June 25 - Badlands Backcountry

I got up early and drove to Sage Creek. A more remote campground without any water. I was headed for an over night in the backcountry. My plan was to walk for an hour to an hour and 15 minutes and camp somewhere to the south east of sage creek. I was travelling up the middle fork of the creek.

	I stopped along the road to Sage creek and took some pictures. These are from Panorama Point.
	This is from the Yellow Mountains scenic turnout.
	This is my last shot of my car as I'm headed out. The Bison in the background are sitting directly in my way. I had to take a long detour around them. A couple of them watched me quizically as I walked around.
	This is the trail and a shot looking back. There was no "official" trail. Any seen in these pictures are probably made by Bison and ended soon after I took these pictures. This is the first part of the journey where I had to use a compas and pay close attention to the map.
	I followed a ravine up into the back country. As I came out at the top of the ravine the prarie opened up into hills that were lifeless and felt like walking on the moon.
	This is the "moon walk" portion of the hike.
	After about an hour and a half I setup my tent as far away from the traces of Bison as I could find. Which wasn't far. Bison trails and tracks crisscrossed the are. I'm about 40 feet from a major thoroughfare. I was hoping to see more of the "Badlands" type terrain, but didn't want to get too far from the car as I knew I had a long drive ahead of me in the morning and wanted to get an early start. I was going to try to make it to Arches, but figured I would probably end up camping somewhere in Colorado.
	After I got situated I headed out to do a short hike. I went to the top of a bluff so I could get a good look around.
	I hiked through this yellow canyon until I came upon this lone Bison. He watched me intently as I made my way around him. He kept turning to face me so I kept an even bigger distance than I normally would have. Normally it would be about 100 yards.
	After I got around him he started heading west. Towards my tent. I figured we were going to meet up again.
	I got back to my tent in the evening and could see the Bison still heading west. He was about 1/4 of a mile to the north of me and I watched him until sunset as I sat and wrote postcards, ate dinner and wrote in my journal. The last picture is of the sunset. A group of coyotes travelled up the ravine to the north of me as the sun went down. I could here the braying of Bison all night long, but they may have been mountain goats? It was a perfect camp site.
	I awoke at around 4:30 and for some reason sat up to look around. I found the horizon completely on fire. It is one of the most amazing sunrises/sunsets I have ever seen. The first two pictures are a bit blury because the digital doesn't do well in low light. The middle picture is my favorite. This is one of those times when I wished I had my real film camera. There were a few others later in the trip as well. Next time I think I'll bring both a digital and a film camera. In the grand canyon I tried to make a drawing of this sunrise. I like the way the drawing turned out.
	Some pictures as I packed out of the backcounty. There were a number of locations where I had to take long detours around Bison sitting directly in the easiest path. At one point I had to hike down into a ravine and came back up around 100 feet from a Bison. I must have startled him because he took off in the other direction and it was one of the strangest things I've seen. It looked he had springs on his feet and was hoping (on pogos) away. Boing Boing Boing. I got a good laugh.
	These two trees look like the have arms and I came up with a caption as I walked by them. "If you keep it up you're not going to have a leg to stand on!"

The rest of the day I drove through Colorado. It rained most of the way across the Rockies. I really wanted to take a shower, but never passed an RV park the entire day. It got dark quick as I came to Grand Rapids and I headed for The Colorado National Monument not knowing if they had a campground or not. They did and I put my tent up in the dark. I had eated on the road and basically went straight to sleep.

Previous | Next | Home