Friday jellybean came back into our lives. Jellybean is M’s old Dell laptop, who was on an extended visit to the repair shop (good with machines, not so much with people). As opposed to the newish laptop we’ve been using for a while (named poobean for it’s keyboard action and finicky power supply mount), jellybean guards old pictures from years past.

In particular, pictures from October 2005 (when we quit our jobs and left Iowa for good) and January 2006 (when we dropped the camera in Death Valley and it got funky, permanently). So, this will begin a retrospective of that trip.

We started our trip with a long drive north to the Boundary Waters. I’d done several canoe trips in that wonderful area, two with the Boy Scouts and one with Concordia Language Camps (French immersion nerd camp for high school kids, marvelous). I wanted to see it in a different season and without the strictures of a large group. In theory, very good in mid-late October.

Our dice came up wrong. We got our rented canoe, packed and launched by mid-afternoon. It began raining right as we put in, and by the time we crossed one big lake and did our first portage, it was sleeting. This continued all night, and into the next day. So we stuck around the marvelous little island for the second day, and enjoyed a flawless third day on glass smooth lakes as we paddled out. It started raining again that night, and didn’t stop for four days.

This picture was taken from the dock of our rental cabin during a calm morning. One of the few we have.

Pushing our cabin rental up was not a problem, and we spent four very nice days (including our anniversary) stoking the wood stove, eating, reading, and watching the weather. I snuck out occasionally to chop more wood and ride my bike on flooded and overgrown snowmobile trails, burning energy riding through 100 meter puddles and once doing a perfect endo when my wheel found a hole hidden in the grass. We paddled the boat a bit, got burgers and beer and played pool at the hole in the wall down the road, petted the resort owners dogs, and got a surprise pan of brownies and bottle of champagne that M’s mom had paid the owner to make for us. Sad to do so little canoeing, but relaxing to enjoy space and quite and unemployment.

Soon we were headed west.

Cooking dinner on the road, in the big parkas, somewhere in central Minnesota. The fat coats would become our intimate friends in the coming months.

That evening we slept in the rest area, first of many nights in Josey the Xterra. I had spent a fun afternoon with a pile of wood and a rental circular saw from Home Depot making a sleeping platform in the truck we bought for this journey. Our Jetta, bought hastily when my Subaru met its end at the hands of black ice, concrete walls, and 65 mph that winter, seemed a bit small. it was also bad in the snow, and really bad on rough roads. Two years and 70,000 miles later Josey remains a faithful and low maintenance friend.

This massive sculpture is off I-90 in western North Dakota. Note the Rocket Box, two bikes, and two 5 gallon water jugs crammed onto the roof. Exacting spacing requirements.

I had some fun and exercise walking the steel support cables.

For some reason we have no pictures of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, which is sad. We hiked for two days and I rode the Maah Daah Hey trail for one, two days longer than we planned on staying. We had moderate temps for the last time in what was to be a while, and enjoyed the Prairie Dogs, Bison, and unexpected place.

Soon enough we were off through Montana, and onto the rapidly snowing in place that was Glacier National Park. This is the huge, impressively constructed (I believe CCC) wall at the turn on the west side of Going-to-the-Sun highway. Above this the road was closed, so we rode and when the snow got to much walked to the summit of the pass.

These are the stairs to the closed visitor center. We’re eating lunch right by the door, trying to hide from the wind. Why do we have no pictures of the fantastically delicate rime ice on the trees for the mile below here? No idea.

Then it was off south, into the face of more rain and snow south through Montana. We enjoyed an 11am tour of Big Sky Brewery and extensive samples, tried to not loose our heads at the Patagonia Outlet in Dillon (best I’ve seen, the super bargain, 100% >50% off room!!), and made our way to M’s sisters place in Sun Valley.

We saw Craters of the Moon National Monument on the way, and returned a week later on the way south. By then it was covered in snow and fogged and cold, and I enjoyed a fantastic dayhiking loop through the lava (that M wanted no part in). Amazing: <100 foot visibility, shifting fog banks, 15 mph winds, working hard to go 1/2 mile an hour, 70 ft lava tower mazes appearing out of nowhere. Sublime.

Joslyn, fresh out of Vanderbilt engineering school, enjoying life as a customer service specialist for a title company. Did I know what a title company was before this trip? Nope.

We hung out for a week, hiked and biked, bar hopped, skulked around in coffee shops, I bought a new bike helmet, and witnessed the first major snowfall of the year. The morning after, I got lost on a run on Baldy and waded the snowy creek to get back home. Not a bad place.

Packing to leave.

Thanksgiving was rapidly approaching, and our old home of Utah was calling. Thanksgiving in the Robber’s Roost was on tap.

Camping in the sand, cold water and colder nights, beer drinking, and old friends.

To be continued…