July 2010

We are traveling about 150 miles today.  We have reservations at a National Forest campground in the mountains between Stanley and Boise, Idaho.

There are a lot of people camping this summer.  Many of the campgrounds have been very full and, in a couple of cases, we were lucky to get a spot.

About an hour or so we got to Dubois, Wyoming, we got to an area with cell phone service and called ahead to the KOA there.  They had one spot left, next to the horse coral.  We said we take it.

“Are you sure? It is next to the horse corral.”

We had left Pathfinder Reservoir late in the day because of the wind and really didn’t want to go searching for a camp site.  “Yes, we’ll take it.”

We have reservations at a campground in Yellowstone a little later in the trip.

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In 1973, I was a student at the Naval Reactor Facilities in the Idaho Desert on the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory – now Idaho National laboratory, an 890 square miles (2,300 km²) complex located in the high desert land of eastern Idaho.

As a student at one of the three Naval training reactors, I worked rotating shift work, 7 days in a row on each shift, with varying number of days off in between as we rotated to the different shifts.  I think there was a 2 off, 3 off, and 5 off.  On weekdays, I worked 12 hour days as a non-qualified student; weekends were 8 hour days.  Students were required to ride buses to the site because of the long hours and the 2 to 3 hour daily round-trip commute, depending on where you lived on the bus routes.

Three buttes – all of volcanic origin.

The site and the mountains beyond.  You can see some of the facilities off in the distance.

The little yellow Department of Energy sign warns that this is a restricted area and that unauthorized people are to stay out.

No trees in this high country desert.  It’s a sagebrush steppe – a treeless plain, a temperate, semi-arid landscape of shrubs (sagebrush) and widely spaced bunchgrass.  Total precipitation is about 8 inches per year.

Our motorhome and car on the highway between Idaho Falls and Arco.

Needless to say, the humidity is very low here, and the fire danger can be very high.

  This display is from a monitoring station at a rest area on the Big Lost River, just a few miles west of where the rest to the photos were taken.

In 1977, after 3 years of submarine duty, I was assigned instructor duty back at the Naval Reactors Facility.  We lived for about 6 months in Idaho Falls.  As an instructor, I didn’t have to take the bus, but still did a good share of the time. 

In the fall, we were able to assume the loan on a house in Arco, which is west of the Idaho National Laboratory.  My commute time was cut to about an hour a day.  There were other guys from my crew living there also, so for the next three years, most of the time I carpooled to work.

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The animals in our National Parks truly are wild and even those that seem mild may attack if provoked.

Recently, a woman was attacked by a buffalo that appears to have become enraged when someone in another group threw something at it and hit it.  Following a friend who also got too close, they became the buffalo’s target after angered by being hit in the side.

The CNN report includes the woman’s video, in which you can see the object hitting the buffalo, followed by the buffalo bucking and charging the first humans it sees.

"I thought it was the end," Cathy Hayes told CNN by phone late Wednesday.

Hayes said she was vacationing in Yellowstone on Monday with her husband and a friend. The group was driving through the park when they spotted a bison.

"My friend is from California, and had never seen a bison before," she said. "So we pulled over and went to get a closer look."

Minutes later, the bison attacked. And it was all caught on tape.

Read the whole story and see the video on CNN.

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One of the nice things about traveling without intense planning and scheduling is that we can change our minds – and, then, change them back again.

Our original thoughts for the trip included going into Idaho, where we lived for 6 months in 1973, when I was a student at the Naval Reactors Facility, and then, again, from April 1977 through August 1980, when I was an instructor.  However, we changed our minds with the idea of exploring more of Wyoming.

Well, here we are in Idaho Falls, Idaho, which we first saw in March, 1973. The house we rented for the 6 months we were here sure looks small now.

While I was a trainee, I worked shift work, 12 hour days on week days, 8 hour days on weekends, and we were seeing and doing stuff on my days off.  Karen remembers the house much better than I do.

When we came back in 1977, we wanted to get this house again, because we liked the landlord and the house, but he already had renters in it, so we ended up renting and apartment for 6 months before we found a house to buy in Arco – sixty eight miles from here, but closer to where I was working.

It’s funny, but neither of us remembered exactly where we lived for 2 six month periods over thirty years ago, yet by a little bit of driving, we were able to find them fairly easily.

The town has changed a lot since we lived here.  It has grown from 25,000 to over 50,000, if I remember right.  It has a representative selection of the popular big box stores.  Today, we stopped at the mall, bought books at Barnes and Noble, picked up some yarn and a work light/magnifying glass, and stopped at Lowes for some plumbing materials to fix a siphoning problem on the fresh water tank in our camper – (I actually made a second trip to get something I forgot).

None of these stores or the mall were here when we left the area in 1980.

Day after tomorrow, we’ll be heading out to Arco for a couple of days.

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