We're back in the Twin Cities after another long day on the road. It's warmer, flatter, and much much lower.

Paul and I woke up early again this morning, with our second marathon drive looming. Two factors would make the return trip much longer. The first is that moving from Mountain to Central time would lose us an hour and would considerably cut down on our daylight hours. The second was that we both decided to head back via South Dakota instead of North. The second route would take about an hour more, but promised new sights. Despite rolling back home just past midnight, the new route was well worth it.

Just past 7:00am we headed East from Cody, picking up coffee and gas station sandwiches along the way. Paul quickly discovered that the "bacon" in his sandwich bore little resemblance to any conventional understanding of the nature of cured pig belly meat, and so his uneaten sandwich took a seat on the floor and remained our traveling companion for the most dramatic part of the trip. I wisely had selected a sausage sandwich, which extensive experience and study confirms is much less likely to disappoint/horrify.

Cody sits at the foot of the easternmost range of the Rockies, which we had explored yesterday. Eastbound from Cody, we drove over a long period of flat land with purely nothing in sight except the whitecapped peaks to our back. On several occasions, we noticed that besides the road, there was absolutely no evidence of humanity within sight, and we could see for at least a mile in every direction. Only during my short stay in Iceland (see January 4, 2012) have I traveled across such a desperately lonely territory.

Eventually, a new set of mountains began to grow from the horizon in front of us. This was the Bighorn Range, a smaller string of mountains separated from the Rockies by the Bighorn River valley, which were coming through. Near to the base of these mountains, we began to encounter a few towns along the river, including the town of Greybull, which deserves special mention. Although the human geography of warehouses, one story houses, gas stations and bars, Greybull's main drag was decorated with streetlamp banners and murals, which won us over even before we encountered the town's charming old-west remnant downtown. Unique among the towns we encountered, Greybull seemed well loved. Unfortunately we had little time to linger.

The road took us straight through a crack in the mountains, and suddenly we found ourselves driving up a pink-rocked canyon with stunning ridges on either side. We climbed and climbed, and soon the canyon was a mere crack below us, while we shared the company of tan rocked citadels overlooking the Bighorn Valley. We climbed further, and eventually the rocky peaks began to seem like mere buttresses to the white, fir-ry giants we approached upon the heights. Here, it was already winter. The snow had the sparkle of a long term condition. After an hour of progressively more incredible sights, the road flattened out and the snow-capped peaks were to our sides, with nothing but sky in front. A small sign announced; Granite Pass 9,033. That's the highest we reached during the trip.

Our ascent was a gradual acclimation to the splendor of the mountains. Our decent was a fistful of awe delivered directly to the jaw. After a quarter of an hour driving across the roof of the range, we started to hit signs warning of steep grade and eminent death by runaway truck. The road took us out on the ridge of a tree-packed valley, then turned across the side of the range and gave us the full broadside. From our perch near the top of the ridge, it felt as though we could see to Minnesota. What were surely massive scars in the earth below looked like shallow blemishes. The curvature of the earth where the green of the scrubland merged with the haze of the sky was clear. It was as if we had walked out on the wing of a commercial jetliner to take in the sights. Today's photo comes from that lookout. It doesn't begin to do the view justice.

After picking our jaws up off the ground, we found our way to the floor of the Tongue River valley and resumed our trip east. It would've been hard for anything to compare to our first hour of travel, and politely, the rest of Wyoming and South Dakota stepped aside and didn't try. I90 crosses north of all the major SD natural attractions, so we never made any serious effort to get to Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse, the Black Hills, or the Badlands. We did of course pass through Sturgis, home of the world's most famous motocycle rally. And we stopped at Wall Drug, for ice cream.

A word about Wall Drug to close this chapter of the photoblog. Wall Drug is a drugstore with some extra features. It's more accurately a western-themed Target. It is also world famous. This fame is somewhat questionable. From Rapid City on, there are roadside advertisements about Wall Drug close to every tenth of a mile. The sheer mass and audacity of the ads is essentially what gives Wall Drug its fame. Although Wall Drug seems a dubious attraction in its own right, it as latched itself onto the South Dakota tourism circuit through sheer perseverance. It's an interesting economic parable, and Paul and I had a long discussion about the fact that advertising itself could add to the value of a specific product, not just a brand. I'm still struggling to come up with other examples of similar operations in different industries. Perhaps it's good that there aren't.

Me? I feel really overwhelmed in places like Wall Drug or IKEA. It's hard to put into words, but I took my ice cream and ate it outside next to the car.