Wyoming (Spearfish Canyon and Devils Tower) [240518-19]

Wyoming didn't originally make the "East of the Rockies" cut for this Trek, since the Rockies go through Wyoming and we've already visited the two national parks there.  But when we discovered how close Devils Tower was to the Badlands, we couldn't resist making a small foray in Wyoming to visit it while in the area, since neither of us had seen it before.  On the way, we made a point of driving through Spearfish Canyon - on the recommendation of the camp host we had met in Johnson's Shut-ins State Park back in April.

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The Wall Drug dinosaur bid us a fond "farewell" Saturday morning as we hopped on I-90 and headed east, leaving the Badlands NP area for good.

We had seen a really interesting looking Rest Area on the way to the Badlands, and made a point of stopping to check it out even though it was only 20 miles up the road.

Another 90 miles west/north brought us to the city of Spearfish, which happened to have one of the first Safeway grocery stores we'd seen in weeks.  We had added a number of Safeway for U offer items to our account that morning, and were somewhat surprised to see them all disappear from our account when we signed into their WiFi.  We composed a new shopping list from the new set of (apparently regional) Safeway for U offers presented and finished our restocking run.

We didn't know much about Spearfish Canyon, so we found this interpretive sign at the "start of the road" helpful.

Our first stop was at Bridal Veil Falls.  Nowhere near as tall as Yosemite's version, but still quite impressive and pretty.

We were confused by a roadside parking lot that was marked "Devil's Bathtub", because there was no such thing marked on the map seen above.  There seemed to be a makeshift path leading off from it, which we walked for a little ways, but it just kept going and going.  We finally returned to the T42 and fired up the WeBoost, getting enough signal to do a very slow Google search that revealed the hike would take at least an hour and "Throughout the hike you will have to cross the stream several times, most likely.  Often times trees and rocks provide makeshift bridges that you can attempt to cross on." - which we took to mean it was pretty much guaranteed that you'd get your feet wet at one point or another.  We decided to pass, settling for this photo of a little dam by the parking lot instead.

The signage in the Spearfish Falls / Roughlock Falls area was somewhat confusing.  We parked in the lot by this sign here, but the hike from the Upper Spearfish Falls Observation Deck...

...down to the Lower Observation Deck and back was only half the distance stated on the sign for some reason.

We didn't find a real Sasquatch on the trail, but this wooden sea serpent was guarding a section of it on the way back.

Guessing that all the trail lengths on the sign might be overestimated, we decided to just hike up to Roughlock Falls from our current parking spot rather than drive up to one of the lots further up the narrow gravel road.  It turns out our guess was wrong, and we're not exactly sure where they were measuring the "1 mile" from.  But the combined hike ended up being 3.2 miles, with an elevation gain of 270 feet.

We spied these very large birds nests in the trees on our way back.  We're guessing they're Turkey Vulture nests, but nothing came in/out while we were there, so we don't know for sure.

Leaving Spearfish Canyon behind, we crossed over into Wyoming at 6:21.

We pulled into the little town of Sundance around 7 p.m., where we'd be overnighting in the parking lot of the Travel Center (photo actually taken at 6:30 a.m. the next morning).

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Sunday morning, we filled up gas at the Travel Center, did a dump/fill at the Rest Area across the freeway, and were back on the road headed towards Devils Tower by 8 a.m.  We got our first glimpse of the Tower in the distance about a half hour later.

As we approached the Visitor Center parking area, we noticed there were large RV/Bus parallel parking spots on the side of the road, but we decided to try our luck in the main lot first.  We were rewarded with a primo parking spot right by the trailhead, that was more than large enough for the T42 to fit in.

We checked out the Visitor Center first, and were amused to see that they had a photo of the 1977 alien landing there.

There are two main trails at Devils Tower, and we decided to hike both - starting with Tower Trail, which is a 1.5 mile paved trail that circles fairly close around the Tower.  It never occurred to us before that the Tower isn't symmetrical, and changes its shape depending on what side you're looking at it from. 

The Red Beds Trail does a much wider 2.8 mile loop around the tower.  It's unpaved with a fair amount of elevation change (450 feet total, as measured by Apple) so the Tower isn't even visible from large portions of the trail.

About 45 minutes into the hike, we finally got a view of the Red Beds the trail was leading to.  Despite being fairly high above the entrance road, we could still clearly hear the "cheep cheep" barking of the prairie dogs in the field on the far side.

From our vantage point, we could also see that quite a line had formed at the entrance station to get into the Monument.

NPS had set up a "selfie stand" by the parking lot, so we decided to give it a whirl before leaving.

We also thought about taking Devils Tower along with us on the roof; but once again - "weight limits"! 😞

On the way out, we stopped by the prairie dog field.  But it appeared to be lunch time in Prairie Dogland:  a lot of eating, and not a lot of cuteness going on.

Somewhat oddly, the ranch on the corner of Devils Tower Monument Road and Highway 24 seems to raise both bison and longhorn cattle, which makes photos like this possible.

With our day at Devils Tower completed, our little incursion into Wyoming was over and we headed north, crossing over into Montana at 3:40 p.m. on our way to North Dakota.

Our time in Montana was supposed to be very short, according to Google Maps - just nicking a small corner to pass through a small corner of South Dakota to get to our intended destination in North Dakota.  We discovered at a very inopportune time that the route that Google wanted us to take involved a crap gravel road for 21 miles (that she claimed had a speed limit of 70 mph; nothing was posted, but we were skeptical that any vehicle could've gone 70 on that road without being shaken apart, and we certainly weren't willing to try in the T42).  Unfortunately by the time we started down said road, we had no cell reception at all and couldn't re-route using Apple Maps or Waze.  Luckily, the T42's built-in navigation (using TomTom maps) knew the area - down to warning us that we were currently on an unpaved road - and offered us a more sane route that had us traveling an "extra" 40 miles (avoiding South Dakota all together) in order to stay on paved roads.  (And so began the policy of pre-vetting all routes the night before using at least two different mapping programs, finding out later that Waze also knows how to avoid unpaved roads.)  So here are some bonus Montana road photos.

We crossed over into North Dakota just before 6 p.m. and the landscape started changing a few minutes later.

That night we stayed at the Gascoyne Lake Campground, a free campground just outside of Scranton, ND (read as "out in the middle of nowhere").  It was an extremely windy night and we had the entire campground to ourselves (except for a couple of prairie dogs hiding in the lawn).   As we climbed into bed that night, we hoped that Scranton had no ax murderers...