Badlands National Park, South Dakota
The Badlands looks like what I imagine it would look like if the sea dried up. Every shape and nook in each hill or mountain seems as if some great hand had poured sheathes of water over it again and again. I know the scientific term for this is simply erosion, but that word didn’t seem enough to describe the scale of it.
Snakes slithered around my feet sporadically as if trying to get my attention during the first mid-day hike around some of the easier trails in the Badlands. After five days in a van with 11 other people, covering roughly 1,460 miles of the United States, I was ready for snakes. Fresh air, dust and snakes.
The campground was a vast, open space and the wind whipped around me as I attempted to pitch my tent. The nails rolled away and the tent itself wrapped around me in protest at the adverse weather. Above the mountains surrounding the campsite the sky had turned the color of ink and there was a flurry of activity to make shelter before the rain came in.
Personally, I was more concerned for the books. In a bout of wondrously suspect decision-making before my trip, which consisted of camping and hiking across the north of America over the course of a month, I decided to pack a grand total of 23 books. I proceeded to carry these tomes with me everywhere I went, every day, in a large brown backpack. This made me look not unlike an absurd turtle in blue overalls with a shell full of impracticality.
I slept restlessly with my books as the rain pattered down, hoping that by my 3:45am wake up it would dissipate.
The purpose of waking early was to watch the sunrise over the mountains. Though the rain did indeed move on, it left behind a blanket of endless clouds in its place. I hiked out to the middle of the Badlands to watch as the sun broke through in small slits to light up the rocks around me. Each layer of sedimentary rock changed color for a brief moment, tinged blue then orange then red in the rising sun.
I sat silently on the hill watching the land that used to be under the sea wake up, until my friend Ben shot me in the head from further up with a sling he had bought the day before from a gimmick shop.
Swearing blindly I fumbled downhill with him. Rubbing my head and thinking about what it would have been like to live in the world when the Badlands was underwater we started out for Crazy Horse.
Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
My whole self smelt of sulfur for two days as I hiked through the bubbling underground and overground volcanos of Yellowstone. Plumes of steam rose around me constantly till my hair was thick with geothermal activity and my ears full of the sounds of wildlife all around me. We drove past a small, sweet, terrifying brown bear on the way into the park. Till then the only bear I’d seen was the illustrations in my Goldie Locks story book.
While the day was growing dim, we began to walk past the rivers and lakes embedded within the park. Such clear, distilled water I had not seen in my life. The sulfur had seeped into the waters, making it shine and ripple colors I never thought could be seen without some kind of time lapse photography trick. Light bounced, reflected and I saw the sky replicated exactly in it’s natural mirror, these waters so still I didn’t want to speak loudly and disturb them.
I clambered breathlessly to the top of a hill with no clear path, slipping and sliding attempting to hold on to fragile looking trees to propel myself to a height where I would be able to look down to the most famous of the geothermal lakes, the Grand Prismic Spring.
As soon as I had reached a good spot, I sat and stared at it for all of 15 minutes before resolving the thing to do was to find a way to get as close as I could to it.
Luckily for me, the park has built wooden walkways over it so one can stare into the stain-glass waters as long as one wishes. I stared and stared. I walked around to look at it from every angle, the hot steam rising from the spring warming me until I stepped into the cool breeze brought about by sunset.
I went back to the campsite with my head in the clouds, and burnt the living hell out of the rice I was making for everyone.
Glacier National Park, Montana
The second day in Glacier I split from the group and ended up in the middle of the park. I saw a trail called ‘Going To The Sun Road,’ I picked it and wouldn’t stop walking.
I was driving across America with the intention of moving to Los Angeles, where the van would stop and the trip would end. All the things I had with me were all the things I had. I had left the record player, friends, parents, the memory boxes, the photos, the person who I believed in all my 21 year old wisdom was the one. I said goodbye to my father at the gate and sobbed until half an hour into the flight to Washington, DC.
So I took books, new ones I bought on the road and old ones I had blindly picked in the haste of moving. By the time I got to Glacier, roughly half way through my trip, I had burnt through most of them. I was now buying books from the little stores at the campsites, the ones that people left by accident.
There were moments on my Great Trip that I felt utterly lost. Completely in fear of the unknown and still very much heartbroken, there would be hours in which I would cease to speak. The colossal choice to move to a different country a week after I graduated University was one that I still sometimes question.
Alone, trudging so high up, the path was sometimes covered in clouds and it felt as if if my whole life hit me squarely in the chest.
In Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut talks about a moment that one can have where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts. People interpret this differently, it means a lot of things to a lot of different people.
I had mine for the first time in Glacier, National Park. I threw myself down on a rock by the path, crying and utterly exhausted. I was exhausted from propelling myself at an unreasonable rate throughout my life. My tears ran out and with nothing else inside me, my head and my heart empty I just watched the pattern of the sun breaking through the clouds over the mountains around me. It was, in my opinion, the most beautiful place on my trip. Everything was so incredibly green and the mountains seemed so old. I felt enveloped by everything that had been. That’s what ‘Going To The Sun Road’ was for me.
Banff National Park, Alberta (Canada, eh?)
After Glacier, we drove up into Canada and then back down to Seattle. In Canada was Lake Louise, the part of the trip that had looked most attractive on Google Images when I was stalking the itinerary of the impending expedition.
Ben, a boy who became my best friend, was in charge primarily of not letting me buy unreasonably priced weapons because I thought they would make me cool. He was the most excited about Lake Louise. His girlfriend was called Louise and he intended to buy a boat load of souvenirs with her name on it to bring back to her.
I left him rattling around in the gift shop like a child after our usual altercation of ‘no, Zara, you can’t buy this knife/ hatchet/ throwing star/ sword’ to which I would reply ‘BUT WHY BEN, IT WOULD BE AWESOME.’
Lake Louise was like all the pictures. Blue and perfect with brightly colored canoes. All the minerals from the mountains around the lake had run down into the waters, making it the kind of deep, beautiful blue that’s the same as a perfect pair of eyes belonging to the face of someone you love.
This effervescent blue could be seen even from the dips in the trails that I hiked behind it, huffing and puffing because I’d been smoking too many cigarettes of late. It rained all the way back down the trail, so to dry off I sat in a chair outside the gift shop writing postcards and watching Ben potter around.