Day 7 – Friday : Crazy Horse to Bighorn National Forest (449 km) It’s Friday so it must be Wyoming – we head west on US-16.
We stop briefly in Newcastle to find a hardware store to buy some more of the mini camping propane cylinders that fuel Chet’s camping stove. It seems to go through these cylinders at quite a rate, probably in the cause of servicing Sally’s tea habit.
From Newcastle we head north on US-85 towards Devil’s tower. I play my usual game of not telling Sally where we are going until it looms into the windshield, eliciting a “Wow – is that what I think it is?” response.
The road heading for the tower runs along a ridge with several opportunities to get a great view of the monument.
We head past the KOA – if you watch Close Encounters of the Third Kind you will recognise that as the spot where the army base was located. We carry on to the entrance station, using our America the Beautiful pass again to get in at no extra cost.
The road winds up the lower slopes of the tower. The park is quite busy and we circle around the car park twice looking for a level spot, of which there are none due to the slope the car parks were built on – then we spot that they have marked the parking along the edge of the entrance road as “RV Parking” – and it is level! I shouldn’t have been surprised. Where-as in Britain there isn’t really any thought about places to park sizeable RVs, let alone being level so your fridge works – in the US this is pretty well thought out.
There are two hikes you can do around the tower. We do the nice short tourist hike first, which stays pretty level on a paved trail running just below the boulders at the base of the rock that forms the main part of the tower. The only difficulty is that you are a bit too close to the tower to get a nice view – you are always straining to look up at the rock rising above you.
After that we take the much longer lower level hike. This trail is on uneven ground and drops down near to the KOA / entrance station before circling around the red cliffs on that side, then climbs up again and circles around the other side of the tower. In contrast to the tourist trail, we see hardly anyone on this one and enjoy a picnic on a breezy ridge in the early afternoon heat.
It is now 2:30 in the afternoon, and we have pretty much exhausted the things I planned to do at Devils Tower. Plus it is hot. We take a drive around the park campground (not the KOA). It is more expensive, hot, quite crowded and doesn’t seem particularly attractive as a campground, even though the countryside surrounding it is fantastic. It doesn’t look like somewhere we want to spend the night, especially given it is still early afternoon. My plan had been to camp in this area Friday night, and on Saturday travel west to the Bighorn Mountains. We decide to simply head in that direction and see how far we get. Sally is keen to make progress and not just stop anywhere along I-90. We do stop briefly at the Powder River, but again it is hot and there is time to spare; Sally prefers to head for the mountains.
We turn off I-90 onto US-16 heading west through Buffalo into the Bighorn National Forest. On the way out of Buffalo there are a couple of offices – for forest and park service, so I pull in to find out about camping. The offices are closed and I find the notice board confusing. There are envelopes you can fill out and put money in for back country permits, but I’m not really sure whether that is for us, or for people hiking into the back country, or what. So we head on into the forest. I had already put a waypoint into the GPS for Tie Hack campground. However, we turn up to find it is quite small, and since we have turned up late in the day, completely full. ****, I hadn’t considered that. It is of course the weekend, so suddenly there are a lot more campers around.
We return to US-16 and head a few hundred yards to check out the next campground, and that too is full. This is getting desperate. As we head further along the highway we pass a turnoff on the right – maybe there is something down there. We do a U-turn and take the turn off: a gravel road heading south-west into the mountains. I can see someone with a touring trailer has pulled just off the road by a creek and is setting up camp. A couple of hundred yards along we find a side turning down to the creek with a small turnaround area. An off-highway-vehicle trail leads past this and fords the river before heading up into the forest. After some manoeuvring and applying levelling timbers I am satisfied with our location. A couple of cars came past on the main track, and some motorbikes on the OHV trail, but other than that we are alone.
Sally temporarily repurposes Chet’s plastic trash bin to wash some of our clothes in, which she hangs on the ladder and elsewhere around the camper. She then goes down to the creek and washes her hair. She pretends it is not extremely cold and uncomfortable, but there is no hiding it really. I point out that we have a heated shower in the camper, so grateful as I am to her for saving propane and water, I won’t be joining her in the creek.
We may have been keen to get out of the heat for the night, but now we are in much colder weather.
I try to start the Platcat heater, but it won’t fire up. Chet had shown me the process, and I ensure the propane valve is open and the thermostat is set, and the reset button depressed. Still, despite trying several attempts, it will not fire up. We resorted to running the furnace for a short while, which heats the camper quickly. Unfortunately, we can’t find the blankets – they are there in the camper, but we don’t discover them until we get to Tacoma. Instead we cuddle up together and make a note to buy a comforter when we get to the next major town.
We could run the furnace overnight, but I am conscious of the battery drain. Remember that Chet’s generator is not working and I am not entirely sure if the batteries are being charged off the alternator. When I checked the charging amps coming from the solar panels I had noticed they were very low. I only discover later, after reading the manual for Chet’s solar controller, that it deliberately ramps down the charging current to a trickle once the battery exceeds 90% capacity. So I at this stage I am mistakenly assuming the low charging rate might signal a problem with the solar panel. Hence I am very careful about how much battery power I use, worried I will have difficulty recharging it.
