I Love My Life

I love my life. I am so grateful that I am able to travel.

Today, though, I am not traveling. I am stranded in the Black Hills of South Dakota in a blizzard. We have 10-12” of snow outside. I’m staying here until the snow stops and melts enough for me to travel the roads. There are lots of sites I want to visit in this area. Most of them I have seen before, but want to check on again. So this is a great time to continue my blog, which I have ignored for a while. I’ll highlight some places I loved.

I stayed in the Redding/Red Bluff area of California for a time waiting for a part to come to get my rig fixed. California is so desperately in need of water. One of the parks had little pools of water that the ducks usually enjoyed. There were signs with warnings about using the pools. They didn't need them this year because all the pools were dry. The ducks pretty much ignored the signs anyway.

One of the sites in the area was the Lasson Volcanic National Park. It has all 4 types of volcanoes within it. The last to erupt was Lassen Peak. Since it was winter, a number of the roads were closed, so I couldn’t get to the geysers and bubbling pools. I thought the roads might be open because the snow cover this year over the park was a fraction of a normal year.

In the years  1914 - 1917 many small explosions took place after a 27,000 year-long sleep. Then on May 19, 1915 a large explosion sent hot lava blocks down the side of Lassen Peak. On the 22nd of May, 7 men including a photographer were examining the devastation from the explosion, and 5 hours after they left Lasson Peak exploded again.

Volcanic ash and gas rose higher than 30,000 feet. Hot rocks were thrown a long distance from the peak. One man was awakened by his dog. He got up thinking there was an animal outside and when he looked out the window, he saw the lava moving down the sides of the volcano and rocks being thrown out the top. Time to leave!! The explosion devastated a huge area, which is now, uniquely enough, named the Devastation area. You can see all these lava rocks sitting around. One in particular was quite large.

I mosied down to Sacramento and spent a day with my cousin. That’s another great thing about traveling. I hadn’t seen my cousin for about 20 years. We spent a great time talking and talking and then visiting the state house.  What a beautiful building! Later my cousin’s husband joined us and we had dinner and saw a play. It was so great seeing them. Cousins are very special.

I visited Columbia which is a great little town representing a gold mining town in the mid-1800s. It had a blacksmith shop, a barn for carriages, a place to pan for gold, and more. What I liked most was the Wells Fargo office. They had all these old packages and trunks from the mid-1850s. They also had a mission bell from the El Camino. Valerie and I had seen these and wondered what they were. And here I found out.

I’ve realized that I like to visit trains and fish hatcheries. Was I a fish-eating conductor in a past life? I went to Railtown in Jamestown, CA.

This location features one of 2 continuously operating steam locomotive roundhouses in the U.S. It also features the Sierra Railway #3 - the movie train. Its movie credits include  High Noon, Back to the Future III, among others. Its TV credits include “Gunsmoke,” “Petticoat Junction” and many more. I lucked out because the day I visited they were getting the locomotives ready for the summer, so I saw them blowing their steam.

I traveled to the desert, staying a couple weeks in Desert Hot Springs. The campground was great - they had hot springs galore - about 7 of them in my section.  It was right near Palm Springs, and I took a tour there.  I thought it was more than celebrities’ houses, but it wasn’t.

I did get a kick out of Liberache’s mailbox - a piano, and the fact that we saw that Leonardo Di Caprio was getting ready for a party. None of us got a kick out of the fact that owners hired gardeners to wash down their driveways. Do they not know there is a water crisis?

Next on my agenda was Colorado. I stayed near Boulder and Denver, in Golden. I visited my niece and her fiancée quite a bit. That, of course, was fantastic. We took advantage of a few Happy, Happy, Happy Hours, and brewing establishments. I like Boulder’s atmosphere.

I’ve taken a few walking tours of homes this trip, a lot of them Victorian. One I went into in Denver was terrific, because of the owner, not the home. It was the home of Molly Brown. What a woman!! She got the name the Unsinkable Molly Brown when she survived the sinking of the Titanic. On the Titanic she was helping others get into the lifeboats, using her knowledge of many different languages.

She put all her clothes on, and then took off layers to keep others warm. She was literally picked up and put in a lifeboat. Molly Brown constantly fought for the rights of others, particularly miners and children. She ran for Senate 3 times before women even had the right to vote. As I said, what a woman!!!!

I've also visited quite a few museums. One I enjoyed very much was the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver. I like his work from the 1920s into the 1940s, before he was a full abstract expressionist. I also loved the Jim Gatchell Memorial Museum in Buffalo, WY. You can’t take pictures there since many of the articles are very meaningful to different people, and recording the images dishonors their contributions. Jim Gatchell was a most interesting and honorable man. He opened a drugstore and was an equal friend to the white settlers and the native Indians. He was known to them as a medicine man, dispersing some of the medicines from his pharmacy. There are so many stories attached to each of the articles in the museum. I think I spent 3 hours there and didn’t see everything. There were boards and boards and boards of old pictures which were unique and informative. They had a mounted head of a jackalope and a story of a few guys who finally got this elusive wildlife. I first heard about the jackalope (half jackrabbit; have antelope) in Jackson Hole, WY 45 years ago.  I was very impressed to read this long story and see the trophy head.

In Cheyenne, WY I stayed at the Terry Bison Ranch. I played the washboard in the band and went out to feed the buffalo during the day.  I told Tawny she should have one of those tongues. They also had camels at this ranch - started with 5 about 5 years ago, and now have 6. One of the cowboys said if they drop a baby in the winter it wouldn’t make it. He said the camels were too tall for the barn. I told him they should build a taller barn.

I was very glad I stayed for a few days in Buffalo, WY. I ate and drank at the Occidental Hotel which Butch Cassidy, Calamity Jane and other well-known outlaws frequently visited. I also followed the cattle wars and the cavalry-native Indian wars. Then I went to Sundance and got wrapped up in The Sundance Kid’s exploits. But the most interesting site to me was the Vore Buffalo Jump.

When they were building Rte 90 through Beulah, WY they found a mass of bones, stopped digging and called the archeologists. One of the ranchers gave the highway department some of his land to move 90, and the site of the buffalo jump continued to be researched. Between 1550 and 1800 a number of tribes used this location to trap buffalo. At the time they hunted by foot, not horse, and it was difficult to kill as many buffalo as they needed to get through the winter. The tribes joined forces and tricked the buffalo, sometimes posing as one, to stampede toward this sinkhole with high walls. The buffalo jumped off the ridge and into the pit. The natives then went down into the pit, made sure the buffalo were dead and took pretty much everything off the buffalo for food, clothing, grease, tanning oil, etc. They found 21 different layers of bone. Through oral histories as well as the archeological findings they recreated what happened so many years ago. I found this fascinating. And I really lucked out because they were not due to open for weeks but they had a group of students and the board members came out to show them the site.

Now I’m in the coach in the middle of a foot of snow, listening to a man play songs on his tuba. Could it get any better?