A Little Trouble in the Bighorn Mountains
Disclaimer: the cover image is not my own (as if you couldn’t tell), it’s from pond5.com, we were too engaged in active survival to snap any photos of the following experience.
We reached Wyoming after nightfall, so it was hard to tell exactly what its landscapes consisted of other than shadows and stars. I had been driving for around three hours when we stopped off for the old American road trip staple: McDonald’s. This particular Mickey D’s was so secluded that we shocked the employees merely by entering. They were sitting on the counter, bullshitting loudly about last week’s party when we walked in, briefly shutting them up as they watched us walk into the bathrooms and then returned to their conversation. It was sort of a weird experience. On Long Island, fast food managers run the show like god damn Mussolini.
After that it was time to return to the road, only difference was it was Gabby’s turn to drive and my turn to try and write this whole thing down. I had my head buried in my laptop for all of fifteen minutes when I began to notice some sounds of unease coming from the driver’s seat. I looked up to see that we were chugging upward into dark Wyoming mountains. Squinting my eyes, I could swear I saw snow.
The GPS read something like 75 miles until the next turn, which led me to believe we were about to take on an entire mountain range in the middle of absolutely nowhere, sometime around midnight. Gabby whimpered. I rubbed her shoulder and suggested that I drive. She refused, probably because she knew how badly I needed to write.
I couldn’t write.
Things started to get more serious. Our phones lost service entirely. The night became so thick that even our high beams struggled to cut through. Soon tiny foreboding snowflakes were beginning to cling to the windshield. The roads were narrow and winding and icy. We slowed to a crawl to get ourselves safely past the most daunting downward curves, knuckles white, toes clenched in shoes. There was not a single sign of civilization for over an hour. No other cars, no homes, no stores, just endless, sinister nature. Gabby was totally panicked, but she persevered. I was just as panicked myself, but I kept my mouth shut, glancing over every so often at the gas meter which read just above a quarter tank
image via AutoGuide.com
Every little thing we passed in those dark mountains seemed to take on this air of total malevolence. Road signs leered, trees mocked, shadows taunted. We passed a number of sullen deer on the roadside, eyes glowing, waiting to leap out into the road and send us swerving.
Somewhere in the blackness we made out the silhouettes of two massive moose. That part was honestly awesome, but also it was absolutely terrifying.
It seemed like hours before we came out of those god-awful crags. Looking back at the immense rock formations as we cruised safely out, I wondered how beautiful it would have been had we seen it all in the daytime.
I was incredibly proud of Gabby for sticking to her pre-trip mantra of “feel the fear but do it anyway.” She was amazing navigating us through that treacherous hellscape. She even managed to avoid a deer that ran out directly in front of the van somewhere just beyond the town of Tensleep (pop. 250) as if to give us one last gasp before we rolled into the little Roundtop Mountain Motel in Thermopolis at about 1:30 in the morning. Our first encounter with utter peril behind us, we slept damn well.
Roundtop Mountain Motel image via Thermopolis.com
In the morning we were packing our car up for the trip out to Yellowstone when Liz, the owner of the motel, came outside to greet us. She was absolutely lovely; cordial and friendly as could be. We told her about our harrowing night in the Bighorn mountains. She laughed, probably more about how clearly out-of-town we were than anything else, and then let us know that we were better off having gone through all of that at night, so that we couldn’t see how many of the roads we traversed were on the side of sheer, gut-wrenching cliffs.
Turned out Liz had been to Yellowstone about a week or two before and she gave us a bit of the lowdown on the place as she knew it. She told us that almost all of the traffic jams we might come across in the park were people pulling over to get a better look at some form of wildlife. Gabby and I looked at each other excitedly each time she listed another creature she’d seen there. Funny thing was that she thought the traffic jams, and in a way the animals that caused them, were just a silly nuisance. She said most of what she’d seen was all around the town of Thermopolis anyway.
“There’s a Bison watering hole right around the corner,” she told us with a smile and shrug.
It made me wonder how many fantastic things I completely overlook every day of my life back on Long Island.
We said our goodbyes to Liz, and her little kitten Timber, and packed it in for the long and beautiful road out to the mighty, glowing Yellowstone National Park.
