The Blue Lady Travels in the Red Lands: South Dakota and Beyond

Smokey Rose knew right away how to get comfy in our
Black Hills home.

Smokey Rose and I are now living in our home in the Black Hills. We no longer have a place in Salt lake, just this little condo of ours. We arrived here around July 1 and spent most of July "moving in." Of course this place was fully furnished and all, but I brought with a carload and a pickup truck load of boxes of things that had to be integrated with everything that was already here. A lot of it was clothes, books and craft supplies. There were also some kitchen things, a bit of artwork and some misc things plus stuff like food, cleaning supplies, other consumables such as office supplies. We are mostly done except for the boxes with papers in them. That can wait to be sorted through until a rainy or snowy day comes along.

The Blue Lady Travels in the Red Lands: Le Tour d'Idaho

Idaho is a good place to visit!

Idaho is an underrated state, I think. I mean what does anybody know about it besides famous potatoes and white supremacists, if you're old enough? It's shaped funnily what with that real skinny part at the top which seems like all it does is to separate Montana from Washington for no apparent reason. I imagine that if you drive it through the pan handle from Montana to Washington, Idaho must be a big yawn. Or a tiny blink. "Oh, did we just go through another state? I guess we did. Oh well."

But Idaho is right on top of Utah, and people from Utah go there from time to time, not just when they are driving through to Oregon or Washington. Fly fisher people know it as a kind of paradise. It has more natural hot springs than any other state (who knew?).

And they say that Boise is "the new Asheville".... or that Boise is a trendy place to live now that all the other places are "filled up" and maybe even "spoiled." Like Prescott Arizona, Boise shows up regularly now on lists of good places to live for a variety of reasons.

So a visit to Boise and therefore surrounding areas in Idaho has been on my list for some time now. Time was getting short in Utah for me, and I just decided to do it NOW. I told my knitting friends of my plans. Two originally signed on to go with, but one cancelled, so it ended up being my friend J and I taking this trip. J drove her car which was fine with me.

The Blue Lady Travels in the Red Lands - A Tiny Vacation to Dinosaur Land

Got myself some fine new luggage mostly from Target,
pretty and just the right sizes,
so Sock Monkey & I can start to hit the road together.

I'm ready to get out of town again. This was the first of several upcoming short trips to a number of places. This time it was a driving trip in my little green car with my friend Jan Mi. We went east up into the Uintah Mountains to the small city of Vernal. We left on Saturday and returned on Sunday. The reason for the trip now was to attend the annual spring concert of the Uintah Basin Orchestra and Chorus. Two members of the Z family, who are friends of ours, were playing and singing.

The Blue Lady Travels in the Red Lands. She Visits New Mexico and Utah Places where the Ancestors Hung Out

After 4 days in the big city, time to head home

After Albuquerque I stopped at two places in New Mexico the first day and one in Utah the second. I deliberately decided not to attempt Chaco Culture because I read on the website about how difficult it is to drive there. I knew my car was up to the task, and it had not rained for some time so the road would have been dry. But I thought about whether or not I really wanted to drive over 70 miles round trip on dirt washboard roads, and decided, nah, not this time. I'll see if sometime I can't find a guided tour group that takes you there in a bus or van.

The Blue Lady Travels in the Red Lands. She Visits Some Places Where the Ancestors Used to Live in Arizona

Flagstaff claims three national monuments within its radar.

First of all, I had no idea how many places there are where you can spend time checking out ruins of the places that the pre-Columbian people of the Four Corners region built. I know about Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon (where I have not yet been, but I will get there!) But it turns out there are many, many places protected by the federal government, state governments, tribes and sometimes no one at all.

The Blue Lady Travels in the Red Lands: She makes a Plan for a Road Trip

We had a long and glorious autumn this year.
This scene is driving up Cedar Canyon in southern Utah.
The colors were just shimmering which the photo can't show.

In early October I took my first big retirment trip. I took a road trip through northern Arizona, north western New Mexico and southern Utah that lasted 12 days. If I had just been moving the whole time, I probably would not have taken 12 days, but the kernal that began the trip was an accreditation site visit at the College of Nursing at University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

The Blue Lady Travels in the Red Lands: Nowhere Special. She Always Wanted to Go There

A road to Nowhere Special

No doubt every part of the country has plenty of Nowhere Special places. I know the intermountain west is riddled with ghost towns, micro-towns, failed towns and all kinds of other places like that. A couple of days before I left the Hills the autumn weather was just perfect. I decided to just get in the car and drive in the Black Hills along some roads I never or seldom take to see a couple of Nowhere Specials.

The Blue Lady Travels in the Red Lands: The Next Buffalo

View of an edge of the Big Horn Mountains

Thursday dawned bright and sunny after a few days of cold & rain. I woke up and decided to do something that is not what people in the east do. I just wanted to take off driving for a couple of hundred miles to see what I could see.  So I did. I lit out for the territory.

The Blue Lady Travels in the Red Lands: Northeast Wyoming Road Trip 1

Wyoming has excellent Welcome Centers

I have to say I love Wyoming. It's right next door to both Utah and South Dakota, and when I drive from one to the other it's pretty much all Wyoming all the time.

Blue Lady Travels in the Red Lands: Bison South Dakota

On SD 21 heading east

Before I tell you all about the town of Bison, I have to give you all some practical travel advice. Remember how I said I bought a bottle of Starbucks Frappucino in Buffalo? I'm hear to tell you don't be fooled by the appearance of  those sweet, little faux milk bottles. If you happen to have one of these wolf-in-sheep's-clothing items in an ordinary cup holder in a Subaru, opened up so that you can swig it while driving, you know, the way you're supposed to do with bottles of liquids you buy in gas station C-stores, and you decide to stop rather suddenly, said bottle will fly out of said cup holder and whatever contents are left inside that innocent little thing will go all over everywhere inside your vehicle. I'm just telling you.

Blue Lady Travels in the Red Lands: Buffalo South Dakota

The road, the grass, the sky. Welcome to South Dakota, a quintessential red state.

I got my new super secure, Homeland Security approved driver's license this week. It has at least two holograms on the front, a big picture and a small picture and half the back is mysterious bar code-y stuff. You can all feel more secure now about flying if I happen to be in the plane with you. I don't get on planes very often these days, so I don't suppose this will effect too many people, but, hey, I'm doing my bit.

I asked my friends on Facebook what this new little card could do for me. I got two good replies....one from Josie who said I could now drive like a madwoman, and then David just wrote "Road Trip!" So I decided to combine the two and take a madwoman's road trip.

I got out the map and decided to check out Buffalo, South Dakota, in honor of Sally T. whose home town is Buffalo, New York and who has been blogging recently about all the neat things to do around there. Next time you find yourself in her part of the country, go ahead and use her blog as a tour guide.  You'll have a great time. There are lots of things to do in the greater Niagara area, many of them involve getting to eat cheese and/ or cupcakes.

Blue Lady Travels in the Red Lands - Sundance, Wyoming

I had the opportunity to send a real nice day with my friend who grew up in this region and now sells real estate. She knows a lot about all the little places around here. We began the day at a local art in the park festival which was a lot of fun, but then we had to hit to road so she could show some property to clients. We spent the rest of the day in Sundance, Wyoming. We got to explore the place quite a bit because her clients were scheduled more than two hours apart.

I had been to Sundance before because it's one of the possible gateways to Devil's Tower. For what I remembered, I had not been particularly impressed. But I came away thinking a little better of the place this time. It's bigger than I had thought and has more "stuff" in it than I realized.

Sundance was founded as a stage stop. The historical outlaw Sundance Kid spent some months in the local jail there and later decided to take (or was given) the name of the town as his nickname. We did not see any evidence of the railroad in town, but surely it must have come through there. Must have been something in between the stage coaches and I-90.

A lot of the county is federal land, forest service or BLM, plus the National Monument (Devil's Tower). The map shows the county is checker boarded with squares of federal, state and private lands. It's considered part of the Black Hills, just in Wyoming, not South Dakota. Many paces have drop dead gorgeous views of Sundance Mountain and the surrounding plains to the south. Sundance has plenty of big, big, sky.

Sundance ought to have stuff in it because even though the population is only around 1,100 people, it's the county seat and the only town of any size in the whole of Crook County. So you can find a full service hospital, a clinic, a dentist, a mental health center, a family crisis center, a senior center, a library along with the county courthouse and administrative building. (The city and schools also had admin buildings). We saw a couple of nursing homes / senior living places.

 We found these churches: Catholic, Mormon, Lutheran, Methodist, Episcopal, Christian, Community. There are probably a couple more Christian ones, but I doubt that we missed a Jewish synagogue or a mosque.

The town has a full service IGA grocery store. There are a few gas stations /C-stores, a liquor store, a couple of auto parts stores, a flower & gift shop, a decent sized hardware store and a small drug store. There was a implement dealer just outside of town. I saw some people selling a few used cars, but no auto dealers.

There are 3 real estate offices.  Locals run these kinds of businesses:  hair salons, a fitness center,  meat processing, photography, chiropractic care, printing & copying, law, accounting, insurance, construction, tree care, auto repair, funeral services. There is a local newspaper, radio station and a local bank. There are several motels ... it's right off I-90 so I'm sure they get a lot of weary travelers.

There were a couple of bars plus the VFW, a Subway sandwich shop, an ice cream and hot dog local seasonal drive in, and 2, perhaps 3, other restaurants (it wasn't clear of one was still in business or not). The C-store clerk highly recommended Etta's Fine Dining.  I did not see a specialty pizza shop ... I guess you get pizza from the C-stores.

There is a nice, pretty new, Harley gear shop and two art galleries which were both closed, but clearly had things to see inside. And there was local coffee shop...the espresso kind... that also rented videos.

Dish Network is clearly how people stay in touch with the rest of the world. Everyone had the little satellite receivers on their buildings.

Sundance has the three levels of schools plus a building labeled "Beartooth High School" which must be some kind of private school. There is a 4-H center, a rodeo arena and very nice little city park. There are no theaters now, and we didn't notice any buildings that clearly looked like "used to be theaters" but I imagine back in the first half of the 20th century there must have been one. We did not see a cemetery, but there must be one some place.

We saw only two remaining, beautiful, old, local sandstone buildings. One was an old school and there are efforts to turn it into a museum and community center. The coffee shop sold tee shirts that said "I'm an Old Stoner" which support thee effort to save the old stone building. I hope they are successful because the building is just grand and well worth saving.

The whole town was very quiet. If you don't count the people attending a rodeo that afternoon, we saw almost no one outside doing anything. No one was out walking, no one was doing yard work. There were only a couple of cars parked near the downtown stores. I kept wondering, where are the people? Have they all been captured somehow by close encounters? Or maybe Dish Network has them all totally enthralled. (maybe Dish Network is how we have close encounters these days without realizing it. Maybe Dish Network is part of the evil plot from our new masters from other worlds.)

The house we showed to the clients was in an interesting location about 7 miles out of town. It was a decommissioned Air Force radar station (Sundance Air Force Radar Station, known for being the first totally nuclear powered radar station). It was a teeny, tiny Air Force base. I didn't know there were such things, but once my friend told me what it was, I could see it clearly because it was totally that Cold War style of federal architecture.

 The houses were all small and had the same floor plan. Over time under civilian ownership, the outside appearances had changed a lot, but you could still see the bones. And when I went inside the house for sale, it was deja vu for reservation housing...I recognized everything. There were also a few common buildings in the development...one story offices, a two story either single enlisted men's quarters or possibly a BOQ, a community building which probably housed a mess, rec rooms, meeting rooms and maybe a chapel, buildings for vehicles and equipment.

The actual radar station was some ways away from the living area. It's supposed to be all gone, but still has a chain link fence all around it that says something like "federal property, keep out." The nuclear generator was portable, so presumably it did not contaminate the land, but really, who knows?

So, as I always do when I visit a new place, I asked myself, if life took me here, how would I feel about making Sundance my home? I don't think I would pursue it, but I think I could live there. The setting is drop dead gorgeous. The actual town has the basic stuff a person needs for ordinary living and working. It's clean and safe. There were nice homes (and some not so nice, of course. There didn't seem to be much zoning.) You could walk everywhere you needed to. Bicycling would be easy on deserted, wide, not very hilly streets. There's Dish Network. Cell phones work. I-90 eventually connects to everywhere. Bigger places like Spearfish and Rapid City are really not very far away. You can get public radio. All the different trucks deliver there. I could wear an "Old Stoner" tee shirt.

But I would be a spinster blue lady in that red town. How many others eat tofu, do Zen meditation & tai chi, walk, avoid driving, always recycle, save electricity and water, despair over global climate change, want lots of gun control, and vote for Obama happily? Whom would I talk to? Who would be my friends? Possibly I would stand out so much that the five other people there already like me would find me in a heart beat after I arrived in town. It could work.