The sky’s the limit in Wild West country
From mountain views to mighty bison (and monstrous breakfasts!) Gabriel Thompson is awestruck by the sheer scale of everything on his US road trip
IT’S NOT often that you meet a buffalo in a car park. Especially one that has sneaked up behind you while you’re putting your bags in the car. But our bison encounter was just the latest surprise on our road trip around the heart of America that confounded everything I thought I knew about the country.
Unfortunately, the first surprise was British and unpleasant: BA had sold our seats on the plane to Denver to someone else – it’s ‘routine practice’ to oversell all BA’s flights, apparently. So our ninehour flight turned into a miserable, 25-hour odyssey via Washington.
We arrived in Denver snarling and exhausted – and got our second surprise: the people in this part of America are lovely. Everyone we encountered was stunningly polite, helpful and friendly. My fury disappeared almost as fast as my first- ever breakfast burrito. Driving out of Denver in our hire car after resisting the temptation to upgrade to a vehicle big enough to make Eddie Stobart jealous, my wife Asha and I went through our holiday wish-list: scenery, wildlife, Wild West history, meet a Native American, eat in a diner, go shopping. We would be driving in a gigantic 1,700-mile anti-clockwise circle from Denver to the Yellowstone National Park and back again... would we get what we wanted?
The scenery started the moment we left the airport and didn’t stop surprising us for a single day. I’ve heard Americans call this ‘big sky country’. They lie. This is whopping great gigantic sky country with stunning mountains, forests, prairies, rivers and geysers thrown in for free.
The Rockies, Custer State Park, the Black Hills, the Nebraska grasslands, the Bighorn Mountains, Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone swamped us with scenery. In fact, Americans have so much of it, they forget to mention some of the best bits. Yes, the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River has amazing waterfalls, but Shell Falls in the Bighorn National Forest is as beautiful and hardly gets a mention in the brochures. Yes, the Rockies are astonishing, but the grandeur of Nebraska’s Oglala National Grassland has to be seen to be believed.
Everywhere, scale has no meaning: horizons go on for ever, trees are counted by the million, land is measured in hundreds of square miles, that hill that looks as if it is two minutes’ drive away on the interstate is actually 18 miles down the road.
Ah yes, the driving. I’ve seen those maniacs in Hollywood films, so I knew what to expect. No, surprised again. The roads are remarkably quiet – it wasn’t unusual to see no other cars for at least a mile in either direction – everyone sticks to the speed limit and drivers are courteous. It was so easy to clock up the miles that our 1,700-mile trip turned into 2,300 miles without us noticing.
Of course, a road trip is no fun
unless you can get a good night’s sleep and a decent meal – and America was ready to surprise us again. The hotels, from the humble to the luxurious, were almost always clean, efficient, helpful and friendly – and our log cabin in Jackson had one of the most glamorous bathrooms I’ve ever seen. Free wi-fi was almost universal.
It has to be said that the cooks of the West are never going to trouble the judges on MasterChef, but I’m not going to complain when there’s a perfectly cooked 16oz ribeye steak on my plate. And the breakfast of chicken fried steak, eggs, hash browns, country gravy, pancakes and maple syrup at Tally’s Silver Spoon diner in Rapid City will live in my heart (and arteries) for ever. The news that Asha is a vegetarian was met at one cafe with the cry: ‘But, honey, this is cow country!’ However, there was always something for her.
AND what about the wildlife? It’s everywhere. Coming from a country where ‘wildlife’ usually consists of a fox and some pigeons, we were excited to see a chipmunk and ecstatic when a pronghorn strolled across the interstate on our second day. By day ten, we had been overwhelmed. Pronghorn, mule deer, elk, moose, bighorn sheep, yellow-bellied marmots, bison and even bears – we’d seen them all with very little effort.
In fact, we usually saw them when they strolled out in front of our car – or when, like the deer and bison, they ambled into the car park at our Yellowstone hotel. The high point for me was seeing a herd of hundreds of buffalo (yes, I know they are actually bison, but like the Americans, I don’t care) in Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley. It was so like a scene from Dances With Wolves that I expected Kevin Costner to come riding over the horizon.
But then, as a boy I had been enthralled by the old West, and a passing mention of my fascination with the Battle of the Little Bighorn – Custer’s Last Stand – had been the initial inspiration for this road trip. And finally, 43 years after I first read about it, I was standing on the battlefield in Montana. There was Last Stand Hill, there was the Little Bighorn River. The land has changed very little since that day in 1876, and an excellent