"I looked into a gulf 1700' deep, with eagles
and fish-hawks circling far below. And the sides of that gulf were one wild
welter of colour--crimson, emerald, cobalt, ochre, amber, honey splashed with
port wine, snow-white, vermilion, lemon, and silver-grey, in wide washes. The
sides did not fall sheer, but were graven by time and water and air into
monstrous heads of kings, dead chiefs, men and women of the old time. So far
below that no sound of its strife could reach us, the Yellowstone River ran--a
finger-wide strip of jade-green. The sunlight took those wondrous walls and gave
fresh hues to those that nature had already laid there. Once I saw dawn break
over a lake in Rajputana and the sun set over the Oodey Sagar amid a circle of
Holman Hunt hills. This time I was watching both performances going on below
me--upside down, you understand--and the colours were real! The canyon was
burning like Troy town; but it would burn forever, and thank goodness, neither
pen nor brush could ever portray its splendours adequately."
--- Rudyard Kipling, 1889
"It is my opinion that we enclose and celebrate the freaks of our nation and
of our civilization. Yellowstone National Park is no more representative of
America than is Disneyland."
--- John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley, 1962
Yellowstone was our first national park and it is my personal
favorite. Nowhere else in the world does one find mountain scenery, thermal
moonscapes, noble wildlife, raging waterfalls, and painted canyons all in the
same place.
Head northwest for Butte, Montana, once one of the richest towns in America,
the population has been shrinking since the copper mines closed. Downtown bears
the mark of easy fortunes and is strewn with once-fancy shops and magnificent
bank buildings. Visit the Berkeley Pit overlook to see the 1800' deep hole
filling up with water, reversing the effects of years of drainage and threatening
to turn half the town back into a swamp. Furthermore, the tailings contain enough
arsenic and cyanide to make this one of the most notorious Superfund sites. On
the bright side, though, you can buy a nice house in Butte for between $6,000 and
$18,000.
Missoula is a strangely beguiling cross between Western misfit loner culture
and Cambridge/Berkeley granola culture. In the words of one local, "an easy place
to get by, but a hard place to get ahead." I planned to stay one night and ended
up staying three. Missoula helped me understand John Steinbeck: "Montana seems to
me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans."
Head north to
Glacier National Park. Stay in the Outlaw Inn in Kalispell, where the cast of
Heaven's Gate stayed while $44 million was being spent, ultimately
bankrupting United Artists. Drive over Going to the Sun road, which doesn't
usually open until mid-June when they dynamite the remaining snow up at the
6,680' summit. Visit the parking lot on the edge of Two Medicine Lake where the
town of Sweetwater was built for Heaven's Gate.
- Total mileage: about 600
- Best time of year: before or after public school summer break
If you are actually planning to take this trip, you may wish to look at the
user-contributed
Related Links page.
Return
to the Great Trips index page
philg@mit.edu
"I looked into a gulf 1700' deep, with eagles
and fish-hawks circling far below. And the sides of that gulf were one wild
welter of colour--crimson, emerald, cobalt, ochre, amber, honey splashed with
port wine, snow-white, vermilion, lemon, and silver-grey, in wide washes. The
sides did not fall sheer, but were graven by time and water and air into
monstrous heads of kings, dead chiefs, men and women of the old time. So far
below that no sound of its strife could reach us, the Yellowstone River ran--a
finger-wide strip of jade-green. The sunlight took those wondrous walls and gave
fresh hues to those that nature had already laid there. Once I saw dawn break
over a lake in Rajputana and the sun set over the Oodey Sagar amid a circle of
Holman Hunt hills. This time I was watching both performances going on below
me--upside down, you understand--and the colours were real! The canyon was
burning like Troy town; but it would burn forever, and thank goodness, neither
pen nor brush could ever portray its splendours adequately."
