I took the photo just a minute after arriving at Cedar Pass campground. Much of the “original badlands” scenery is down in canyons, but these peaks are more photogenic. The long loop road is worth it, and the park allows even off-trail scrambling. The ranger talk was excellent, and I learned that the town of Wall (and famous Wall Drug Store) is named after the barrier that the park’s landscape presents to travel.
I’ve now only a couple caves left to explore in the system. I’m all out of troll, dragon and lizard-people jokes. So, instead I will just encourage you to reserve your tour in advance, since they can sell out. I was lucky to get the last single ticket to the shortest tour, where I was able to see the jewel-like dog’s tooth structure above. There are many more interesting crystal and other features to see. And the cave maps continue to expand as new sections are explored.
The park is most famous for containing much of the world’s boxworks, pictured, which is the ‘mortar’ left over after most of the rock dissolved. The tour included a recitation of the origin myth of the Lakota people and the bison, since the cave is a central and sacred part of the story. The neighboring Custer State Park is a great place to see bison today, and they often wander across the road.
Since I was inspired here by an obscure fact about forest fire frequency, here’s another rant. There’s a popular misconception that park service mismanagement or ”fire suppression” caused many forests to overfill with fuel, creating conditions for today’s wildfires. Smokey the Bear encouraged people not to smoke or leave campfires unattended, but neither he nor the forest service has ever had the ability to put out a naturally occurring wildfire. Even the best efforts today can merely partially contain wildfires to try to protect structures.
So why did the fuel build up? Well, that’s because farmers, ranchers and timbermen cut down all the surrounding forests. Many of the remaining forests are isolated, so that wildfires that would have entered from neighboring areas stopped. The remedy to restore the natural balance would be to enlarge the forests and regrow the surrounding ecotones or transition zones with native scrub and grassland. Funnily enough, you don’t hear that solution often proposed. Instead, folks use farmer, rancher and timberman logic and suggest scheduled burns, like they use on their land. But there’s nothing natural or statistically normal about following a schedule, so the park service, which is the victim here, is left with no choice but to try to maintain forests artificially, which typically results in lower species diversity than the original.
In any case, with climate change, even using prescribed burns won’t save forests from increased bug damage, warmer winters, hotter summers, drier air, longer wildfire seasons, hotter fires and increased wind. I mention this because there are nearby areas where forests aren’t regrowing, since the extremely high temperature of the fire overcooked the soil, killing the microbial life needed to sustain the original trees. We need more accurate and truthful thinking about fires if we are going to save species in the future.
There are climbers in the photo on top of the leaning column on the left. I walked around whistling the theme from Close Encounters, but nobody seemed to get the reference. The area nearby is also beautiful, with a prairie dog town and lovely green and red valley with bison.
This diorama is one of the best I’ve seen, and it showcases all the major finds discovered here to date. The first fossil was found by James Cook on his ranch here at the headwaters of the Niobrara, but his collection of Native American art & artifacts rivals the attraction of the fossils. He was a great friend of Chief Red Cloud, and, unlike many of the original fossils which have gone on for display and study elsewhere, Cook insisted his gifts remain here. If that weren’t enough, there’s a lovely creek with wildlife on the trail up to where most of the fossils were found. This is one of my favorite fossil sites, although Dinosaur is better.
A couple of elk were crossing the parkway, and I managed to take a quick photo. As I slowly started to pass, trying not to scare them, the complete idiot behind me decided that would be a good time to pass me on the right, inches from the elk, practically pushing them away into the woods. Who hates mega fauna that much? So I decided to demonstrate what instant acceleration looks like in a Tesla, and I never saw him again.
The parkway isn’t the fastest way to get anywhere. My navigation kept telling me to get off and take a straighter road, so I turned it off. Anybody who is in too much of a hurry should take another route. It winds along the ridge line from Great Smoky through North Carolina and Virginia to Shenandoah, and it is delightful. I saw some kind of light pink rhododendrons blooming along the wet ridge rocks above 5000 feet. I think Catawba, named after a local Native American tribe, or maybe Vaseyi, named after the famous botanist who discovered them 150 years ago. The former would be early, but it’s unseasonably warm now, due to the climate crisis.
The parkway is best enjoyed at leisure or in segments, and people who don’t care about nature should avoid it.
This little guy walked out on the trail through the meadows in Cades Cove. There’s a beautiful loop drive around there with an old mill, horses playing and a spectacular natural environment. Nice campground too. The road closes to traffic some days, but there are miles of trails, creeks, a lake and mountains to explore by foot, horseback, boat or bicycle. This is one of the most visited parks, one of my favorites for wildlife, a World Heritage Site and a UN biosphere, but I think most people just pass through quickly. My last trip here, I drove through far too quickly, without any idea what I was missing. Just lovely.
The view from the gap includes Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia, plus the small historic town of Cumberland Gap itself, which has a surprisingly good restaurant, Nineteen19. It’s difficult to think of a more historic spot in the country than this gap, where Native Americans, trappers, traders, frontier families, soldiers and slaves passed through over centuries. While most traffic zooms through the modern tunnel below, it’s an easy drive up near the top, where the ”object lesson” trail offers a short hike to the “saddle” of the gap or to the tri-state meeting point. In order to encourage more modern road construction techniques, the government improved the road here as an object lesson or proof of concept, that transportation can be improved even in challenging terrain. This blog is an object lesson that EV travel is possible, even over long distances cross country.
Where Carlsbad is like the Mines of Moria where you’re expecting goblins to stream out of the crevices into the magnificent cathedral-sized chambers, Mammoth is definitely hollow-earth lizard people. The walls are fairly smooth and plain and the ”cave” is actually an incredibly long maze of tunnels with underground rivers. I figure since the ceilings vary in height that only lizard people who are equally comfortable either upright or on all fours would feel at home roaming the endless passageways. The ranger herding us from the back concurred and told scary stories which kept us moving right along.
The cave is a World Heritage Site. Above ground is a huge forest with miles of trails, several nice campgrounds, and the Green River which runs deep enough to require a small car ferry at one point. The clean ecosystem above helps keep rare blind cave fish and other species alive below.
The ranger leading the historic tour explained that a slave named Stephen Bishop first crossed the ’bottomless pit’ and discovered the fish while guiding tourists. His tours gained widespread fame and included luminaries like Emerson. Bishop was evidently fearless, had an unusual amount of freedom as a guide and educated himself in geology and other subjects to converse with visitors. Emerson’s tour lasted all day, and they must have had interesting discussions. Emerson and his literary friends were conductors on the Underground Railway at the time, and many slaves escaped through Kentucky in the area near the cave. Bishop must have been motivated to use his unique access into the hundreds of miles of tunnels under Kentucky, since his own children were sold away into slavery. He died shortly after gaining his freedom in unknown circumstances.
Speaking of railroads, I charged my Tesla at the Casey Jones Museum in Jackson Tennessee on the way, and got a kick out of how modes of transportation change. I also ate at the Old Country Store there, which was reasonably priced and delicious, and it surprised me. Outside it celebrated the confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest of KKK infamy, but inside it had a thoughtful and beautifully done exhibit on the Woolworth lunch-counter protests. Much like Mammoth Cave, you sometimes can’t judge what’s happening beneath the surface. Similarly, this post has been too long and meandering, but I hope somehow it’s all connected.
This is a large, multi-purpose, multi-unit park. On a previous visit I visited one of the Acadian (Cajun) cultural centers and the 1815 Chalmette Battlefield (read the pirate Lafitte’s story here), so this time I figured I should see the swamp at the Barataria Preserve. I didn’t see any alligators, but the ranger said they were probably under the boardwalk. He also said I might find one if I went on a more remote trail, explaining logically that no tourists had returned from that section today.
Folks around here are under a lot fewer illusions about the Climate Crisis than other places, out of direct experiences. The signs were more blunt than in other parks, explaining that the beautiful ecosystem above is being killed by rising oceans. If we had time to adapt, then we could learn techniques for dealing with storm surge, flooding, etc. But it doesn’t seem like enough people care.
Zero Carbon Travel 