god's country

I awoke to Becca yelling. Peaking out my tent into the drizzly morning, I saw a huge bull elk, antlers full of velvet nuzzling her tent affectionately. When she yelled, he backed away startled, then returned to lick on her backpack and investigate. She finally asked him politely to leave, informing that she neeeded her space, and he did.

The rain broke long enough to allow us a sunny breakfast of eggs and potatos, coffee sprayed out in laughter, and then the sky turned black. We began packing in a furry, hoping to miss the storm, but were still scurrying about when hail the size of almonds began to painfully pelt us. Just as a I finished shoving everything away, a huge lightening bolt struck about 50 feet from our camp leaving a tree smoking. All of my wilderness leader training fled my head and i jumped up and down crying "what do we do??" Luckily Cameron remembered to climb on his pack. Ah yes, we must insulate ourselves from ground current. By this time i was wet to the bone. The truck only a mile from our campsite, and we were truly in the midst of wildness. We began walking throught the slanting rain, passing boiling thermal features and buffalo crouched low to the gound. Thunder rumbled, and we ran trying to pass through an open meadow before the lightening struck again. A fisherman hid under the bridge before the parking lot, and the ground looked white from the hail balls not yet melted.

The afternoon found us in a bar on the Montana side drinking hot buttered rum served by a retired bull rider.

When the sun rose the following morning, i crawled out of our hotel in Jackpot, Nevada to extricate the stove from all of the wet camping gear and get some coffee going. Sitting on the tailgate, waiting for the water to boil, an old cowboy asked me where we were going camping. "Actually we're just coming back from Yellowstone up in Wyoming."
"God's country," he replied.