It's hard to believe that three weeks have passed since we left home on our pilgrimage to the western mountains via the Badlands of South Dakota where this photograph was taken along a trail through the rugged landscape where the Earth shows her bones. We've since left the Great Plains behind and have made it safely through the Black Hills of western South Dakota with a stopover in Deadwood to relive the wild-west late 1800s in that national historic town, and then over our first mountain range, the Bighorns of eastern Wyoming. Soon, into Yellowstone National Park where it's impossible to ignore that the Earth is alive--and gasping, gushing, bubbling and heaving beneath your feet or several safe feet away.
For now, I leave you with a short poem that I hope will give you a sense of what it felt like to cross over the Bighorn Mountains at 9,000 feet above sea level on a chilly June morning.
Amid the Bighorns
snow swale
fog drift
stream rush
raven glide
If I am not crushed
by cliff slide
I will become
the summit
