Wilderness Blues- Ramblings from the Great Land

When I wrote my last post, which was documenting the beginning of our journey, Peeing Across America, I didn't have access to the notes that my daughter Autumn had been recording. Just to set the record straight, I wanted to go back over a few things that I had failed to mention previously. I suppose it goes without saying that prior to hopping into the rental car at the Boise airport, we all thoroughly drained our bladders. One would assume that we'd be good to go for at least an hour, however, that assumption would have been wrong. Our first pit stop on the trip was the Black Hills rest stop, twenty minutes outside of Boise. I had assumed that it was going to take us longer than the average family to cover the ground that we needed to cover, but this was ridiculous. At this rate, we wouldn't reach the Grand Canyon until Christmas.  I can't recall how far we went before nature called again, but it was before we made it to Mountain Home. We made a stop in Bliss Idaho to...

   For the past few weeks my sister-in-law, Jill, has been visiting. She came for a visit once or twice when we lived in Hoonah, so it was nice for her to get to see something totally different this time around. This past Saturday, we drove to Hatcher Pass, about forty-five minutes away. The bottom three pictures are from there. The week before we took about a four hour trip, one way, to Denali National Park.  It was Labor Day weekend, and I was a little leery of all the traffic, but it wasn't too bad. Once inside the park, you can only drive about twenty miles to Savage River, and there really isn't all that much to see. There is an unpaved road beyond that but you have to take a tour bus or some such thing in order to run on that. I'm not sure how far it goes or if you ever get to see the mountain (Denali) once you get to the end. There were several spots along the way while we were still about a hundred miles away where we could pull off and stop, but of course we didn...