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Dakotas Road Trip 2022: Custer State Park (and Glamping!)

When planning our somewhat-last-minute trip to the Dakotas, I knew that the South Dakota portion of the trip had to include Custer State Park. It’s a huge park, with a lot of wildlife and plenty of scenery, so I also knew I had to research it to figure out how best to use our time there – since we’d have one day, and one day only, to explore.

For a first priority hike, I settled on the Cathedral Spires Trail. It had pretty much everything I was looking for: the right distance, cool scenery that we definitely couldn’t see at home, and enough ups and downs to keep things interesting. To get there – bonus – we had to drive part of the Needles Highway, a narrow road that winds through spectacular scenery and includes some excitingly tight tunnels.

The trail starts out winding through the forest – beautiful trees all around. We took our time, stopping to examine flowers growing by the side of the trail and snack on wild berries. (Kids, don’t try that at home – unless you know what you’re doing! I learned about edible berries in Girl Scouts.)

Eventually, after a bit of a climb, the trail leaves the woods and breaks out into a hanging valley surrounded by towering rock formations – the Cathedral Spires of the trail name.

They were absolutely glorious!

Steve said it felt like hiking through a landscape created by Disney. I couldn’t have agreed more.

It felt like no time passed at all before we reached the end of trail marker at a big rocky overhang. We loitered around for a little while, drinking water and eating trail snacks, and then turned back and headed downhill to our car, bound for the next stop in the park…

Sylvan Lake, a short drive away, boasted a general store – where we picked up lunch – and an easy, mostly flat, trail around the water. We perched on a rock and enjoyed sandwiches (adults) and Lunchables (kiddos) with a view of the water, then set off for an amble about.

About halfway around the lake, we bumped into a mom and two little girls who were staying at the same campground. The kids had met over dinner the night before, and Peanut – who was big into the Babysitter’s Club last summer – was enjoying supervising the littler girls.

I’d be leaving out an important detail if I didn’t tell you about the big event that was taking place while we were there… so when we were at our gate in the Chicago airport, waiting to board our flight to Rapid City, we noticed that – with the exception of one other group whose Osprey backpacks and little munchkins gave them away as headed on a family hiking trip – everyone at the gate was in head-to-toe Harley Davidson gear. Steve did some quick googling and discovered… the Sturgis Bike Rally. Not being motorcyclists (or knowing any avid bikers) we did not know that this was a thing. We quickly discovered what a very big thing it is: an annual event that more than doubles the population of the host state. (I thought I had trouble finding lodging because the trip was so last-minute. Pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place…) The first part of our trip, up to North Dakota, took us out of the action. But when we returned to South Dakota, we were in the very epicenter. And there were motorcycles everywhere.

(You might be thinking, as my dad noted, that there are no bikes or riders in any of these pictures. The explanation is: I am quite good at angling humans out of my hiking photos. Put it down to long practice taking pictures that don’t include other people’s kids.) I’m only mentioning this to share my big learning with you: from now on, when planning a vacation, I will google to see if there are big events of any kind scheduled to take place at my destination, and I’ll either change destinations or pick a different week if there are. The huge crowds definitely changed the experience – didn’t ruin the trip, by any means, but something I will try to avoid in the future. On the bright side, “the time Mommy made us go to Sturgis” is now family lore.

About finding lodgings with a big event going on… it was a challenge, but I ended up finding something great and I do want to tell you where we stayed. We booked a deluxe campsite with a kids’ tent at Under Canvas Mount Rushmore. To be honest, we stayed here because it was the only place I could find with availability (and there was only one campsite left when I booked). But I’d also always wanted to try glamping, and the entire experience was a hoot.

The campground included a main tent – where breakfast, lunch and dinner were compiled from fresh, local ingredients; the food was delicious – and a collection of campsites ranged around the property. The main tent included “indoor” (really just… under canvas) and outdoor deck spaces for eating and lounging. There was a board game corner where the kids dominated, and complimentary nightly s’mores overlooking the sweeping view across the Black Hills to Mount Rushmore.

Our tent was a canvas platform tent with a little deck seating area, a giant – comfy! – West Elm bed, and even a working shower. The kids had their own little canvas tent just feet away, and they slept on cute little cots under big, fluffy duvets every night (until the final night, when a loud thunderstorm had the whole family snuggling together in Mom and Dad’s bed). I can’t tell you enough how much we loved Under Canvas. The staff was warm and welcoming, the food was fabulous, and the glamping experience was just a total riot (and very comfortable). They’re not paying me to say this – they don’t know I exist. But it felt like a huge win to find this spot and grab the last available family campsite on short notice, and I’d definitely like to stay at another Under Canvas location in the future. (Funnily enough, the week after we got back, my friend Adriana posted pictures on Facebook about her stay at Under Canvas Grand Canyon – which she also loved.) Only regret: I never made it to early morning yoga on the deck. Next time.

Well, this has been a novel of a blog post, so I’ll pause here for you to go make your glamping reservations for this summer. Next week, we check out Wind Cave National Park! Will we finally see the elusive bison? You’ll have to read my post next week to find out.

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The Classics Club Challenge: The Professor, by Charlotte Bronte

Recently, I was updating my Classics Club page with links to the reviews I posted while in Antarctica, and I realized that I never actually wrote up a review of Charlotte Bronte’s first novel, The Professor. This neglect could be due to one, or both, of two possible explanations: (1) I finished the book in December, and writing up a review got lost amid the general holiday hustle; or (2) it wasn’t very good.

Charlotte Bronte wrote The Professor alongside her sisters, Emily and Anne, who each produced a first novel of their own (Emily’s melodramatic and slightly racist Wuthering Heights and Anne’s superior Agnes Grey) and submitted them for publication around the same time. And while Charlotte went on to produce justly famous books like the remarkable Jane Eyre (one of my favorite novels of all time) and Shirley (which I read last year, and loved) – The Professor is very much a debut novel. The prose is clunky and overdone; the characters unsympathetic; the setting bland. It’s the shortest of Bronte’s novels, but still feels too long. And it’s not a very good story – really, the only reason to read The Professor is to compare it against Bronte’s other work for a complete picture of her evolution as a writer. If you’re just in it for a good yarn, skip.

The Professor tells the story of a young man, William Crimsworth, and his journey to find an income in the teaching profession. Young Crimsworth first considers going into business, and approaches his older brother, who owns a successful mill in the north of England. The elder Mr. Crimsworth agrees to take his brother on as a clerk, but warns him that he can expect no special treatment as a family member – and indeed, he works our young “hero” hard and mercilessly. When a rival mill owner starts to gossip about the perceived unfairness of Crimsworth elder to Crimsworth younger, the young man is unceremoniously fired. I think we’re supposed to feel badly for him and perceive the injustice of the older brother, etc., etc., but young Crimsworth is such a mealy-mouthed, sycophantic creep that sympathy is impossible.

The action of the story then moves to Brussels, where young Mr. Crimsworth flees in search of a better opportunity. He finds himself a role as an English teacher in a boys’ school, and supplements his income with teaching the young ladies in a neighboring sister school. He becomes infatuated with the girls’ headmistress, who leads him on mildly – but really, he reads much more into her behavior than he should – and then experiences a disappointment when he discovers that she’s, to borrow a contemporary phrase, just not that into him. Again, I think we’re supposed to feel sympathy for him, but – nope, can’t. In any event, he bounces back, starts up a creepy relationship with his star student at the girls’ school in which he is overly critical of her intellect and she seems to enjoy it (sorry, what?) and… nothing much else happens.

There ya go: I read The Professor so you don’t have to.

Lately I’ve been wondering if I… just don’t like the Brontes anymore? That feels like blasphemy, and upon reflection, I don’t think it’s accurate. While it does feel like I’ve grown out of Emily (I loved Wuthering Heights as a teenager, but as a rational adult who is allergic to drama, I can’t stand it), Anne’s novels grow more richly rewarding with every re-reading, and Charlotte’s other works are much, much better than this. It just boils down to: The Professor is a first attempt at writing a novel, and it reads like it.

Charlotte, I still love ya. But I’ll be sticking to Jane Eyre, Shirley, and Villette when I feel like re-reading your work.

Have you ever been disappointed by a favorite writer’s first lackluster effort?

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The Week in Pages: March 27, 2023

Here it is again – Monday. They just keep coming around, don’t they? Vacation feels very far in the rearview mirror and I am totally slammed again, but on the plus side, I think my post-travel reading mojo is back. As you can see, I had a productive reading week (well, weekend, really). Over the workweek I squeezed in pages of Great Expectations wherever I could, and finally wrapped it up on Friday. Although I always profess to be “not a Dickens person,” I might have to revise that – because I really enjoyed Great Expectations, and I also really enjoyed the last Dickens novel I read (The Pickwick Papers). You’d think after all my years as a reader, I’d have learned not to assume I don’t like an author based on what I did (or didn’t) get out of that author’s books I read as a teenager.

Anyway, once I wrapped up Great Expectations, I wanted to give myself a break before diving into the next doorstopper, so I picked up a couple of Slightly Foxed recent issues. I’ve fallen behind on the issues and had three – last fall and winter’s, plus the recent spring issue – on my stack. So those made for a couple of very pleasant hours on Saturday (and got me back to “on track” in my Goodreads 2023 reading challenge). For my next chunkster, I was planning to pick up The Three Musketeers, but it turned out that Saturday was “Tolkein Reading Day” (who knew?), and I also had The Silmarillion to get to off my Classics Club list – so I started it late on Saturday evening; that still counts, I hope. To be perfectly honest, I’m not loving it. I’ve read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but only once each, and Tolkein’s world just isn’t part of my regular lexicon – like it would be for someone who read and loved the books as a child (my brother, for instance). I can tell there is a lot of important stuff I’m missing because I haven’t internalized Tolkein’s stories. The Silmarillion feels like the Bible of Tolkein’s world and… well, I haven’t even read the Bible of my own world. (I probably should.) At least it’s going by surprisingly quickly – I’m almost halfway through after just a couple of hours of reading on Sunday (two of which took place OUTSIDE, on my back patio, reminding me that I really need cushions for my outdoor dining chairs).

Finally, I’m still working my way through Horizon on audio. I’m down to six-and-a-half hours left in the audiobook after this morning’s commute (which sounds like a lot, but the entire audiobook is almost 24 hours long, so you can see that’s actually good progress). If I keep up the listening pace I think I’ll finish this week – and then it will be time for an audiobook break, because podcast episodes have been stacking up as I have slowly listened through this time.

So it was a relaxing weekend with plenty of reading time – as you can see from the above. Saturday was a dreary day – perfect weather for reading on the couch – but Sunday was glorious and I did also get outside for a bit. We met up with some friends for a short hike at Burke Lake Park and spotted one paddleboarder out on the water already. Summer is coming!

What are you reading this week?

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Dakotas Road Trip 2022: Painted Canyon Trail (Theodore Roosevelt National Park)

On our last morning in North Dakota, we woke up to bright blue skies and warm sunshine. It was a shame to leave, even to head for more fun in South Dakota. With a long drive ahead of us, we started looking around for ways to break up the time on the road, and decided one more hike in TRNP was in order. Although technically in the South Unit of the park, the Painted Canyon Visitors’ Center – and hiking trail – are about 45 minutes or so south of the rest of the park, so right on the way to the next leg of our trip. It was meant to be.

The trail starts on a bluff right next to the visitors’ center and starts to descend right away into the canyon.

Soon we were walking over gravelly sand and past striated buttes. The gorgeous tans, ochres and greens of the North Dakota badlands were all around.

(One of us leaned into the cowboy culture extra hard while in North Dakota. Three guesses who.)

Before we knew it, we had reached the valley floor and the badlands were rising all around us. The good news is: the scenery was spectacular – this was one of the most beautiful hikes we did all week. The bad news is: what goes down must go… up.

But before we faced that hot, steep climb, we had plenty of scenery to enjoy. I was still staggered at how beautiful the North Dakota badlands were. This trip was a little bit spur-of-the-moment and, to be honest, I hadn’t thought much about the scenery we’d be enjoying – I was more focused on finding lodging and figuring out which trails were likely to be the right difficulty level for the kids. This beauty was, although not unexpected if I’d been thinking about it, just a wonderful treat.

More prickly pear!

Always on the lookout for exciting wildlife, as we hiked along, I spotted a pair of fuzzy brown ears in the grass. We all stopped to stare (quietly).

Too cute! Eventually something startled him (it wasn’t us, I swear we couldn’t have been quieter) and he hopped away.

Fortified by an adorable bunny, we faced the climb out of the valley with as much good grace as possible. I tucked my phone back in my hiking pants and focused on trucking up the steep section of the trail and we eventually arrived at the top – sooner than expected, actually – red-faced, sweating and huffing, but very happy.

I mean, how could you be anything but happy with a view like that to look at?

Next week: we’re on to our next stop – South Dakota! Lots of adventure in store, so check in: same time, same place.

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A Bookish Agenda for Spring

With my Classics Club deadline rapidly approaching in July, I’m full steam ahead on the last few books I have to read from my list of fifty. (When I finish Great Expectations, today or tomorrow, I’ll be down to seven left unread.) So I’m expecting that much of my spring reading time will be dedicated to those few holdouts. But I am planning to sprinkle in some springy reads here and there – for a little relief between doorstoppers, because the remainder of my Classics Club list contains such chunksters as The Three Musketeers and East of Eden, not to mention two Trollopes. I’ve pulled together a spring stack that is winking cheerfully at me from my bookshelf, and I’m already thinking about which one to pick up first this season.

  • On Wings of Song: Poems About Birds and A Nature Poem for Every Spring Evening will scratch the spring poetry itch. I’ve already started A Nature Poem for Every Spring Evening (and I’m already behind on the nightly selections – whoops) and it’s a delight, as expected.
  • Spring also wouldn’t be spring without garden writing, don’t you think? My Garden World satisfies the Monty Don category – yes that’s a necessary category – and I’ve been wanting to read the gardening memoir Seed to Dust for ages. Calling it now – this is the season I get to it.
  • I pre-ordered Sinister Spring, the latest collection of short mystery stories from HarperCollins’ collection of special editions of Agatha Christie. I’ve already read, and really enjoyed, Midsummer Mysteries and Midwinter Murders, and I’m looking ahead to the publication of Autumn Chills later this year. In the meantime, a couple of chilly spring evenings with the Queen of Crime will be just the thing.
  • Another one I pre-ordered: A Countryman’s Spring Notebook, the latest collection of Adrian Bell’s seasonal nature columns from Slightly Foxed. They published A Countryman’s Winter Notebook a couple of years ago, which I adored, and I’ve been anxiously looking for an announcement of another seasonal Adrian Bell collection ever since. There was actual whooping when this one became eligible for pre-order. I’m saving it for a warm evening in the backyard.

I’ve got some other spring reading I’d love to tackle if I have time – more garden writing, mostly. We’ll see! In the meantime, I’ll be very satisfied if I get through all of these this spring, especially with the Classics Club reading on my agenda. Spring is my fourth favorite season, as I often say, but with reading like this to look ahead to, I don’t anticipate any difficulty getting through the months between me and my beloved summer.

What are you planning to read this spring?

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The Week in Pages: March 20, 2023

Good Monday morning to you all – how were your weekends? Any crazy St. Patrick’s Day antics?

Last week was a slow reading week around these parts – slower than I’d hoped for, to be honest. I’m still making my way through Great Expectations in print and Horizon on audio – no changes to report, except that I’m about halfway through both. Audiobook time has been limited by (1) only commuting one day last week, which is the usual for now; and (2) being slammed with work projects and not getting out for as many neighborhood walks as I usually do. I’ve been listening a bit here and there while doing things like washing dishes and making beds, but I’m also not so enthralled by the book that I am turning it on at every opportunity. It’s good, but I think I’m just burnt out on polar travel literature right now – but being halfway through, I feel like I need to press on and see it all the way to the end.

As for print reading, that’s been hampered by time constraints, too. Between a couple of evenings of working late, and other evenings of needing to get things done around the house – or just being too zoned-out to focus on a book – I’ve been picking up Pip’s adventures at 9:30pm, which is too late for me to start reading and get through a meaningful amount of pages in an evening. I did curl up with Great Expectations for a few hours on Saturday morning, but barely touched in on Sunday. The bottom line being: I’m about halfway through, or a little more. Hoping to finish it up this week, which really shouldn’t be a chore because I am really enjoying it. It’s all about time and energy in the evenings, and I’m hoping to have more of both this week. I am thinking, though, of reading something slim and quick before going on to the next Classics Club doorstopper. A palate cleanser might be just the thing.

No pictures from the weekend! The only time I took my camera out was to snap pictures of Peanut and her fellow Girl Scouts enjoying Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: The Ballet this weekend, and as you can I’m sure appreciate, I won’t be sharing those since they all include kids that aren’t mine (and Peanut’s face, too – about a year ago, I stopped posting pictures of my own kids’ faces on here, as may or may not be obvious). Anyway, the girls had a fabulous time at the ballet, and that was kind of the only notable thing I did over the weekend. The rest of it was the usual – a run on Saturday, a long walk with Nugget on Sunday, plenty of book time on Saturday as detailed above, etc. A weekend of the usual and not-at-all-notable actually felt kind of good after traveling to the end of the world and back in the last month.

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Dakotas Road Trip 2022: TR’s Maltese Cross Cabin (Theodore Roosevelt National Park)

It will come as no surprise that Theodore Roosevelt National Park is chock full of TR history. (Fun fact: he hated being called Teddy. I also hate being nicknamed, so I felt that.) You don’t have to go far into the park to find places to walk in Roosevelt’s footsteps, either. You can do it just steps from the South Unit park entrance – right behind the visitors’ center, where Roosevelt’s tiny Maltese Cross Cabin is situated. (This isn’t the original spot; the cabin has been moved.)

The anklebiters are no strangers to Presidential residences. We have an annual family membership at Mount Vernon, after all. But the Maltese Cross Cabin is a little more snug than President Washington’s grand mansion.

I loved the rich, knotty, grainy wood of the cabin’s exterior.

And the interior! So cool to think TR touched these very walls.

We checked out his desk and letter-writing spot and joked that he must have sat there to answer Uncle Dan’s fan mail. (Theodore Roosevelt is my brother’s favorite president. I like him too, but my favorite president is a bit more recent. President Obama forever!)

The table all laid out for a hearty meal after a tough day of galloping around the badlands on horseback…

And check out that stove! And the teapot – and waffle iron! How cool.

I will say that as cozy and inviting as the kitchen appeared, the bedroom – not so much. That bed looks uncomfortable, no?

We didn’t spend much time here – it would have been hard to do so; you could see everything there was to see in the span of five minutes. But what a fun little stop, a good way to stretch our legs before we headed out on another long drive, and a nice glimpse into the life of everyone’s favorite Rough Rider.

Next week: it’s time to head back south, but we have one more hike in TRNP on the way!

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Reading Round-Up: February 2023

Reading is my oldest and favorite hobby. I literally can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t love to curl up with a good book. Here are my reads for February, 2023.

Scott’s Last Expedition, by Captain Robert Falcon Scott – This one has been on my shelf for years, waiting for its day. I finally picked up Captain Scott’s diaries detailing his doomed final expedition to the South Pole shortly before leaving for my own trip to Antarctica (which, thankfully – and as expected – went much better than Scott’s). I bogged down in quite a few places (especially the endless descriptions of weather conditions, which were certainly top of mind for Scott but which didn’t exactly hold the attention) and spent a fair amount of time lamenting Scott’s poor decision-making – especially those bad decisions that led directly to his death and the deaths of the rest of the members of his Polar Party. But it was an interesting and important read on the history of polar exploration.

Three Letters from the Andes, by Patrick Leigh Fermor – As I thought, this book focused entirely on Peru – so not the part of the Andes I was destined to see at the southern tip of Argentina. But as with everything written by Fermor, it was a beautiful and evocative read. And Peru is quite high on Steve’s and my list of countries to visit soon (with the kids) so I’m sure I will be revisiting this slim but lovely volume.

Object Lessons: Whale Song, by Margret Grebowicz – An interesting, again slim, look at the sounds whales make, their communication, and what those phenomena mean to human culture. This left me with a lot of food for though, especially about the tendency to anthropomorphize cetaceans.

A Nature Poem for Every Winter Evening, ed. Jane McMorland Hunter – I really enjoyed Jane McMorland Hunter’s selections in A Nature Poem for Every Night of the Year, which I read a few years ago, and was delighted that she is now curating seasonal selections (in pretty hardcovers that are a bit easier to hold and read than the giant doorstopper omnibus, too). I bookmarked quite a few poems to revisit, and this volume contained some old and some new favorites. I have the spring volume sitting on my coffee table and can’t wait to dive in.

Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica, by Sara Wheeler – One thing about polar literature, and the literature of Antarctica especially, is that it’s very heavily male-dominated. Looking for a woman’s voice to take on my Antarctic journey, I found Sara Wheeler’s memoir of her time spent “on the ice” – a memoir the great Beryl Bainbridge describes as “essential” – and Wheeler was the perfect company for the long flights and days on the Drake Passage. I loved her description of her initial preconceptions of Antarctica as “the place where men with frozen beards competed to see how dead they could get” and her wise and funny observations of her companions at McMurdo Station and the other research stations and camps she visited over multiple trips to the icy continent. Funnily enough, Steve and I hit it off with another couple in our kayak group while on our trip, and they were both reading Terra Incognita too. We all agreed – it’s a wonderful read.

Well! This is a short list – only five books – as I was too busy having the adventure of a lifetime in Antarctica to do much reading. (Even during the long at-sea days on the Drake, I spent most of my time watching albatrosses swoop behind the ship and looking for whale spouts on the horizon.) But it was a good month of reading in that everything I did manage to read was interesting and enjoyable (or some combination!). Terra Incognita was the highlight of the month, for sure. Now that I’m home, I’m taking a break from ice and men with frozen beards and turning my attention to some springier reading. I’m definitely feeling the pull to my shelves again – I never read much when I am traveling – and looking forward to a longer booklist for March.

What were your reading highlights in February?

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The Week in Pages: March 13, 2023

Happy Monday! It’s been – what, a month? – well, some time since I last recapped my week’s reading for you. Traveling will do that – and as expected, I didn’t read much while on my adventure to Antarctica, so you haven’t missed anything really. It took me a whole week of being home and in a routine again to get back into the swing of reading, but I think the page-turning mojo is back.

I started the week still mentally in Antarctica, this time with Sir Ernest Shackleton and friends. I’d read so much about the disastrous Scott Expedition before my trip that I really wanted to get in at least one book about Shackleton’s last journey to Antarctica, too. But after three weeks of traveling and a month of reading polar exploration literature almost exclusively, I was pretty checked out of this one and it was a bit of a slog for me to get through it. I was relieved to close the book – for now, there are more Antarctica books I want to read but I need a break – on polar explorers for awhile and start some spring reading. Last Mother’s Day, Steve gave me Monty Don’s beautiful American Gardens, and while I had flipped through it some, I hadn’t made time to sit down and actually read it cover to cover and look at all of the pictures. So that was a lovely way to welcome in spring (much nicer than turning the clocks forward). And at the same time, I picked up Great Expectations, which has been on my to-read list for years. It’s also on my Classics Club Challenge list, which has a deadline of July 23, 2023. I’m almost done with the challenge – only eight books left, but some of them are loooooooong, so – as one of my favorite co-workers likes to say – “I’ve gotta giddyup.” I’m about 80 pages in as of press time, and really enjoying it. Pip has just met Estella and I’m looking forward to watching their relationship evolve.

After Great Expectations, I think I’ll probably keep plugging away at my remaining Classics Club books. I have copies of both The Three Musketeers and The Silmarillion, so possibly one of them? Time will tell.

Guess who turned eight on Saturday and is now eligible for go-kart racing?

What were your reading highlights last week?

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Dakotas Road Trip 2022: Petrified Forest Loop Trail (Theodore Roosevelt National Park)

The more time I spent researching things to do in Theodore Roosevelt National Park, the more must-dos I came up with. It seems this park is just jam-packed with iconic hiking trails – including the Petrified Forest Loop Trail, a ten (or maybe more?) mile loop that passes through expanses of prairie and a valley full of petrified tree stumps. Doing the full loop trail was not on the agenda this time – our small hikers are good for a maximum of four miles at a time – but according to the trail reports I was reading, the really cool petrified wood was located approximately 1.5 miles into the longer hike. Now, a three-mile out-and-back… that we could do.

The trail begins on the prairie. There are broad steppes in every direction – we saw a few wild horses grazing atop one of the buttes.

The trail reports cautioned that the prairie part of the hike was a little boring, but you had to press through it to get to the cool petrified wood. I disagreed – I didn’t think the prairie was boring at all. I kept thinking of Laura Ingalls Wilder in On the Banks of Plum Creek, describing the prairie as being full of little rounded hills, dips and hollows – it’s so much more than just a stretch of flat grass.

At least one person in our group did find the prairie section boring, though. Hiking is not Peanut’s favorite activity. I told her to channel her inner Laura Ingalls. That meant nothing to her, because she has not read the Little House books. (She did read the My First Little House series years ago, when she was a preschooler and kindergartner – but it had been a minute.)

Eventually, we reached a trail junction. Our research had indicated that we could take either the North or the South trail and end up at the petrified wood, but the South was a bit faster – so we went that way.

Just as Steve was starting to wonder out loud when we’d be seeing the petrified wood, I spotted some unusually shaped boulders immediately ahead of us. “I’m pretty sure… now,” I replied.

We walked over a little lip in the trail and then started to scuttle down the bare rock face into a valley that was dotted, unmistakably, with petrified tree stumps. It does not get cooler.

We wandered around the petrified forest for almost an hour, taking our time poking into every nook and cranny, examining every piece of petrified wood, and calling each other over to share in all the cool finds.

What a cool hike this was! I’ve found that when hiking with anklebiters, it does help to have a goal. The goal doesn’t need to be a petrified forest – it can be something as simple as a snack picnic at a good turnaround point. But it’s nice to occasionally be able to deliver something with real WOW factor, and the Petrified Forest Loop certainly had that. The kids were suitably impressed. And as we hiked back to the car (scanning for wild horses – saw some – and bison – another strikeout) I started mulling over a trip to Petrified Forest National Park, which I imagine is… like this, but on a grander scale. I can’t say that was high on my list of national parks to visit before, but after this hike it certainly moved up the ladder a few spots.

Have you ever found petrified wood on a hike?

Next week, we check out another one of TR’s Dakota residences. This one has walls!