Our Gap Year

This is our travel blog documenting our gap year across America. We are exploring the US National Parks, Forests, Wildlife reserves, monuments etc. and volunteering at organic farms across the country through a program called WWOOF USA.

[julestheconman]

The last few days of our trip filled us with an unimaginable number of emotions, memories, and thoughts about our futures. We didn’t want the trip to end and we also had never wanted to be home so much. Neither of us regret this decision and we would both do it all over again. What is more is that it is just one short chapter in our lives and though the gap year chapter of our lives has ended, the book still has many more pages yet to be written. We had an amazing last few days, backpacking/canoeing in Voyageurs National Park, hiking in Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore and jumping down and struggling up massive sand dunes at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. We did so much in one of the longest, and shortest years of our lives to date, and though we both head off to college next year, our stories and experiences will only build upon each-other. Thank you so much for following us all along on our journey.

[julestheconman]

After a day hike in the petrified forests of the southern unit in teddy roosevelt, we headed to the north unit to drive that scenic road, grab a campground and hike around! Unfortunately, our hiking plans were foiled by incredible winds (knock you over strength.) We found a campground and enjoyed taking in all of the sights from the road and wished that we didn’t have to hide in the car to prevent sand and dirt being blasted into our faces. We woke up and saw the really cool concretions, orb shaped deposits of various minerals,and then  headed out towards Voyageurs! 

[julestheconman]

Teddy Roosevelt National Park! Very similar to badlands in its prairie/badlands climate, Teddy Roosevelt preserves the first place that one of the nations great preservationists first connected with nature! We drove the length of the scenic road and stopped to hike the nature trails and take in the incredible views, then we headed back to the visitors center to cook up lunch and prepare for a longer hike. We set out on the big plateau loop, a 6.5 mile hike with a few river crossings. What we didn’t know was that those river crossings were through “The muddy little Missouri” and its even muddier tributaries! We ended up taking turns losing shoes in various 8 inch mud holes and laughed and hoped we didn’t fall in, all in all quite the hike! We watched some thunderheads roll towards us with a beautiful ominous glow!

[julestheconman]

I spotted your car in Yellowstone yesterday so I came to see what you're up to. What an epic adventure! Thanks for sharing so many awesome photos. :)

Thanks for checking it out! We love that people see the car and are interested!

[julestheconman]

Looks like incredible journey! Saw you in Yellowstone. Promise me the Prius gets new shoes soon!

hahahaha! Yeah! We just got new tires today, they were much needed. Thank you for your concern! 

[julestheconman]

The Badlands! Look they are so bad! The badlands are really cool. They just sort of show up! Miles and miles and miles of vast hilly prairie and then boom, suddenly the earth drops away to reveal gullies, ravines, hills, mounds, and every sort of feature possible! There are colors and layers and jagged peaks and rounded domes and the variation of the place is amazing! Its all due to rapid erosion of soft sedimentary layers deposited from the Black Hills! While we were there we saw plenty of Bison, Prairie dogs, and cliff swallows! The grasses are everywhere and apparently 1 cubic yard of prairie soil can contain upwards of 25 miles of roots and root hairs! We also gave the state of South Dakota a new name “The state of Tumblr Skies” just because there is no such thing as a bad picture of the sky while you’re here, sunsets, rises, storm clouds and just regular old daytime! All of it was beautiful!

[julestheconman]

Of course, if you’re in the Black Hills area in South Dakota, you have to go and see Mt. Rushmore. The immensity of it is incredible, and we enjoyed learning about how the heck you go about carving a mountain. Conor and I are still a little conflicted about how we feel about the alteration of a huge piece of rock like that. If anyone deserves it, it might be these presidents but from now on I think Conor and I would prefer to keep rocks rocks and not memorials. However, the size, scale and labor that went into this is not something to be brushed over, thousands of men worked on the mountain, and the result is something truly incredible.

[julestheconman]

Interestingly enough, the only photos we took in Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota were pictures of something many many miles away from the surface of the earth and not something below our feet. While at Wind Cave we took the “Wild Cave Tour” where you suit up in helmets, headlamps, flashlights, knee-pads and sturdy clothes to crawl, squirm, climb and slide through small passages in the cave. Similar to our experience in Carlsbad Caverns, except Wind Cave does not allow photography on the Wild Cave Tour, mostly just because its hard to get a camera into some of these places! We did however get to witness the summer solstice on a full moon which yielded a HUGE golden moon over the prairie. Once again, I want to crawl around in caves and be a caver for the rest of my life, as long as I get to come out once every few months and see my friends and family.

[julestheconman]

Our third day in the RMNP we spent the earlier part of the day at high elevation. From our campground at about 8500 feet we drove up trail ridge road to the highest point and did two different hikes, we did about 2 miles above 12000 feet, the highest we have been on this trip and we could feel it. Us New-Englanders aren’t quite accustomed to these 12000 foot mountains and our progress was slow and our breath faster than usual, but Conor and I loved every single minute of it. Despite having slightly less oxygen in our lungs every second we were on top of those mountains we were laughing and dancing and jumping and skipping and running, not for longer than about 10 seconds though... Following our trip to the highest elevation we will get to on this trip 12,257 feet, we decided to opt for a short 6 mile round trip hike that showcased three beautiful alpine lakes Emerald, Dream and Nymph Lakes. We enjoyed being able to fully catch our breaths.

[julestheconman]

Our first two days in Rocky Mountain National Park, we saw lakes, alpine tundra, moose, elk, elk that wanted to eat our dinner, Blue Columbine, fire towers, rivers, waterfalls and some of the taller mountains in Colorado like Longs Peak! We arrived late our first day, camped out then woke up to do some short hikes on the east sside before and driving the Trail Ridge road to the west side.The road goes up to just over 12,100 feet and is the highest paved road in North America, I guess there are higher unpaved roads? Its up there for sure.  

[julestheconman]

After the Tetons we headed east towards Devils Tower National Monument just to see such a cool bizarre structure! We spent a night at their campground and did a short hike around the football field sized 900 foot tall extrusion. Geologists are still a little boggled about how it formed but without going into too much detail the foundation of it is that a LOT of magma got trapped inside of a funnel sort of shape, maybe an underground reserviour or the cone of a volcano on the surface of the earth. This lava then cooled in its cone/funnel/tower shape and formed much harder rock than what rocks had been surrounding it. The softer rocks eroded away and left behind this magnificent almost geometric chunk of coolness!

[julestheconman]

Quick update on what our faces look like and how us two kids are doing out on the road. Both of out pictures feature our friends Leaky roof-bag straps, and the cooler that is never upright and would be more appropriately named “the warmer.” If you ignore the packed car you will notice both of us look like pretty OK guys with consistently inconsistent hair!

[julestheconman]

For our final night in the Grand Tetons, we camped on national forest land parallel to the front of the teton range and got a spectacular view of the sunset at night and then the cloud layering in the morning! That morning we stopped by “Mormon Row” where people had once homesteaded and Conor found his “dream home.” We had learned from our other days that when the weather for Grand Teton says “20% Chance of Thunder Storms” it really means “Do not go hiking between the hours of 10 and 4 because there is going to be a thunderstorm.” Regardless we set out for a 12 mile hike up into Cascade Canyon (pictured above as that notch in the mountains filled with dark ominous clouds) around 11 o’clock. As we had expected, we got up to higher elevation and the afternoon clouds rolled in and in a matter of minutes the weather shifted from light rain to threatening hail and very close by lightening strikes. This was one of the storms where you could walk 100 feet and see the sun, and walk another hundred feet and be getting bruises from the hail. Total blast!

[julestheconman]

One little side post from the Grand Tetons. Sometimes its hard to resist taking black and white photos. Its fun pretending that I’m all artsy fartsy,

[julestheconman]

Grand Tetons is such a cool national park because the Tetons have no foothills. This makes the rocky jagged mountains look even more striking. This is one of the only mountain ranges without foothills making it a very special place. The reason they have no foothills is because they are right on a fault line called the Teton fault. They experience frequent earth quakes here because of the fault line. This is one of the newest mountain ranges and it is currently expanding! The glaciers that were present here also helped shape these magnificent peaks. They carved out all these alpine lakes leaving large dirt hills at he bottom called glacial moraines. This trip has really peaked my interest in mountaineering but this mountain range seals the deal. I’ve decided at some point in my live I will definitely become a mountaineer! I also found one of my new favorite shots. Wildflowers in front of mountains!

[julestheconman]

The Grand Tetons! This place took my breath away as soon I saw the mountains. They astounded me. The weather has been rather on and off for us with the threat of thunderstorms halting or plans for longer hikes. On our first day here we had a restful day after a long and tiring week in Yellowstone. We went grocery shopping and ate like kings for the next day and a half! which really just means some delicious turkey burgers and a 5 egg omelette for breakfast! On our second day we were a little more active and did a 3.7 mile loop around string lake. The sun came out for us during the hike which I was very appreciative of. Then we did the scenic drive of the park which was gorgeous!

[julestheconman]

Out of over 250 photos we took and looked over in Yellowstone, 38 of them ended up on the blog but every single one deserves its own post. We could make a blog just on Yellowstone if we wanted! However these last five shots some spectacular moments in the park.  We saw Grand-Prismatic Spring and an incredible sunset with a few other photographers who exceeded our skill level and photography knowledge 10 fold. We also ran into a Grizzly/Black Bear and after being in bear country for a long long time we still aren’t quite sure which kind of bear it is, we want to believe its a grizzly. Overall our time at Yellowstone was worth more than just 250 photos and some rice and beans. If you do the math and say that a pictures worth a thousand words, then to us Yellowstone is worth AT LEAST 250,000 words. But lets not put a number on it...