Midwest Memories

“Have you ate yet?” The voice called out from a small group gathered at a nearby campfire as I made my way toward the river in the gathering dusk. Before long we had joined Bruce, the source of the inquiry and a cook at the local Mexican restaurant, and the camping couple from South Carolina he was visiting for drinks and bacon-topped pork loin with carrots and potatoes, all wrapped in foil packets and roasted in the campfire. Visiting daughter, son-in-law and three kids drove up, and soon it was a party at the city campground on the St. Louis River in Cloquet, MN.
It was the beginning of our stay in the Midwest, whose residents proved to be consistently chipper, chatty and cheery. Where else would the gas station guy run ahead so he could open the door for you? Everyone seemed so genuinely nice.
North Dakota’s rain carried through to Minnesota, but we liked what we saw of Bemidji’s pretty residential neighborhoods. Michigan’s Upper Peninsula was deep forest and gorgeous beaches that could double for the California coast, delicious Cornish pasties and signs that advertised “Bear Bait” down the road. (OK, it’s not Yellowstone, but still…)
We moved into Wisconsin and bought succulent smoked whitefish from the Halvorsen dock in Cornucopia, “Wisconsin’s northernmost village,” on the shores of Lake Michigan. The country was quintessential Wisconsin rural, with picturesque Scandinavian red barns, rolling fields of corn and grazing Holstein dairy cattle.
I eagerly awaited our entry into Door County, the thumb of Wisconsin’s mitten, and a place I remembered lovingly from family vacations a half-century ago. I braced myself for changes that weren’t shocking as I had anticipated. The road still passed through miles of orchards, the limestone soils of the peninsula producing notable cherries and apples. The little towns had condos now and modern inns, but the rustic cabins still remained, along with the skinny white church steeples and bobbing boats in the harbors. Ephraim’s drive-in and 100-year –old Wilson’s ice cream counter were still in operation. And every mailbox and business bore a Scandinavian name. My peeps! Perhaps my love of this place as a child had been genetic. I loved it even more now.
We camped in a sunny spot near the water surrounded by birches and maples in the very campground we’d camped in when I was a child. Little of the park looked familiar, but I remembered singular places, like the Eagle Tower built in the 1930s, which I again climbed to get a bird’s eye view of the islands in the bay and the town of Ephraim in the distance.
We took our bikes on the ferry across Death’s Door to Washington Island and peddled the length of the island, stopping for a local wheat beer at the oldest continually operating tavern in Wisconsin. We passed sun-dappled forests of maple and beech and sweetly pungent dairy farms under cobalt skies, visiting the beach of smooth limestone pebbles that sits on the same Niagara escarpment as the famed New York falls.
But the greatest shock of recognition was a stop at Gills Rock at the tip of the peninsula, where the waters of Green Bay meet Lake Michigan. I remembered coming here with my mother and buying smoked fish wrapped in butcher paper, eating the oily sardine-size chubs while sitting on the rocks and tossing the skins to the hovering gulls.
We stopped at the docks and talked to two men processing fish in a large building. I told them of my memory, of the little outhouse-size shack I remembered. “It’s still there, although it hasn’t been used in years,” they told me. I found the little shack of my memories, but the fish we bought at their store up the road was whitefish. The chubs of my childhood have become so rare they’re no longer fished.
Later in the day, we purchased fresh-off-the-tree Honeycrisp apples from grower Seaquist, who mixed comical tales of tourists in the orchard and histories of apple varieties in a delightful singsong Swedish accent.
Wisconsinites tend toward plump. Traditional fish boils are big in this neck of the woods, cheese curds are popular snacks and restaurants advertise specials like “old-fashioned pot roast.” But an ironic trend has appeared in the restaurants of America’s Dairyland – margarine. Virtually illegal when I was a kid, it was popping up everywhere in restaurants. And when we had Swedish pancakes with lingonberries at Al Johnson’s sod-topped restaurant with goats on the roof, the butter dish held not only margarine, but foil-wrapped pats of butter from Minnesota. Pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/happytwo.mcwilliams/TripEast3MNMIWI?authkey=Gv1sRgCOSojOKV1aXjCg&feat=directlink

Across the Northern Plains

We lost the mountains near Great Falls, entering the rolling hills of prairie land, passing through tiny towns like Big Sandy and Box Elder. Harvested wheat fields sported blond stubble and drying bundles of hay looked like giant cake jelly rolls in the fields.
This was land rich in western history whose glory days had passed. Markers recalled Indian battles, settler expeditions and ambitious river settlements. Now we passed abandoned barns and white frame houses, once rather grand. White metal crosses marked all-too-frequent sites of highway fatalities. We shuddered as we passed several groupings – four in a row, then a pyramid of seven. Tiny towns advertised businesses like Bear Paw Savings & Loan and Montana Lil’s Saloon, but the biggest urban enterprises were the grain elevators and hoppers, the skyscrapers of the prairie.
We paused for a soak in Sleeping Buffalo Hot Springs, a timeworn complex just off the highway. A fat cat held court on the counter of the adjoining gift shop, which sold minnows, snacks and T-shirts proclaiming the area the “Mosquito Capital of Montana.” The enclosed hot springs were like most we’ve seen, steamy and smelling of sulfur, with a general air of decrepitude. The indoor Olympic-sized pool was spooky and dark, but we enjoyed a soak in the extra-hot soaking pool, under the baleful gaze of a bison painted on the wall.
The horizon stretches forever on Montana’s northern plains, where once-prosperous towns parallel the old Great Northern Railway tracks and bear European names like Malta, Glasgow and Havre, none of them resembling their distant namesakes.
Living time capsules, these towns combined ‘50s era neon signs and ornate 19th century stonework. We checked out the old drug store soda fountain in the railroad town of Stanley, and although it was way too early, enjoyed a “whirl-a-whip” custom-blended ice cream for breakfast.
We hit Highway 2 the first evening, the next morning setting out under leaden skies on one of America’s least-traveled highways. Steady winds blew down from nearby Canada; a gentle reminder that winter temperatures in these parts can hit 80 degrees below.
The mineral-rich grasses on these treeless plains once fed a vast sea of buffalo; now a token wild herd is fenced on the Nez Perce reservation. Outlaws like Butch Cassidy knew these plains and Chief Joseph surrendered to the duplicitous U.S. army here, effectively marking the end of the Great Plains Indian wars (and the Indians’ way of life).
The biggest crop in western North Dakota seems to be oil, and we camped for the night on a lake, the rosy glow of oil rig burnoff flames lighting the horizon of the nighttime sky. Heading east the next morning, we shared the road with a steady stream of trucks and equipment bearing names like Halliburton. A few gentle hills and clumps of forest appeared mid-state, along with fields of corn and sunflowers, their seed-heavy heads bending toward the earth.
Suddenly blinding rain and flashes of lightening drove us inside to a late lunch at a roadside café, where we sat in a vinyl booth at a Formica-topped table next to a trio of old-timers playing a friendly game of dice while they enjoyed cookies with mugs of coffee. Most customers, men and women, wore baseball caps. Terry had the walleye special for $8.95 and I had fried chicken, mashed potatoes and green beans for $6.50. The food was delicious. A stone marker outside indicated the geographic center of the U.S. We’re a long way from California.
Tonight we’re in a gorgeous state campground on the Turtle River near the Minnesota border, the only visitors in a forest of towering hardwood trees.
Photos at: http://picasaweb.google.com/happytwo.mcwilliams/TripEast2MTND?authkey=Gv1sRgCILphp6xtcXQHw&feat=directlink

Happy Heads East - Stop 1: Jackson Hole

We moved into Gros Ventre campsite #2 just after lunch, covering the 1046 miles from St. Helena in a day and a half. Scattered groups of pronghorn along the way were the only wildlife we saw; our much-loved bison were AWOL. We hoped they’d show up the next day or so in time to treat our St. Helena friends to a welcoming bison jam.
The owl fledglings had left the nest cavity in the cottonwood tree, spring budding wild rose bushes now bore the ripening red hips of fall and the campground was filled with large rigs running noisy generators. No wonder wildlife was scarce. We wouldn’t visit again over Labor Day weekend.
But the mountains remain immutable and awe-inspiring, the air clear as spring water and the clouds spectacular. We began our first two mornings with long bike rides, breathing hard as we made our way up the long hill from Moose to Windy Point and eventually Jenny Lake. An elk bull with a nervous harem threatened to charge us along this route last year, but we were too early for the rut this time and the meadows were empty except for late-blooming wildflowers of purple and saffron.
Friends Daphne and Chuck arrived with a shaker of icy martinis and excellent Napa Valley wines. We made campfire chicken and dumplings in Terry’s Dutch oven with tomato salad and farmers market corn on the cob, ending the evening at a ranger talk on wolves, where we compared the feel of coyote fur with that of a wolf.
Morning dawned with a pair of moose in the meadow. One of the bulls seemed to spot a small willow just off Happy’s stern and made his way steadily through the sage toward his intended breakfast until suddenly he was just feet away, looming above us. We spooked, he spooked, and while we ran for the door, he bounded across the road just as Daphne and Chuck drove up.
We didn’t get our bison jam, but had a close encounter with a herd enroute to a cookout breakfast on the Snake River where we whiled away the morning watching mergansers and kayakers make their way swiftly downriver as the sun ducked in and out of the clouds.
More campsite martinis, an excellent Penang curry in town and lots of laughs ended our brief rendezvous before we went home to head our separate ways the next morning; our friends off to Idaho and Terry and I north through Yellowstone.
After a morning walk to discover a beaver lodge near the campground, we headed north through Yellowstone, where wildlife did not disappoint. There were elk in the woods and elk lounging on the grounds at Mammoth Hot Springs; there were bison galore, including a meandering herd in the Hayden Valley which held up traffic for the better part of a mile, just because they could. We’re spending the night in Mammoth, one of our favorite spots in the park. After hot showers at the hotel and Wilcoxson’s graham cracker ice cream, we drifted off to sleep while a family of coyotes held a spirited discussion on a nearby hill.
Pictures at: http://picasaweb.google.com/happytwo.mcwilliams/HappyHeadsEast1?authkey=Gv1sRgCJzWjNz0roOJ-QE&feat=directlink

Summer on the horizon

Our last day in America's oldest park began with a hike to Trout Lake, where the resident otters put in a brief appearance, and ended with a couple of black bears – one in the sage and one in a meadow. Yellowstone was generous with bear sightings this year.
We returned to Grand Teton and checked into one of our favorite view campsites at Gros Ventre, visiting the resident baby great horned owls, now huge fledglings out of the nest and flexing their wings. A new moose calf has been born in the campground and an elderly bison has moved in to spend his last days.
We’ve had two long bike rides on Jackson Hole’s wonderful series of paved bike paths, riding past herds of elk and nesting osprey. The nightly ranger programs have resumed at the campground’s amphitheater. Last night’s talk was on ungulates – animals with hooves – illustrated not with Powerpoint slides, but with hides, antlers and skulls.
Even though I earned my junior ranger badge a couple years ago (no upward age limit, thank you) I always gather some new factoids from these presentations. Who knew that moose can dive 20 feet to find underwater vegetation or that elks pass along their particular antler configuration to their offspring?
The sun has been intense, the meadows are beginning to bloom with larkspur and balsam root and it’s hard to believe we woke up to snow a few weeks ago. Returning from a ranger walk this afternoon, Terry picked a bunch of dandelion greens for dinner out on Antelope Flats while I took wildflower pictures. The short Teton summer is nearly here and it’s time to head for home. Pictures at: http://picasaweb.google.com/happytwo.mcwilliams/TetonFinaleSpring2010?authkey=Gv1sRgCJXa05Dg3MDZZg&feat=directlink

Creatures great and small

The mood lightened and the sun came out during the week as we witnessed the birth side of nature’s equation rather than the death. Puffy cumulus clouds floated in a cerulean sky, reflected in temporary ponds that were gone the next day. We remained in our scenic campsite at Mammoth Hot Springs, rather than move into Pebble Creek, the campground that served as last year’s wolf watching base. We visited to find it was half-gone, flooded and filled with deadfall trees. We visited with Ray, the camp host, who still planned to open on June 11 – and did -- although some of the sites have disappeared.
Also gone are the Druid wolves, the pack that introduced so many Yellowstone visitors to wolf-watching. Disease, death by rival wolves and shooting ended the legendary reign of the pack that inspired both film and book. Their survivors are scattered and unaccounted for and watching wolves in Yellowstone is not as easy as it once was. At their peak some seven years ago Yellowstone wolves were estimated at 170 in number. There are fewer than 100 today.
We were fortunate to witness a wolf pair – one black, one gray – chase a grizzly that had evidently strayed too close to their den. As the bear wandered off, the wolves rubbed noses in greeting, viewable even at our distance of well over a mile away. Leaving the valley we spotted a coyote just off the road, so intent on hunting she ignored us. Another day brought the sighting of an entire coyote family with four playful pups.
In a Lamar Valley meadow we saw an hour-old pronghorn calf tear through the sage after its mother, already able to run faster than most humans. The warm afternoon prompted a play date for a herd of young bison mothers, who butted heads, galloped in circles and chased each other back and forth across the highway a half-dozen times in a game of buffalo tag, their calves galloping close behind.
We saw a badger den with three youngsters raising comically-striped faces to the sun and wrestling briefly before disappearing back down their den. Another day brought a close view of an adult badger, a strange-looking creature that reminded us of an armadillo with lots of fur. He trotted back and forth between two excavations, throwing earth in the air as he dug energetically.
Watching for wolves, we saw another badger trot by with one its young in its mouth, moving to a new den. Once the coast was clear of their predator, four young Uinta ground squirrels emerged from a hole and surrounded their mother, standing erect as meerkats.
Driving into Mammoth village, we were stopped by rangers who held up traffic to allow an elk and new calf, born two hours earlier outside their office, to cross the road. Unlike the new pronghorn, the elk calf struggled mightily to follow its mother, testing wobbly legs gingerly.
“Regarde!” said a French woman to her husband. “Peut-etre deux mois?”
“Non,” I told her, “Deux heures. Il ne peut pas marcher bien.” “Not two months -- two hours. He can barely walk.”
But the prize sighting of the week was the one we’d heard about all the way down in Grand Teton park: a grizzly sow with four cubs, a number rarely seen. The sow browsed for food far below us with cubs in tow, the fourth cub noticeably smaller than the others. The small cub bounded along, always bringing up the rear as the group moved through the brush. An hour and a half after we first began watching the bears, we moved to another viewing spot up the hill in time to see the mother appear at the edge of a lake, rolling on her back to allow the little ones to feed. The scene of domestic bliss was a lovely contrast to all the predation we’d been seeing, although the grizzly mother was undoubtedly killing other animals’ offspring to feed her own. The sow stood up and allowed the runt to climb on her back for a ride, a maternal gesture we’re told she often employs to allow the littlest griz to keep up with the rest of the family.
One evening we visited the spot where we’d seen a black bear last spring followed by a hefty cinnamon male looking for romance. Apparently he found it. We looked up the wooded hill and saw a black sow with two frolicking cubs: one was black and the other cinnamon brown.

Bears in the woods

In just two days, the landscape changed. Warming days and near-constant rain dissolved thick snowbanks like cotton candy. Dramatic ice flows on Yellowstone Lake broke up, moved down river and disappeared. Rivers and creeks swelled to overflow banks, charged by muddy rapids, forming lakes where once there were meadows. Rare bursts of brilliant sunshine prompted the bison to take a break from their constant wandering and browsing and lie down in a meadow to soak up the sun, the calves’ legs stretched out as far as they could go. The weather didn’t keep us from looking for wildlife.
Bears are the top prize for most visitors from around the world, many of whom expect to see bears each day. But sightings of predators – wolves, bears and even coyotes – involve luck and being in the right place at the right time. We often arrive on the scene just seconds too late, and consider each sighting a wondrous miracle, given the size of the park and the fact that we’re “hunting” from the road. Mostly, they're far beyond the range of my point-and-shoot camera.
Passing the meadow where we’d seen the grizzly sow and cub, we noticed three cars parked in the pullout, one of them a ranger’s. There will always be vehicles in the road’s wide spots, but when you see a ranger’s car, you stop, knowing it’s something important. We did. In the light rain that grew heavier by the moment, we scanned the empty meadow and edge of the forest but saw nothing. Then we noted an elk at the far edge of the clearing. Its behavior was atypical.
Not once did the elk lower its head to browse and meander through the spring grass. Instead, it appeared rooted to the spot, looking toward the forest, sensing danger. We spotted the grizzly and cub sheltered from the rain behind a fallen tree, napping in the forest. The sow bear had killed the elk’s calf and was sleeping off the meal.
Returning from grazing, the elk was unaware of her calf’s fate, but smelled the grizzly and dared not approach the calf where she’d left it camouflaged in the grass. She took several steps toward the forest, then retreated.
“The bear will eat everything,” said the ranger. “Crack the bones, eat the marrow…”
The elk paced nervously, swiveling her ears to catch any sound.
Cold and wet, we left after an hour, but the elk maintained her vigil, looking toward the forest in the pelting rain.
. . .

“Chicken of the woods is what I call elk,” said a naturalist at the lake the following day. “They supply food for so many other animals.” We learned that fewer than half of the new spring calves will survive, and many adult males, weakened from the autumn rut, either die in the winter or are killed by predators in the spring. Grizzlies are the most successful predators of elk calves.
Two days later, the grizzly sow and cub were again in the meadow, where the adult bear jumped on the ground to determine the presence of tunnels, then dug to capture voles and ground squirrels, chewing them slowly and with apparent relish.
“Ooooh,” squealed the children among the roadside spectators. “Isn’t she the cutest thing you’ve ever seen?”
We picked up camp and moved to Mammoth at the north entrance of the park. Our first drive to Lamar Valley brought us the sighting of a black bear some distance from the road, then a later sighting of our ranger friend John, managing the biggest bear jam we've ever seen at the bridge. After greetings and a hug, we joined the crowd on the span to see a cinnamon black bear, sleeping off the capture and ingestion of yet another hapless elk calf. This time we could see the remains.
Spring may be the cruelest season in Yellowstone.
Pictures at: http://picasaweb.google.com/happytwo.mcwilliams/2Yellowstonespring2010blog?authkey=Gv1sRgCPG1q67Fo-a3mwE&feat=directlink

Back to Yellowstone

The jam of vehicles and battery of long lenses told us that this was a wildlife sighting of significance – not one of the frequent bison crossings that stop traffic on the park’s roads. We were enroute to a campground with Happy in tow our first day in Yellowstone and managed to double park in an overlook midway through the Hayden Valley.
Silhouetted atop a sage-covered hill above us was a large black wolf – the pack’s alpha male, a ranger guessed, because he was collared. As we watched through binoculars and other spectators’ scopes, he began digging vigorously, stopping only in apparent exhaustion to lie down in the sage. A gray wolf appeared and took over the task, digging strongly. The wolves were destroying a coyote den.
Off at a safe distance, a tan coyote was lying on a grassy slope in a posture of defeat. Earlier, spectators told us, there had been constant agitated communication between the coyote pair. Now, only one parent remained, lifting her head occasionally to look up the hill. We watched for some time but left before the denouement. With a plaintive howl, the coyote called to her doomed pups.
. . .

A few hours later, we passed through the same area, now blanketed in several inches of new snow. A few cars were parked at the pullout, their passengers studying maps or gazing through binoculars at the valley below. The sage-covered hill on the other side of the road gave no evidence of what had transpired earlier.
. . .

It had really been extraordinary, a ranger told us the next day, that we had been able to witness such true life drama. Disturbing as it had been, it was a rare glimpse into the countless scenarios that play out in the natural world, where predators kill other predators in turf wars, and some animals’ offspring serve as food for others. Yellowstone’s coyote population plummeted with the introduction of wolves, who view the smaller canines as competition and easily kill them.
Our sadness was lifted later that day when we came upon a bear jam and were able to watch a grizzly sow and her young cub in an open meadow for over a half-hour. The mother dug in the soft earth with her three-inch claws, sending huge clods flying as she hunted for voles or the nutritious roots of heartleaf arnica and balsam. The sandy-colored cub watched, delighting the growing crowd of onlookers by standing on his hind legs and peering at the humans. Rangers directed traffic and kept spectators on the opposite side of the road, since few things are more dangerous than a grizzly sow with a young cub. But the griz appeared oblivious, concentrating on replenishing calories lost during a long winter fast and rearing a new cub.
To top off the day, a black bear broke from the forest and crossed the road just in front of us on our way back to camp, where resident bison "Bob" and a buddy browsed the grass between tents and RV’s.
Photos at: http://picasaweb.google.com/happytwo.mcwilliams/1Yellowstonespring2010?authkey=Gv1sRgCOeGtJCAz__l0wE&feat=directlink