for this place. Each little village was as charming as the next and the soft green hills that surrounded them begged us to get out of the car and have a good long stroll. In the end it was too much to resist. We pulled into Bibury around noon, parked the car about a block off the main street and headed in the direction of a church tower we could see in the distance.

From the honey-stone cottages that lined the way, to the crystal waters of the River Coln, the entire place looked as though it had been torn from the pages of an English folk tale. The most incredibly picturesque town I have ever visited.



Saint Mary's Church

We wandered the church yard for awhile, reading grave stones and snapping photos until a door in the perimeter wall snagged our attention. It was small, weather beaten, ancient looking. It was like something out of a dream we had both had. Or, maybe one of those creepy Tim Burton-esque children’s books people read to their kids these days. It was archetypal, irresistible. The idea that opening it and stepping through to the other side might amount to trespassing didn’t occur to us…nor did the thought of not doing so.

Beyond was a spectacular garden with roses and apple trees, green paths and climbing flowers in full bloom. The sort of place one could imagine wandering for the rest of one's life. But the garden was scarcely a side note to the massive Ivy covered stone mansion that sprung into view. At any moment I expected to hear someone yell from somewhere inside “Jeeves, release the hounds…there are trespassers on the lawn!”




We stayed for as long as we dared (maybe 15 or 20 minutes) before sneaking back through the little hole in the wall. It turns out we could have stayed as long as we liked. A local later informed us that the big house was actually a hotel called The Bibury Court. The grounds are apparently a public right of way.

In any event, sneaking through a little hole in the wall of a very haunted looking Saxon churchyard, and wandering through a secret garden in the shadow a 12th century manor house had made the whole scene a little surreal. And it was about to become even weirder.

As we rounded the front of the church we bumped into the first people we had seen in nearly an hour, another couple that was filing out the main door. The woman was tall and quite thin, while the guy was short and fairly broad. They were followed by an older woman who was acting as their tour guide. We walked slowly behind them until we arrived at the ornate wooden gate at the front of the yard.

At that moment Shauna grabbed the back of my arm and whispered something that I couldn’t quite make out.

“It’s…*insert inaudible whispering*" she issued discretely.

“What?”

“It’s...*insert more inaudible whispering* ” she hissed a little louder, but still too softly to understand.

“What?”

“It’s Nicole Kidman!” she said just loudly enough for me (and I suspect everyone else) to hear.

“Oh…”

I looked at the tall, thin woman standing a couple feet in front of us and there could be no mistake…it was Nicole Kidman. Apparently the diminutive fellow next to her was Keith Urban.

There was a short, uncomfortable pause as they looked at us, and then at the camera around my neck. They were clearly expecting us to ask for a picture with them, or to start clicking away without their permission. All at once I felt sorry for them. I could tell Shauna did too. They were, after all, just two people trying to have a quiet day in the Cotswold’s together like we were (I can’t imagine what it must be like to be recognized and approached every time I went out). Moreover, there were suddenly enough people on the street that a couple pictures might have turned into a bit of a scene.

I think I said something very clever like “uh...hey guys" as we pushed past them, and then down the lane. I don’t think they said anything in reply. And so ended our perfectly awkward Cotswold’s celebrity encounter.



Yeah, people used to be much smaller...

From the church we found our way back to the center of town and strolled up Arlington Row, the single most photographed scene in the Cotswold’s. Maybe all of Britain (outside of London and Stonehenge).



Arlington Row



Arlington row was built sometime in the 1380’s as a place to store wool, but converted into weavers cottages sometime in the 1700’s.

I find it very difficult to explain to people how perfect, how idyllic these little towns and villages are. Every angle of every dwelling seems to be expressly designed for maximum aesthetic value. Truly, every fallen leaf and every blade of grass appears to have been individually placed by god, or elves, or disney imagaineers.

We wandered the paths and trails that surround Bibury for another hour or so, finally taking a late lunch at a little diner next to the trout farm. Hoping to avoid the events of the previous night, we hopped back in the car and made for The Brecon Beacons, Southern Wales while the sun was still fairly high above the western horizon. We left Bibury wishing we had a week or more to spend there. Our next trip to the UK will likely be a self guided walking tour of the Cotswolds. I find myself eagerly counting the days.

Shauna was feeling really ambitious today and created a new blog dedicated just to Lucy. She moved all the baby related stuff that had been posted here to http://babygirllucy.blogspot.com/

I think she posted a bunch of new stuff as well.

Feel free to head over that way...

Stonehenge isn’t the only cool historical landmark in southern England. A quick glance of our AA road atlas revealed dozens of historic houses, churches, castles, roman antiquities and prehistoric sites in Wiltshire and Oxfordshire alone. Places like Woodhenge and Old Sarum, Silbury Hill and Chisbury Chapel. Layer after layer of human history stacked one on top of the other. We didn’t have time to see even a fraction of what was around us. We had to content ourselves with hitting a few noteworthy highlights before moving on.

From Stonehenge we made our way north, towards Marlborough and Swindon. Perfect little English towns like Manningford Bruce, West Stowell and Bishopstone flashed by as we drove. Then, finally, we arrived at the vale of the White Horse.

The White Horse is a huge, highly stylized figure cut into the side of a chalk hill near the village of Uffington, Oxfordshire. Evidence suggests that it was carved sometime between 1400 and 600 BC, during the height of Britain’s Bronze Age. Who commissioned it, and why, remains largely a mystery.


The white Horse of Uffington...Click the image if you want to actually see it.

Though not as photogenic as Stonehenge, the white horse was impressive. There were fewer people there, and the whole scene was rather more tranquil than Stonehenge had been. To say nothing of the fabulous views to the north. We would have stayed longer, probably hiked to the top of the hill, but the sun suddenly seemed very low on the western horizon and shadows were growing long across the fields below. As the setting sun turned the landscape gold around us, a sinking feeling settled in the pit of my stomach. We had hotel reservations in Stroud, some 30 miles to the northwest…we’d never make it before nightfall.




Back home, a 30 mile night drive through the country would have been little more than an excuse to roll the windows down, turn the radio up, and ease the seat back just a tad. Not in England! The thought of navigating those tiny, twisty rock and tree lined bike paths for roads in the pitch black scared the hell out of me. It was tricky in broad daylight!

We pulled into a little market town called Highworth, just as the last red and purple rays of day were falling on the old stone buildings of Lechlade Road. Instead of pushing ahead into the darkness, we checked into a little inn and pub called the Saracen’s Head Hotel.


The Saracen's Head.

We tried to cancel our reservation in Stroud, but no luck. We ended up paying 200 quid (about 400 dollars) for a bed we never slept in!

We eventually wandered down to the pub, where I savored one of the finest steaks I’ve ever eaten. If ever you find yourself in Highworth, Wiltshire County, England at dinner time...you won't regret checking out The Saracen’s Head Pub!

Stonehenge looked like a 15 to 20 mile blast up the A303 from Stourhead on our map, so we hopped in our little street racer and made for it before the afternoon slipped into evening.

We’ve all seen pictures of Stonehenge. They universally depict a huge megalithic ruin standing completely alone on the wide, green Salisbury Plain of Southern Wiltshire. I had always assumed that it was in the middle of nowhere, that we’d have to drive for miles down unpaved country lanes, crossing streams and pastures, dodging lines of druids along the way. Then, finally, it would appear almost magically before us. It would be massive, full of mystery, beckoning us nearer with its ancient spiritual authority.

My first glimpse of Stonehenge wasn’t so dreamy. We were flying down the A303, looking for a road sign, anything that might tell us where the hell we were. Finally, I spotted a strange assemblage of stones a few hundred yards off the road, sandwiched between the A303 and another large “A” road. I was sure it was something else. One of the lesser stone circles that dot the English countryside, perhaps.

Even as we approached the ruin I didn’t recognize it as Stonehenge. The scale and color was all wrong. It shone a stunning greenish blue in the sun, and it wasn’t nearly as big as I had imagined (only about twice my own height).

I speak heresy, I’m sure, when I say that I wasn’t particularly impressed with Stonehenge…at first. We strolled around it a couple times, taking the obligatory photos, sure that the images would be as underwhelming as the place itself seemed.

Perhaps it was because of the trucks motoring loudly down the big roads on either side of us, or maybe it was because of the crowd, but, I had a hard a time feeling even a tinge of the spiritual potency that people so often attribute to the place. I have to admit to leaving a little disappointed.

It wasn’t until we had gotten home and started picking through the hundreds of images we had captured of our trip that I began to understand the magic of Stonehenge. The place is incredibly photogenic…the world seems to shrink around it in pictures. And I noticed something else…the flat gray color of the rocks in our photos (in every photo I’ve ever seen of the place) is nothing like what I saw in person. Somehow our 1,500 dollar camera had utterly failed to pick up the brilliant bluish-green hue that I had seen so clearly. That I had thought so strange when I first laid eyes on it.



I think Stonehenge has imprinted on my subconscious. It’s crept into my dreams with increasing frequency since our return. The dream is always the same, too. I find myself wading through tall grass, across open fields until I see it glowing in that unnatural bluish-green color in the distance. I walk towards it in great anticipation, knowing that when I get there I’ll learn some great secret about my future…about the future in general. I never reach it, though. Instead, I just wake up with a terrible sense of foreboding.

I don’t know, maybe there’s something to Stonehenge after all…

There’s a reason you don’t often hear about American tourists renting cars and driving the entire length and breadth of the main British Island…lots of reasons. But that’s precisely what we were planning to do.

I had always assumed that the hardest part about learning to drive in the UK would be remembering to stay on the left side of the road. Not so much...I was surprised how quickly that became second nature. It was probably the easiest part about learning to navigate the British Road System. There were a host of other, more difficult things to master.

For instance, there’s the peculiar fact that English roads are positively lillipution compared to their American counterparts. Every oncoming car feels like a head-on collision, and trynig to scoot by an on-rushing laurie (semi-truck) is very much a religious experience (my confessions were fast and silent). Cars and trucks are forced to pass each other at breakneck speeds, separated by mere inches. There’s zero margin for error.

Roads that would be 45 MPH in the states are 60 MPH in the UK. Their “A” roads resemble narrow, undivided rural routes, but they treat them like friggin’ interstates. I’m a fast driver by American standards (I’ve got the points on my license to prove it) but I never felt truly comfortable driving the speed limit there.

Then there’s those infernal roundabouts! And we’re not talking about the little ones you see in America. These things have two, three, even four lanes, and they’re not afraid to stack them one after another so that you have to negotiate the entire series of them to get anyplace. It’s absolute madness! Driving quickly became a chore, and we looked for opportunities to ditch the car.

It was all made OK by the fact that we were there, motoring through one of the most beautifully pastoral landscapes in the world, though. The very place that my ancestors had called home for a thousand generations. It was somewhere between Midsomer Norton and Shepton Mallet that I realized this wasn’t just a vacation for me. It was a homecoming of sorts. A pilgrimage.

We drove through sparkling little towns and villages with names like Little Keyford and Maiden Bradley, to a British National Trust sight called Stourhead.


Stourhouse

Shauna had spent a day there during her semester abroad and it was at the top of her list of places she wanted to see again, And for good reason. Stourhead is widely thought to be the most beautiful landscape garden in all of England. It sprawls over an early 18th century estate originally owned by the Hoare family, founders of the Hoare Company (the only privately held bank in Britain). It’s a tree lover’s paradise, home to an unsurpassed collection of domestic and exotic lumber. There were Redwoods, Sequoias, Sitka Spruces and Western Red Cedars right next to Common Oaks and English Maples.




The whole place is littered with ancient looking structures. There’s a medieval church, a Palladian House, and a pair of Greco-Roman Temples rumored to have been used for wild, week long royal orgies. Alright, I made that last bit up…but they could have been used for something like that!


The lake at Stourhead



We walked around the grounds for a couple hours, snapping photos and generally taking it all in. It was every bit as amazing as Shauna had boasted. To my knowledge, no garden in the states even comes close. But, in the end I was just putting off the inevitable. We couldn’t stay there forever…I’d have to eventually cowboy up and learn to drive like a Brit!

I expected to wake to the sound of rain tapping against our hotel window. Or, to the sight of fog drifting through the streets below. We were, after all, in London. I hadn’t even entertained the possibility of bright blue skies and temps in the mid to upper perfect range. But I’d take it.

We were at Paddington Station early, but only after a traditional English breakfast at St. David’s. Eggs sunny side up, English bacon, sausage, the whole nine yards…all with a spot of tea.

The train pulled out of London and we were soon speeding through southern portions of the Cotswolds, the most ridiculously charming piece of countryside in England…maybe anywhere. I struggle to describe just how quaint, how picturesque this place is. Deep green pastures divided by ancient hedgerows roll gently from one horizon to the other. Happy little sheep and ponies graze next to ageless rock walls and medieval stone cottages. It really is the prototypical storybook backdrop.



The Cotswolds

We de-trained in Bath, and dragged our luggage off the platform and up Manvers Street towards the bus depot. We had been told that we could rent a locker there, and I was looking forward to dumping our stuff for awhile and having a look around while the day was still young.

The place was chaos, though. Tourists of every persuasion crowded the sidewalks and spilled onto the streets. It was impossible to walk more than a few steps without being jostled or bumped. Shauna had her bags knocked out of her hands a couple times before finally reaching the bus terminal. I was starting to get a little testy for her.

We waited in line for nearly a half hour only to learn that they didn’t really rent lockers. We were told to try the youth hostel about a half mile up the street. It was then that we elected to take the road less traveled by…and it made all the difference.

Instead of marching uphill to the hostel through a sea of humanity, with all our things in tow, where they may or may not even rent lockers, we hauled ourselves and our bags back to the train station, hopped in a cab, and got the hell out of Dodge. I was a little bummed to leave without exploring the place, but, we didn’t cross the bloody Atlantic to spend what little time we had there fighting the weekend hordes. We had places to go, things to see, people to bug with our ugly Americanism.

The driver dropped us off at the Eurocar office in Marksbury, a little town about 10 minutes southwest of Bath. We had a reservation, but we were early, and our car wasn’t ready yet. I passed the time by franticly trying to cram the entire contents of a little book about driving in the UK into my memory. All the good it did!

We reserved an economy class car, so I was expecting a Geo Metro, or a Ford Festiva, or some European variant thereof.




Needless to say I was jazzed when they pulled this little number out of the garage…a Vauxhall Astra, complete with a turbocharged 1.8 liter 4-banger and race tuned suspension.

“HOT DAMN” was all I could say as I gassed it onto the A39 out of town. As they say in the biz…that little car hauled ass!

We saw Ireland First. It rose like Valinor from the gray waters of the north Atlantic as we approached. Tall cliffs and narrow strands of beach marked the meeting of land and sea, while a vast green countryside rolled out before us. Even from 32,000 feet it was obvious that this place had been blessed with uncommon charm. Ancient rock walls dissected the landscape, and pretty little villages dotted the terrain like bright stars against an emerald backcloth.

Then, the ocean again, and a wall of thick white clouds. I strained for a glimpse of the land as we drew near the Cornish coast, but no luck. It wasn’t until our final approach to Gatwick that I saw it through a driving rain…The Big Island…The Old Country…England.

Gatwick was a mess but we battled through customs and baggage claim without a single “bugger off”, and snagged a couple seats on the Hogwart’s…err…Gatwick Express for London before it filled up. The train sped through a gray, green world that seemed at once strange and familiar. It was raining hard, and the symptoms of jetlag had started to kick my ass, but the excitement of being there made the beating almost tolerable.



The Gatwick Express.

Shauna’s eyes brightened as we pulled into Victoria Station. London is her favorite city on earth. She spent an entire semester there during her junior year in college, and had been aching to get back ever since.

It was soon very clear that she was in her element, and I was not. I’m really no good at big cities, and London is about as big, and as noisy as they get. The cab ride to our hotel was one part culture shock, one part sensory overload, and two parts scrape with death. The rules of the road were either non-existent or completely inscrutable as our driver picked his route through the maze of main streets and back ways to Norfolk Square and St. David’s Hotel. Shauna was unphased.



Norfolk Square.

Our room wasn’t quite ready for us when we arrived, so we dropped our bags off at the front desk and stepped out into the rain. Norfolk Square is nearly ideally situated. It’s within a stone’s throw of Paddington Station and a short walk from Hyde Park. Most importantly it’s less than a block from Garfunkels restaurant, and a desert of legendary status (Shauna had talked about it for as long as I had known her); a large Belgian waffle topped with unnaturally rich vanilla ice cream, maple syrup, and a sprinkling of toffee bits. It would have probably been worth the jetlag by itself.

From Garfunkels, we wandered down Praed Street and Leinster Terrace to Hyde Park. We’d planned on taking a stroll across the green, but a raucous Islamic Jihad Rally being held there persuaded us to keep moving down Bayswater Road. We turned up a side street and loitered for a moment in front of the building where Shauna had lived during her semester abroad.

It was about then that I decided I’d had enough. Neither of us had slept in better than 24 hours, and walking around in the rain, jet lagged out of my mind just wasn’t doing it for me anymore. I was all about going back to the hotel and sleeping it off, but Shauna wasn’t down with it. She insisted that day 2 would suck just as badly if we didn’t allow our circadian rhythms to reset for London Time. She forbade me from going to sleep before 9:00 PM.

I pissed and moaned all the way down Moscow Road and then Queensway, knowing Shauna was probably right. This was her third trip to the UK. She’d backpacked through Europe for an entire summer, toured the Soviet Union, partied in Australia… I had to acknowledge that she might know more about jetlag than I did (seeing as I’d never left North America before).

We thought momentarily about hopping on the tube and seeing the sites in Westminster (Parliament, Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square, etc.), but I wanted to actually be awake for those things. Instead we walked into Whiteleys Shopping Center (London’s main indoor mall) to get out of the rain, and to kill a little time. At some point we spotted a cinema and decided it would be a brilliant way to knock out a couple hours.

We purchased two tickets to a British film called “Children of Men”. It was a dark, unnecessarily violent piece with an agenda. I didn’t get it; perhaps because I don’t completely understand the subtleties of British politics. It was quietly anti-American, and endlessly slow moving. The plot just seemed to collapse on itself. Shauna hated it even worse than I did. Imagine our surprise when Children of Men made damn near every American critic’s top ten films of the year list. I guess there’s no accounting for taste. In any event, it had served it's purpose.

The rain had stopped while we we in the theater, so we spent the rest of the afternoon wandering aimlessly down little streets and alleyways, stumbling into cool little shops and bakeries. We bought some sandwiches at a delicatessen around the corner from our hotel, and took them back to our room after finally checking in.



Barbed wire on the fire escape?



London from our window.

We watched the sun set over London from our window as we ate. We were asleep about ten minutes later.

Yellowstone Day 3 (Continued)…

I had never seen a sky like that before. It was as close to black as blue can possibly get, and a wall of hail was rolling up the flank of Mount Washburn towards us like a giant white breaker. Lighting railed from one horizon to the other, and a nearly continuous clap of thunder resounded across the landscape like a cannonade.

I scarcely had time to pull off the road and negotiate a spot under a generously endowed Douglas Fir before quarter sized balls of ice started falling like mortar shells on our position. Fortunately the hail was short lived, but the rain and the lightning kept us pinned down for nearly a half hour.

Finally, and with the deluge nearly over, we broke cover for the Antelope Creek drainage in hopes of spotting a wolf or two. The storm was pulling out in earnest as we arrived, and a scene of singular beauty was revealed in its wake.

Suddenly the world was unnaturally green, alive, and an incredibly bright double rainbow appeared as the sun grudgingly started to do its thing again.


A double Rainbow

The storm had an effect on the animals as well. They seemed to emerge from the very cracks of the earth to celebrate the end of the onslaught. Through the binoculars we watched deer, elk and bison pour out of the trees and into the meadows below. The place was literally crawling with large animals.

Then, something I had never seen before…three furry gray balls rolling through the grass at the very edge of my binoculars effective range. I didn’t dare to believe it at first, but, over the course of several minutes it became clear that I was indeed watching three wolf pups playing in front of their den. It was a very, very cool moment. Sadly, they were so well camouflaged, and so far out of the range of our 300 millimeter telephoto lens we didn’t get anything even resembling a wolf pup on film.

We watched the little guys beat the hell out of each other for about an hour, when our luck got even better. From our hilltop vantage we watched a gigantic black adult wolf emerge from the timber and jog down the bottom of the valley towards the pups. There was much wagging of tails, and high pitched howls of greeting followed by better than an hour of relentless pestering of the adult by the pups.

Though it was still out of range for a real picture, the adult wolf’s dark coloring allowed us to at least see it though the camera.


The Black wolf

Then, as quickly as they had appeared, they were gone. The adult wolf stood up and made his way back into the timber and the pups scurried into the den.

Content in the knowledge that we had finally seen wolves in their natural setting, we said goodbye to the Antelope Creek Drainage, and the Agate Creek pups. It was early evening and the sky was already showing signs of sunset. The colors slowly changed from florescent reds and oranges to pastel blues and purples as we made our across the park.


A bison at sunset


Geyser Basin

A picturesque end to the best day of our little vacation.

Yellowstone Day 3…

Day three started a little later than days 1 and 2. We rolled out of bed around nine, grabbed some breakfast in West Yellowstone, and found our way past the west entrance by about ten. We didn’t have much of an itinerary; just a vague mental list of things we hadn’t seen yet.

We pointed the car in the general direction of Yellowstone’s Grand Canyon and began making our way lazily across the park once again. Somewhere along the Grand Loop Road past Madison, something caught my eye. It was slinking through the tall grass about 50 feet off the road, and I brought the car to a quick stop. It wasn’t bulky enough to be a bear, and the coloring was all wrong for either a bobcat or a mountain lion. All I could see clearly was two triangular ears floating above the tall grass, and for just a moment I thought I was going to get my first glimpse of a wild wolf.



Instead, this coyote emerged from the brush. It saw us, paused momentarily, and began a bee-line straight for us. We’ll never know how close it would have gotten, since a Ford Excursion packed with a small tribe chose this precise moment to round the bend behind us. Within seconds the scene exploded with kids and excited shouting, and our canine friend disappeared back into the grass faster than you can say “Mormon Fundamentalists”!

A little bugged, we jumped back in the truck and moved on. We hadn’t gone more than a couple miles, though, when Shauna thought she had seen something in the trees. We turned around and spotted a truly massive bull elk lying in the grass scarcely thirty feet off the road.



We had just enough time to snap a couple photos before the hordes descended. A car pulled up behind us, followed soon thereafter by another, and another. Within minutes the place was a circus complete with clowns and fools. People were getting way, way too close and the elk finally decided that it had had enough. It stood up, threw its head back, and crashed through the deadwood at a run. More people are hurt in Yellowstone each year by elk than by bears and mountain lions combined.

Finally we pulled into The Grand Canyon, at inspiration point. We hiked around a little bit, snapped obligatory photos at the overlook, and made for Yellowstone Falls where we did pretty much the same thing.


Inspiration Point...notice the storm clouds gathering.




Yellowstone Falls

It was all completely stunning, but, the mob seemed to diminish it somehow. It was hard to feel inspired when someone's sticky, Ice Cream plastered 6 year old was stumbling over me to get a closer look.

As we left the madness of Canyon behind for Mt. Washburn and Antelope Creek, the sky was beginning to grow dark. By the time we hit Dunraven pass it felt like dusk, and the temperature began to drop like George Bush's approval ratings. As we reached the summit, and as views of the horizon unfolded, I tuned to Shauna and said something like "This is gonna' get ugly"...

More to come.

Yellowstone, Day 2...

I’ve never been particularly keen on horses. I’ve seen way too many clips of riders being tossed like rag dolls from the backs of their equine pals to ever feel truly comfortable on one.

Needless to say I was a little nervous about our impending expedition. It seemed cool in the abstract…Shauna and I riding cowboy style through the world’s first national park…the reality of it suddenly didn’t seem like so much fun as we sat through our pre-ride safety meeting, though.

If I was nervous before, I was positively concerned when one of our guides introduced me to what had to be the single biggest saddle horse on this or any other planet. It was twice as wide, and several hands taller than any of the other horses in our group. I was told that this monstrous thing was some sort of “half draft” (half Belgian draft horse, half quarter horse), and that his name was “Ugg”. I was assured that despite his freakish size, he was the tamest horse of the lot, and that if we ran into a grizzly he’d be the horse I wanted to be riding (apparently he never spooked, and bears would often turn tail and run at the very sight of him).

It was another perfect morning, and soon we were making our way through some of the most pristine country in the park. It took a few minutes to get used to the idea of being there, astride a behemoth, but the scenery seemed to take the edge off. We rode across lush meadows, and through impressive stands of Douglas fir. There’s no doubt we’d have seen all kinds of wildlife if it hadn’t been for one of our guides…this girl let her mouth run the entire 2 hours we were on the trail. She went on and on about horses and dogs and bears and her boyfriend and her girlfriends and her hometown…good hell! I felt like I had to feign interest to avoid being rude, but I was probably only encouraging her. I should have just told her to shut it.

That was my only complaint, though. Ugg was brilliant (what a big, gentle, flatulent animal) and the scenery around Tower and Roosevelt was classic. I’ll never visit the Yellowstone area again without doing something like this. It’s the best way for a lot of people to leave the crowds and the traffic behind…actually get into the back country. A google search brings up links to guide services both inside and outside of the park. We plan on taking a multi-day tour next time.

From Roosevelt we headed south, for Yellowstone Lake. The road climbed gently along Antelope Creek, then followed a long ridge across the western flank of Mt. Washburn. Views of the Antelope Creek drainage opened up, and people were parked along the road with binoculars and spotting scopes, peering into the valley below.

We stopped and asked one gentleman what they were all looking at. “Nothing,” he replied. “Nothing right now, anyway”. He explained that he and his friends had been there since before dawn, watching members of the Agate Creek Wolf Pack come and go from a den site somewhere below.

My interest was piqued. Wolves had always been among my favorite animals, but they were probably the only large North American mammal I’d never seen in the wild. We decided to hang out and glass the valley for awhile...see what we could see. I’d never done this in a place like Yellowstone before, and neither of us could believe what we had been missing. In 20 minutes we saw more large game animals than the entire rest of the trip to that point…Bison, Elk, Mule Deer, Coyote…amazing. I’d never seen that kind of wildlife density before. I had no idea there were so many animals around.

No wolves, though. The diehards said we probably wouldn’t see them again until dusk, or even the following morning when the pack set off to hunt. So, we hopped back into the truck and started south again.

Shauna thumbed through one of our trail books as we drove and decided the short hike along Pelican Creek to Yellowstone Lake sounded cool. Pelican Creek is said to be prime grizzly habitat, so we made a mess of our gear looking for our bear spray. Finally, and with two giant cans of liquid fire in hand, we hit the trail. It was only a few hundred yards along the creek, through thick stands of lodge pole pine to the shore.

The breeze coming off the water was ideal, and we hung out for awhile on the beach. A few minutes later we were back in the truck, wishing the loop had been a little longer.

Suddenly, we were feeling recovered, ambitious again...and Shauna reminded me how cool Shoshone Lake sounded.

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Shoshone is the largest back country lake in the lower 48. Our guide book described the scenery along its northern approach, via the DeLacy Creek Trail, as being “what many of the park’s forests looked like prior to the dramatic changes brought about by the 1988 fires”. These are the oldest stands of lodge pole pine in the park…400+ years old. Best of all it was only six miles roundtrip.

Sounded good to me…

From West Thumb we took the Old Faithful-West Thumb road to the Delacy Creek trailhead. We threw on our day packs, tossed a couple granola bars in the pockets and made south.

It felt good to be out of the car, and we covered a lot of ground in a really short time. The path wandered through a dark, cool old growth pine forest for the first mile and a half or so. Then it burst into some of the greenest, widest alpine meadows I’ve ever seen. Butterflies and wildflowers were thick across floor, and I expected some sort of huge ungulate to wander through momentarily.

A mother duck and her brood...

The meadows turned marshy, and the air felt tangibly cooler as we approached Shoshone. Then, all at once we were there, on the shores of a huge sapphire gem of a lake surrounded on all sides by dark timber. We were completely alone, and for just a moment I understood what those early explorers of the Yellowstone Country must have felt as they gazed across this ancient landscape for the first time.

Shoshone Lake...

We wandered down the beach for awhile, snapping photos as we went, hoping the camera would capture even a poor facsimile of what we were seeing. Finally, we found a nice piece of shade and stretched out for a moment to gather our strength for the looming hike out. Two hours later we awoke to the sound of something big crashing through the forest behind us. A massive bull elk threw his head back as he sprinted away through the trees. The cool breeze coming off the lake had acted like chloroform, knocking us out for what was left of the afternoon. The shadows were getting long across the lake, and the temperature had dropped several degrees. I knew sunset couldn’t be more than a couple hours away. It would be a race to get back to the truck before dark.

I wasn’t particularly comfortable with our present circumstances. I usually try to avoid hiking in places like Yellowstone during the early morning, and at dusk; the chances of bumping into something big and nasty on the trail increases exponentially during these hours. And suddenly the park seemed alive with sounds...a rustling of bushes next to the trail caused me to draw my can of whoop-ass from its holster, but it was just a grouse. Feeling very vulnerable as dark approached, we jogged the rest of the 3 miles back to the trailhead, arriving only minutes before nightfall.

Pulling into West Yellowstone we could scarcely believe that it was the same day that we had woken up pre-dawn do go horseback riding. It would be tough to top Day 2, but day 3 would prove every bit as cool.