Mostly Plants

August 6, 2008
Around 7 AM
Gross Ventre Campground, Grand Teton N.P. 
This is my first real chance to write so far on the trip.  A recap so far:
August 3: Our 5 AM departure became a 9 AM departure.  We were planning to drive 13 hours today and camp at Badlands National Park, SD, where buffalo roam freely [...]

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Tonight I leave Massachusetts for sixteen days of adventure.
I will take the bus to the commuter rail station, the commuter train into the city, the subway to South Station, and the Silver Line (a Dual-Mode Bus that runs through Subway tunnels on catenary wires) to Logan Airport, where I will take the plane to Chicago and [...]

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I didn’t write in my trail journal on Day 6, so this entry will be based on photographs and memory.

A Graphical Summary of the Trip

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This is technically the sixth day in the desert, but by that count there were seven. We Spent this day mostly on the road, so I do not count it–I give it an irrational number between five and six. Or maybe a complex number, with five as the real part and some non-zero [...]

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The walk from here to Lost Palm Oasis is only about 40 minutes. From the overlook, you see two oases–one down in the canyon, and one on the opposite rim. The trail descends steeply into the gorge, where we immediately encounter fan palms. Some are still well-covered in shag; others have recently burned. The canyon floor is very sandy and these are the beaches we read about–beaches without water. There is very little water here, only sparse seeps leak above the ground. Many of the seeps are fouled with decomposing organic matter. We find a few bones, too small to be Bighorn Sheep, too small to be rabbit. Coyote, maybe?

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3/18/2008
9:36 AM
Cottonwood Camp
Warm morning: everybody slept well. Ginger feels better. I’m wearing my kilt and t-shirt at 9:00 AM–a vast improvement over previous days! We cooked the rest of the bacon today, but fully half of it was consumed in a sudden grease fire. I washed the pair of pants that [...]

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In today’s edition, our intrepid heroes climb a mountain and hike through the desert to abandoned mines and the tomb of a desperado miner who died by the hand of a rival, fighting over a few scraps of land in the desert.

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From my hardcopy trail journal. Some of the first paragraph overlaps in content with the last post, but it moves on from there.
Monday, 3/17/2008 11:00 AM
The Sonoran Desert
Yesterday was angrily, bitterly cold.

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I am writing this entry as I ride on the Cornell bus from Ithaca to New York. I think it’s pretty cool that I can blog from a bus, and that’s almost enough reason to post this entry on its own.
What’s an even better reason is the remarkable beauty of the Katskill* region. [...]

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Random Encounter in the Desert Table–Roll 1d8:

1: Unexpected Volcano
2: Abandoned Mine shaft with 1d4 machines lying around
3: Boy scouts
4: Jerky stand
5: Ghost Town
6: Man biking across desert
7: Old friend
8: Abandoned mine with full industrial works still standing

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