We

Stayed up really late watching L.A. Confidential on the hotel TV.

Ate our Cheerios out of the plastic bowls we bought at the Missoula Albertsons.

Got on the road by 11am.

Drove toward a bigger and bigger sky with schools of puffy clouds.

Changed drivers at a Butte Town Pump.

Drove up the gorgeous Yellowstone river valley, where every house is a B&B and snowcapped mountains dwarf the buttes, which hug the gilded trees that flank the sky-filled river.

Ate lunch at the Absaroka rest stop on Hiway 89, where I stopped last time on the way to Yellowstone. The wind was blowing like crazy so we packed our lunch over to the windbreak-protected picnic table area. Then we walked back up the road a little to a wayside chapel misadvertised as a meditation point. It was teeny and cute and loaded with dogmatic literature and agitated and dead flies. One brochure, Everyone is Pierced!, had a picture of a pierced up counterculture guy on the cover. Inside it said things like "We are just born selfish and self-centered, choosing to defy authority from from birth. That's called sin." and "There is NO body jewelry that will do for the hole pierced by sin. Except 2,000 year old... NAILS!" (Emphasis all theirs, man.)

I don't know how all the flies got in, but they couldn't get out. They swarmed the only clear window, buzzing and slapping against it in an otherwise eerie quiet. Many more fly carcasses littered the alter and the bible that was open upon it. Lots of death there. Picturesque, though.

All right, so moving down the road we

Stopped and got ice cream and coffee in Gardiner.

Entered a deserted Yellowstone, all rusty and golden with fall.

Saw a bunch of elk at the park headquarters in Mammoth Springs and stood by as the gigantic bull elk bugled (and was answered by a far off, unseeable bugler) and pursued female elk with his tongue. Later we read that this is elk mating season and that the bulls become so engorged with hormones that they thrash on the forest, bugling as they go, and basically fucking aplenty. By the end of winter, their fat reserves are depleted, with the most active bulls becoming so weak by springtime that they are vulnerable to wolf attack.

We had time to walk around Mammoth Springs and then drove for Old Faithful. On the way, elk and buffalo galore. At one point, a herd of buffalo crossed the road in front of us and it was so cool to watch them all, from the giant ones to the little babies, sauntering across the pavement.

Otherwise, boiling earth.

We hunted for park-side lodging but the Inn was booked and looked expensive anyway. We ate and drove out to West Yellowstone, where we are now, at the Westwood Inn, this cute! little log cabin drive-up accomodation. It's got a kitchenette and a real, fuzzy bathmat, and a lamp with a saddle stirrup base, and a giant photo of buffalo on the range, Oh, and a kitchen table with chairs and woodpaneling and an easy chair and a rack for fishing poles or really long guns, and a fir tree right outside the door. What else? Hooks everywhere!