The Journey is a Wild One: Wyoming and Montana - The Beartooth and Yellowstone!

The Beartooth - Silver Run Wildlife Management
Area, Custer National Forest

The Beartooth Highway and Yellowstone National Park, Montana and Wyoming! What a day. It is only 120 miles from Red Lodge, where I spent last night to Gardiner, where I am spending tonight. But it took me eight hours to make the trip. I wandered the hills and sauntered the trails. I stopped to take photographs. I stopped to examine the rocks. I stopped to play in the waters. I stopped to see. I stopped to be, out in it . .

Blue sky. Temperatures ranging from 34 to 74. Mild breeze. Stiff wind. Juniper, Aspen, Lodgepole Pine, Spruce, Fir, Sagebrush. Clarks Fork of the Yellowstone River, Soda Butte Creek, Pebble Creek, Lamar River, Gardner River, Yellowstone River. Beartooth Lake, Gardner Lake, unnamed alpine lakes. Bison, Chipmunk, Elk, Marmot. Beartooth Butte, Druid Peak, The Thunderer, Mt. Norris. All magnificent!! I am sunburned, windburned, chapped, dried out, and tired. It’s been a great day in all ways. And I ran out of words. I have no words to describe all there was, except magnificent. I will use the words of others.

From the Beartooth Highway - Beartooth Mountains

Chipmunk w/a sweet tooth at a pullout.

Self-explanatory . . .

He showed her things of the mountain, things in the sky,
things in the pools and streams wherever they went. He
did better than tell her about them, he made her see them,
and then the things themselves told her.

George McDonald

Beartooth - Alpine Lake

"There is at least a punky spark in my heart and it may blaze in this autumn gold, fanned by the King. Some of my grandfathers must have been born on a muirland for there is heather in me, and tinctures of bog juices, that send me to Cassiope, and oozing through all my veins impel me unhaltingly through endless glacier meadows, seemingly the deeper and danker the better."

John Muir

Beartooth - Clarke's Fork River

Beartooth Butte

Beartooth Highway - Custer National Forest

If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

Annie Dillard

Yellowstone - From Lamar River Trail Trailhead

Yellowstone - Soda butte Creek

Variation on a Theme by Rilke

A certain day became a presence to me;

there it was, confronting me--a sky, air, light:

a being. And before it started to descend

from the height of noon, it leaned over

and struck my shoulder as if with

the flat of a sword, granting me

honor and a task. The day's blow

rang out, metallic--or it was I, a bell awakened,

and what I heard was my whole self

saying and singing what it knew: I can.

Denise Levertov

Yellowstone - Cairn in Soda
Butte Creek (my addition on top)

Yellowstone from Lamar River Horse Trail Trailhead

Yellowstone - Northeast Section of Park

At some moments we experience complete unity within us and around us. This may happen when we stand on a mountaintop and are captivated by the view. It may happen when we witness the birth of a child or the death of a friend. It may happen when we have an intimate conversation or a family meal. It may happen in church during a service or in a quiet room during prayer. But whenever and however it happens we say to ourselves: "This is it ... everything fits ... all I ever hoped for is here." . . . . This is the experience of the fullness of time. These moments are given to us so that we can remember them when God seems far away and everything appears empty and useless. These experiences are true moments of grace.

Henri Nouwen