BOXES 46-48: NORTH DAKOTA, MONTANA, WYOMING.

Until 1971 I had never been farther west than Madison, WI, so it was with great anticipation that I took a train from Cleveland to Minot, ND (presumably with a change of train in Chicago), to meet up with my friend Gary for a car trip farther west, to Yellowstone.

Arguably the most scenic part of the train route from Cleveland to Minot is the stretch starting with the hills near La Crosse, WI, and continuing along the Mississippi River in Minnesota. Here are some views from the train window, including my first crossing of the Mississippi:

Night fell sometime beyond the Twin Cities, but dawn arrived just as we pulled into Minot:

I have no other photos of Minot, or any of Gary's new college--just of our driving trip as we headed toward Montana en route to Yellowstone. The following pictures are vistas from the car window of Western ND, where the sky really did look bigger, vaster, than it did over any flat land I'd ever passed through in Ohio:

Following our crossing into Montana the terrain was pretty much upland prairie with gradual appearance of rocky outcrops and badlands:

We decided to stay overnight in Billings, since we had driven enough for the first day, and the town looked interesting because of the high bluff rising above it. We drove up to the top of the bluff, where I took one of my favorite pictures of the trip, looking down on cattle, as well as a few pics looking outward:

The column near the the sign that says "Muggins Taylor" marks Billings' Boot Hill Cemetery; Taylor led a colorful and violent life, according to what I can now find online. So we were indeed Out West at this point in our trip. Looking for something to do that evening, we went to a movie at the Big Sky Drive-In at the foot of the bluff. The feature oddly fitted into the setting: The Horsemen, a John Frankenheimer film partly shot in equally rugged Afghanistan, in which Omar Sharif competes in a brutal Afghani horseback game-- polo-on-steroids, we might say nowadays.

The next morning we headed south-southeast toward Wyoming and the eastern entrance to the park, near Yellowstone Lake--a 2-to-3-hour drive.

I'm not sure what the stream is in two of the above photos--maybe a branch of the Yellowstone River east of the park. In the pictures that follow, we are clearly in the park itself, because of the high-country vistas--those are moose in the second photo, according to my memory, not the resolution--and the iconic black bears posing near the cars, though these particular snapshots are not exactly classics.

There had been a long traffic jam on the road leading up to the park entrance, so it was a bit later in the day when the above photos were taken. We drove along Yellowstone Lake to the famous hot springs area, where I clearly was fascinated by the phenomena, since I took a good number of photos. Some of them seem to show frost, though of course these are mineral deposits.

And right nearby was Old Faithful. Here you see the path leading up to that tourist favorite, followed by the beginnings of an eruption and the full force:

We looked at other thermal activity as well:

We must have spent the rest of the afternoon in this area, since my next pictures are of the sunset:

As I recall, we hadn't called ahead to make reservations for a place to sleep, and it turned out that there was nothing available in the geyser area. (Who would have thought it?! Obviously we weren't very savvy travelers.) Fortunately we did find lodging in cabins just beyond the park entrance to the south, between Yellowstone and Grand Teton Parks. It surprises me now that we didn't spend more days seeing Yellowstone--or at the very least driving north to see Yellowstone Falls. Did Gary have to get back for summer school, or did our budgets permit only a few nights' lodging? (Camping didn't even occur to us strictly urban types.) But we had a great time seeing the Grand Tetons and driving eastward through Wyoming to the Black Hills, as I'll show in the next post.