It's hard to imagine how anything grows in that barren land, but small trees, flowers, and lichen are all over the area. It's a stark beauty that you see all around you. We rode the loop around the park stopping here and there to walk around and see it close up. At the Inferno Cone you can hike up to the top which is like walking up a mound of crumbled asphalt. It's totally black, but when you pick up little rocks you realize it is completely porus and thus very light. The wind that day was really howling up on top and I tried to record a little bit of video so I could show how windy it was. It was about 40 mph steady with faster gusts now and then. It didn't really dawn on me at the time, but that wind was going to haunt us later.
Leaving Craters, we headed east toward Arco and Idaho Falls, but battled those crosswinds the whole way. I don't really have anything nice to say about that ride and southern Idaho other than we endured it. The road was straight, the land barren, and the winds brutal. I've checked with the other guys and only Grant took some video from which a snapshot is on the left. Pretty ugly, huh? It looks like that for 360 degrees. From Craters to Idaho Falls is about 85 miles and we fought the wind the whole time. We paused for gas in Idaho Falls and then continued on into the mountains away from the wind. Looking at the mountains in front of us I was happy to be out of the wind, but it was threatening rain up there, so we got suited up with rain gear before we got into the wet.
We rode through Victor and up into Teton Pass in the rain, heading down into Jackson a little after 9pm. We tried to find a hotel, but couldn't find anything that wasn't awfully expensive, but finally got connected up with the KOA about 12 miles out of town and crammed into one of their Kabins.
Again we had showers and a stove but no tents. I slept on my cot, but everyone else had a bed or at least a mattress. After such a brutal day we re-evaluated the rest of the trip. The targets east - Mt. Rushmore, Devil's Tower, and the Custer Battlefield - were out. It would just take too long and we'd have to ride a long way across a very boring part of Wyoming to get to South Dakota. That would have to be on a different trip. For now we would ride as far as we wanted, but by 4-5pm we'd start looking for place to camp.
Monday, July 8th
When we got up the next morning, the sun was shining and the rain was gone. Tim, Dave, and I walked over to the office which had some breakfast stuff to buy, so we had a little bit to eat. While there we found out that God was watching over us with our late entry into Jackson. They told us that they had a really bad hail storm last night. Had we been much earlier we'd have ridden right through it. I'm glad we missed that!
Tom Clark
I'm a Senior Software Engineer at Intellitect, living in Spokane, Washington. I also do a little development work on the side. And I love riding motorcycles all over the country with my friends.
