I'm diggin' these hotels. Old and cheap. This one in Casper, Wyoming, the Westridge Motel on CY Ave is vintage. The furnishings and bathroom fixtures are original, early 1960's. The hues of the place are super saturated and I feel like I'm in a David Lynch movie. Got black vinyl seats and vermilion curtains. Mint green bathroom tile halfway up the walls and the rest of the walls are painted bright yellow. Got this great stainless steel Kleenex holder from ancient times hung on the wall still holding Kleenex.
A family from the Indian subcontinent runs the place and the young man holding down the counter was very nice. I mean, very nice. And helpful. Not like that woman in Missoula who came out from the back room missing a couple of teeth and scratching her ass through a thinning nightgown. With her, I felt like I was in a $39 hotel. Here, it feels like a total deal for $35. Thirty-five! Cheap!
Yesterday and the day before I was in Yellowstone mostly. I did this funny thing I do which is try to make everything happen the way I want it to happen and so rather than focusing on one area of the park I decided I'd drive around the whole thing and then bike the stretch from a point called Madison to Old Faithful. The deal is the drive is a lot longer than it looks and the days are getting shorter.
I did the drive, slowed by lines of cars creeping along and stopping and gawking at moose and bison. (The ranger at the Grant-Kohr Ranch was wrong about the crowds but too crowded it was not really. Yosemite must be intolerable.) Was too tired and the light too low to ride that night so decided to camp and ride first thing in the morning. Stopped at Old Faithful by car though, ate dinner there and waited around for the geyser to blow and it did just about on time. And just about on time I called the Madison campground and got in just before they closed.
Next morning I got on the bike and started a longish elevation gain. My damn knee started aching immediately and about halfway up the long grade a man on a bike caught me. He was a Boeing engineer who lives in Stanwood! He pulled me up the rest of the hill at 17 mph then pulled over to wait for his family. I went on toward Old Faithful. The road turned and the way flattened. A formidable headwind started to pound. At one point the bike rolled 9 mph downhill and my knee couldn't take it. I ended up turning around at 12.5 miles and the turnaround made the difference. Suddenly I took that same hill upward at 23.
Max speed = 39.8 mph.
The landscape was amazing. Up there the earth boils. Steam plumes and rainbow-colored pools flank the road. A forest fire obliterated the park in 1988 (I did not see any part of the park untouched by it) and most hillsides are covered in skeletons. The whole area appears scorched. It was like the Land of the Lost and I felt like a super-evolved bug buzzing through on my bike like that.
I stopped at one geyser—Sapphire Pool,I think—walked the bike through the trail around it. It was my favorite spot, a giant pool striated in rainbow colors from minerals, bacteria and heat. Forceful gusts swept the surface of steam and carried it and the heat and the sulphuric odor over us, obscuring our view of the geyser, ourselves, and the path. Some big hot kiss from the devil that steam so hot and wet all over our bodies.
It didn't take long to tire of the crowds circulating in buses and SUVs. Throughout Yellowstone and all the way through Teton these things crowded and slowed the roads. This is not my idea of wilderness. I hate crowded parks. Wasn't until HWY 287 heading west across Wyoming were they lost, miraculously held captive by the National Parks, as though stuck in endless loops.
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