This is only the second ever what-I-did-this-summer video I’ve made. It’s late summer now, but the summer began with a nearly 4,000-mile road trip out West. “In wilderness is the preservation of the world,” said Thoreau. We saw lots of that—at least what was preserved in our National Parks, which, in his documentary series, Ken Burns called “America’s Best Idea.” Rocky Mountain National Park, Grand Tetons National Park, Yellowstone and Badlands National Parks, with a National Memorial Park, Mount Rushmore, and a national oddity place, Wall Drug, thrown in.
The 5:30-minute Video below shows highlights of our trip, especially being engulfed by a buffalo herd in Yellowstone, and just missing a colossal landslide. That’s the “Mountain Pass” part of my title. When we got home, we turned on the TV to catch up on the news, and just about the first thing we heard was that the Teton Pass had collapsed! While in Wyoming’s Jackson Hole area and the Teton and Yellowstone parks just beyond, we stayed at a hotel in Driggs, Idaho, and crossed that mountain pass every day we were in the area. On the Tuesday before we left, we took a float trip down the Snake River, and our guide was telling us how many of the workers like himself couldn’t afford to stay in Jackson Hole’s major city, Jackson, so stayed in places like Driggs and crossed the mountains every day. We left Thursday morning. On Friday they found a large crack in the Teton Pass roadway. On Saturday the whole pass collapsed in a massive landslide. That’s the way the Video below ends: with pictures AND videos of the collapse, the most amazing of which was on the Facebook page of Wyoming’s governor, Mark Gordon.
It was a near-miracle that they figured out a temporary detour right around the landslide and re-opened the pass just three weeks after the collapse. For those three weeks, all those Jackson workers had to find alternate routes, the quickest of which added at least an hour to their commutes. One of the NPR reporters covering the story said, “Opening the pass again was like reuniting a family. That’s how much people and businesses on the Idaho/Wyoming border mean to each other.” So in essence the main highlight, or shock, of the trip happened after it was over, though my wife Linda is still thrilled by remembering how we were engulfed by that herd of Buffalo. It was, for her, the “baby trip,” too. Buffalo, horses, cows, elk—you saw all these with their newborns everywhere you looked.