Day 19

Again we leave early with clear bright skies. Soon clouds develop over the mountains and we are doing, successfully, the occasional shower. Our main objective is to tour Jasper and Banff parks and then burn as many miles to Yellowstone as we can. Although, I stop to take a few meaningless mountain pictures, some shots of a huge elk, some big horn sheep, I miss the deer, they are too skittish and a beautiful small herd of mountain goats containing a big old fella with a fluffy mane as big as a lion's. What I had thought were mountain goats before turn out to be baby big horns. I capture some adults with adolescence today to prove the point. The small mountain goats look similar but have black spiky horns and, of course the adults, who can be quite large, have the big manes and longer more menacing horns. It is raining just a bit to hard and I'm on a down hill curve. So, I don't dare to get the shot hoping to come across some others later. I don't and that's too bad. I enjoy shooting the mountains but there are just so many. But, I really like getting different views of the animals for some reason.

So, today's samples include a less than meaningless mountain because it has a glacier in the middle and a grizzly old goat who has real character.

The ride down 97 through the two parks is an intimate and up close condensed version of everything we have seen to date. It would be a great hiking, sightseeing, camping destination – like if you had a truck camper. Of course, it's a haul for a weekend from the coast.

Once out of the park we head south, west (into Pacific Time) and then south again into Idaho- landing in Couer d'Alene, a big town to us old mountain men. Idaho is nice. Nice people. Big cattle and horse ranches with the cows and horses wandering around unfenced. Maybe not every ranch and every cow/horse but, some. There are organic farms, and produce stands, and guys dressed in black wearing black cowboy hats – and guys dressed in white wearing, you guessed it, white hats. We get a lot of conversation at the gas stop. Everyone admiring the bikes and giving advise on how to get where we are trying to get to. It's nice but very crowed down here in the lower 48. No doubt, soon, we'll be back in the prairie wishing we could find someone to talk to, again.