drewish.com

(Day 36) Ants on the Floor of God's Kitchen

[New mailing address till 7/19/01 or so:
(Andrew Morton
c/o) Brad Bynum
General Delivery
Correctionville, IA 51016 ]

7/6/01
I woke up with all of four hours of sleep and got back to work on my computer. My plan was just to get Windows 2000, Apache and the SQL server going so I could restore from an old backup. The whole thing was pretty silly; before I could even get Windows halfway installed, the floppy drive went out. I gave up on the computer, packed it up and started working on the backup plan. [Chris has come through yet again and setup a new website for me. I'm not sure what's up there now but you might want to check out http://www.armory.com/~drewish/ ]

Chris drove Brad and me into Cooke City and I bought him lunch for all his trouble. We stuck our heads into some tourist shops and I got some post cards that I won't get around to mailing for a while.

Back in Silver Gate I said good bye to Chris and started packing up my stuff. We'd been looking at the map and decided that we'd rather not go back out through the park. To the north was Beartooth Pass, at almost 11,000 ft it was a Big Hill. I asked myself "What Would Joe Lane Do?" but there was no obvious answer. Would he ride back through the park to see Old Faithful and Yellowstone Lake which while amaizing are covered with tourists? Or would he push up the evil 3000+ ft climb for a new highest point of the trip on a sketchy two lane winding road that would take us 40 or 50 miles out of the way? The more I thought about it the less I was sure.

We went down to ask Kevin, one of the researchers, what he thought. He told us about a road that wasn't on our map. The Chief Joeseph Highway was actually the fastest way to Cody and Dead Indian Pass was only 8048 ft. Now I didn't think Joe Lane would go for that but since the weather wasn't looking good I didn't think he'd want to be stuck half way up Beartooth Pass in a storm either. The extra day it would take to get through the park was soundinq worse and worse so Dead Indian Pass won by default.

We met up with Jackie in Cooke City and as we were saying goodbye it started to rain. It stayed with us for a few miles but as we dropped into Wyoming the weather and the roads got better.

The scenery was mind-blowing and best of all there were almost no cars. I don't think I can even begin to describe the sunset. We pulled off the road looking at a possible camping spot but ended up standing there staring at the sky until it after it was dark. Being in between those towering mountains really puts you in your place. You're just this tiny little ant on the floor of a kitchen. But as big as the mountains around you are, they're just little bumps on a big ball of rock floating out in a lot of nothing. Some how we got it into our heads that we'd like to look at a picture of that ball of rock and say to ourselves "I moved myself across that little piece of that".

andrew

Comments

Post a comment