OFF LINE ENTRY
TO BE POSTED WHEN INTERNET IS AVAILABLE

Sitting Bull Campground
Big Horn National Forest, Wyoming
August 3, 2008, 4pm

Altitude: 8760 feet
Temperature: 74F
We’re dry camping (no power, no water, no cellphone signal, no Internet--really roughing it!)

This is the view from our campground.

A pretty day skirting the northern edge of the Black Hills in South Dakota and crossing the high plains of northeastern Wyoming. The Black Hills were alive with motorcyclists attending the annual Sturgis Bike Week. They were everywhere and Sturgis, from what we could see from the highway, was jammed with bikers. Fields around the town had been turned into temporary campgrounds and tents manned by manufacturers and food and beer concessions were numerous. It was a mob scene, so we just kept on moving down the Interstate.

Into Wyoming and the land becomes rolling high plains, mostly cattle country, in pasture or hay. Scattered about are oil well pumps and at least one coal strip mine. Long railway trains of coal cars are much in evidence. Temperatures are in the high 80’s. East of Buffalo, Wyoming, we see the Big Horn Mountains for the first time in the distance and their snow-splotched peaks, some reaching 10 to 11,000 feet, are inviting.

We reach Sitting Bull Campground, high in the Big Horns, about 3:30 pm. Our new Explorer did yeoman service pulling our rig from the 4,000 foot high plains to the 9,600 foot Powder River Pass. The engine temp gauge hardly moved, although a new whooshing noise came from under the vehicle whenever it was stressed. Since all the gauges and engine computer read-outs were normal, I assumed it was the transmission cooler at work for the first time.