Mount Rushmore and South Dakota

Good Morning Mr President

View from President's Way

George Washington

Harley Davidson on the Iron Mountain Road, Custer State Park

French Harley Davidson Bikers

Custer State Park, where the Buffalos roam

and the deer and antelope play

The Needles in Custer State Park

Sylvan Lake on the Needles Highway, Custer State Park

Keystone narrow-gauge near miss

The first base on our American road trip was Mount Rushmore. I had begun to have doubts about the huge 460-mile deviation we had made to take in the Presidents. The place had always intrigued me since reading about them in a children's encyclopaedia. We were up early, first to breakfast and arrived at Mt Rushmore shortly after 8:00am, the skies had turned a hooloovoo blue and visibility was perfect. It is a State, not a National Park so we had to fork out entrance fees despite having invested in a National Park annual pass. The sheer scale of the 60-foot-high faces was mind-blowing.  It was a formidable project that illustrated the sheer determination of Danish-American sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who with a team of 400 workers had carved the President's faces in the fine-grained light-coloured granite at Mount Rushmore. The work started in 1927 and was finished in 1939, two years before Borgium's death. I remember discussing with Sandy Stoddart, a Scottish sculptor, a similar project to carve an amphitheatre on a rocky Scottish coast dedicated to Ossian, the mythical Scot bard. I suspect it will remain a blithe ambition.

We walked into the amphitheatre below the Presidents, flags of all the States providing a walkway to the sculptures. There is a half-mile loop walk through the pine forest below the sculptures with well-judged descriptions of the 4 Presidents. I reckoned that there was room for at least another two heads to the right of Washington, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt and Lincoln. My choice would be Franklin Roosevelt and possibly Obama. if he could get his act together on foreign affairs over the next two years. And maybe there should be a smaller 'B' list gallery for the impeached figure of Richard Nixon, possibly George W. Bush but may be reserved for future scoundrels as a warning against lies and corruption.

We had a coffee before heading towards Custer State Park in the Black Hills to the south of Mount Rushmore. The State Park was the brainchild of Governor Peter Norbeck, by all accounts a thoroughly decent man who wanted to showcase the spectacular Black Hills and restore the wildlife that had been largely wiped out at the end of the 19th entry following the gold rush to places like Keystone. We had been advised by several people not to miss Custer and they were spot on. The drive up the Iron Road was steep with timber bridges and tunnels blasted through the rocks.

We were accompanied by an escort of French motorcyclists who had hired Harley-Davidsons for their road trip. They were entertaining company as they posed for photos at each of the drop-offs. The mecca for motorcycling is in South Dakota at Sturgis, and each year in August there are tens of thousands who make the pilgrimage and then cruise around the spectacular roads of the Black Hills. The motorcyclists don't seem to be obsessed with overtaking, it is not Scotland, and we felt we were in a presidential convoy rather than another car to be passed. It helped that Aileen spoke good French and that I was prepared to act as an unofficial photographer for them.

The sun of the morning was gradually obscured by clouds and we began to believe the weather forecast for thunderstorms ahead. We stopped at the state game lodge where Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Dwight D. Eisenhower had established their summer White Houses and then headed into the wildlife park where we were tipped off that a couple of hundred Bison were grazing alongside one of the dirt roads. We found them along with burros that came to be fed, pronghorns and prairie dogs. There was little traffic and when we called into a cafe at Lodge Lake we entered the 1960's with a jukebox playing Whiter Shade of Pale as we sipped coffee and ate cake at the Formica topped tables.

The final section of the drive was over the Needles Highway, a road that "could not be built" but was championed by Peter Norbreck and is probably the most spectacular road I have ever encountered. More tunnels, switchbacks and the final section through the famous granite needles that look like church spires. By the time we arrived there, the heavens had opened but we still got out and observed the scenery in awe. We drove down to Sylvain Lake and had another walk in the rain, just amazed at the rock formations even in the poor light and pouring rain. We decided to give the Crazy Horse monument, still being carved, a miss and to drive back to Keystone. The roads were awash with rain and we decided to take the longer route back to Keystone along the Old Hill City Road.

The road was fairly level but was intertwined with a narrow-gauge railway line crossing it every few hundred yards. I had not seen any notices or warnings and I assumed that the line must have closed at the end of the summer and it was 6pm anyway. My initial caution had worn off when I crossed the railway for the fifteenth time just before a steam train whistled and curved into view only 50 metres away from us. Our response was mixed, I was excited to see the steam locomotive but Aileen was worried about what if the train had been 10 seconds earlier. But that's life.

The next day we had to leave the Black Hills and we had another 450-mile journey to make. We were off by 7:45am and after the deluge of the night before the air was clean and the roads empty. We headed north on the 385 to Deadwood, a town overwhelmed by casinos and cheap hotels. There seemed to be some Poker tournament underway but we passed and joined the Interstate 90 to travel to Sundance, we were heading back into Wyoming.

Road Trip to Western States 2014

Jasper John's take on the Stars and Stripes

Big skies and empty  roads, the Pawnee grasslands

Cheyenne Museum

Big Boy Locomotive in Cheyenne Town Park

We finally got around to making that road trip to the western states of Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota and Utah. The notion had formed 15 years ago following a mesmerising road trip with our three teenage children through Arizona, Utah, California and Oregon. The Utah landscapes had been seared into my memory but we had no time to get to Yellowstone. Work never allowed a three-week break thereafter so the trip was deferred until retirement. As always the holiday was a late decision, we had only three weeks after purchasing flights to Denver, booking some of the accommodation and then reading up on places to visit.

An anti-clockwise loop was planned travelling from Denver to the most northerly states first. I assumed that the late summer heat would be offset by the altitude and mountains. We would take in the plains of Wyoming, Mount Rushmore, the Black Hills of Dakota, the Devil's Tower, and then onto Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. In September we would travel south to the desert lands of Utah and visit Canyonlands and Arches national parks, hoping that the furnace-like temperatures of summer had subsided. The final part of the road trip would be to four corners (where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona meet) and then to Mesa Verde National Park before returning to Denver through the Rockies. We completed off the trip with four days in New York to reacquaint our minds and bodies with noise, fumes, corporate excess and a bit of culture. It was an ambitious plan with 3000 miles to be driven on top of 10,000 miles of flying - not exactly carbon neutral but the first holiday of the year.

We flew from Edinburgh to Newark Liberty International where we changed after a four-hour break for a flight to Denver. The flight was well ahead of schedule until we were put on hold over western Idaho and circled over the drab colourless plains watching the traffic and trains below whilst an electrical storm passed through eastern Colorado. Denver airport was both modern and efficient and we were soon at an airport hotel 7 miles away from the airport. There was a good diner nearby and I started as I meant to continue with some fine craft beer to accompany the salad and chicken.

First thing the next morning we hired a car but had to survive the usual hard sell to upgrade to a 4X4 or a large saloon for our 3000-mile trip. I resisted to the chagrin of the salesman so the choice was a line of Chevrolets, a couple of Toyotas or a VW Golf estate. We chose the latter thinking it would be more familiar and less thirsty. We headed north through Colorado staggered at the extent of the commercial developments stretching northwards from Denver. It was also apparent that we had one of the smallest vehicles on the road with gas-guzzling 4x4s, huge trucks often pulling similarly sized trailers and the odd convoy of military vehicles creating the impression that we were in a war zone. The environment was certainly being crushed by American prolificacy.

The railroads were chock full of trains that had three locomotives, and 90 plus trucks that were over a mile long, but this is mining country. I took a 60-mile diversion through Pawnee Indian grasslands to escape the traffic en route for Cheyenne and found images of America that could have been the 1950s: vast plains, old cars, trucks, fences and moody skies. Cheyenne is the largest town in Wyoming and has a vibrancy that owes much to the public buildings like the town hall, museum, railway station and the sense of being a "centre" of a very sparse state. We had lunch in an Italian diner and visited the museum and the biggest railway locomotive in the world: Big Boy.

It was 3pm when we started to roll again and drove north on the near-empty Interstate 25 highway. The scenery was glorious in the afternoon sunshine although the vast empty prairie landscapes were vandalised by massive adverts for real estate and dotted with signs for small settlements or rivers. The villages, roads and creeks were mainly named after extinct animals, lost Indian tribes and dead people. Names like buffalo plain, little bear bluff, old woman creek, or dead Indian hill.

We turned off Interstate 25 to take a route via Guernsey and Hartville, the smallest settlement with a post office in the United States (pop 25). It would have been closed years ago in the UK. Then along the glorious rising highway 270 to the remote town of Lusk. We battered on through flatter scrubland to Newcastle, a small but busy town which was infested by pick-up trucks, take away food outlets but no sidewalks.

The highway to Mount Rushmore was through the scenic Black Hills of Dakota. It was being resurfaced and even at 8pm, there were still dozens of trucks and roadmen rolling out the asphalt. It delayed us by half an hour so that it was dark when we drove past the floodlit profiles of the Presidents and into the adjacent town of Keystone.

I was not sure that a 460-mile drive was the most sensible idea on the first day of the holiday but at least the schools were back after the holidays and we were blessed with relatively quiet roads for the trip. All the restaurants were closed as the visitors had left with the schools going back but the hotel was comfortable and it was 4am UK time. As a first day, we had certainly sampled some sublime landscapes, enjoyed the emptiness of Wyoming, the least populated state, and learnt to cope with driving amidst monster trucks at 75mph.

Carn Bhac and An Sogach

An Socach from Glen Ey

Tuesday, 5 August 2014

Ascent:     1065 metres

Distance:  13 kilometre walk + 18 kilometre cycle

Time:        5 hours 40 minutes

Carn Bhac        946m           2hrs 25mins (1hr 3mins on bike) 

Allt Beinn Iutharn crossing  3hrs 23mins

An Sogach       944m           4hrs 15mins

I gave myself a fifteen-minute break for food and a change of footwear after the excursion up Sgur Mor before beginning the tough cycle ride from Inverey up Glen Ey. It is the third time I have done this and it gets no easier. A strong southerly wind had sprung up in the afternoon and after passing through the immaculate grounds of the lodge and house, I began to tackle the gradient and the wind. Most of the 170 metres of ascent are made in the first couple of kilometres and, after crossing the bridge about halfway up the glen, the main problem becomes the narrow track and the grazing sheep. I passed another party of teenagers saddled with packs that were far too large and looking glum as they sat by the upper bridge. I dumped the bike in the ruins of Altanour Lodge and after looking at the steep profile of An Sogach ahead I decided to climb Carn Bhac first. I normally walk better as the day gets longer and I trusted that this would allow me to tackle the unforgiving 450-metre ascent of An Socach at the end of the day. 

There is no respite in climbing Carn Bhac from here either. I have climbed it on two previous occasions in this direction but in the early morning mist after camping at Altanour Lodge. I took the same line, a rising traverse across the southern slopes of Carn Creagach but in August the heather is more than knee deep and it continued all the way to the bealach at 777metres from where views of the Cairngorms appeared. The final 170 metres of climbing was easier with shorter heather and sections of boulders. It had taken longer than anticipated and I took a ten-minute break at the cairn. A scout supervisor from Edinburgh appeared to claim the summit before returning to find his charges in the glen. I followed him on a path heading south-east and it provided an easy and quick route down if only I had been aware of it on the ascent. The downside was a large number of shooting butts served by eight-track vehicle that had mashed what had been an excellent path into a boggy muddy track. There were not many grouse to be seen in the vicinity, maybe selective breeding had gifted them with the knowledge that the glorious twelfth was nigh.

There are two burns to cross including the considerable volume of water flowing down the Allt Beinn Iutharn and it took a few minutes to find a crossing place. I managed to keep my feet dry. Ahead was the dreaded slope of An Socach, the only mitigation were the bands where the heather had been recently burnt. The steepness was unrelenting for 350 metres from where the northern shoulder led to the final climb to the untidy looking cairn/shelter. On the ascent, I disturbed quite a few hares and found two dead young ones. Before reaching the summit I saw the possible culprit, a fox, that contoured round just above me. The summit gave me chance to finish my food before starting on the descent. I had decided to head down the northern corrie and despite fairly steep slopes, the route proved to be a good one. I disturbed well over a hundred grouse who had presumably assembled here to keep out of the way of the shooting parties.

The vegetation became increasingly dense with heather and bog grass ensuring wet feet and scratched legs, as well as giving some ticks the chance to get a feed. Arriving at the river, I could not be bothered going back upstream to find the bridge so waded across. I was relieved to get on the bike and with the wind and gravity in my favour, I made rapid progress down the glen scattering a few hundred sheep in the process. A party of teenagers had made camp but looked on jealously as I sped back to civilisation. I had one narrow escape when the bike was going too fast as I hit some boulders on the narrow track and I am still bewildered as to how I managed to stay upright. I was back at Inverey by 7:30pm and by the dint of some quick driving down the empty roads of Perthshire I was home by 9:45pm.

Looking towards the Cairngorms from the bealach east of Carn Bhac

Carn Bhac summit looking towards the Cairngorms

An Socach from Carn Bhac

Allt Beinn Iutharn

An Socach summit

Glen Ey from An Socach

Altanour Lodge through the burnt heather

Sgur Mor, Cairngorms

View of Cairngorms from Sgor Mor

Tuesday, 5 August 2014
Ascent:     480 metres
Distance:   8 kilometres walk, 18 kilometres on bike
Time:        3 hours 0 minutes total       
                 1 hour 58 minutes walk from White Bridge, 
                 1 hour 2 mins on bike from Inverey     

Sgur Mor         809m     1hr 44mins (36 mins on bike to White Bridge)

I had planned to climb Carn Bhac and An Socach from Inverey before the onset of the shooting season and had a sudden notion to add Sgur Mor, one of my last remaining corbetts in the Cairngorms. It would be a long day and not possible without a bike. The good forecast was even better in the morning and I left home shortly after 7am. After realising the probability of a sun drenched hot day, I stopped in Blairgowrie to pick up an energy drink and some sun cream. The road from Blairgowrie to Glenshee always seems longer than expected but the visibility was superb and on the long descent to Braemar I was the only vehicle, my urge to go faster suppressed by the imperative to admire the mountain landscapes.

The road from Braemar to Inverey or the Linn of Dee is one of the best in Scotland with the river Dee in the broad glen providing the perfect setting for the caledonian pine forest and the peerie granite cottages looking like pink polka dots in the landscape. I parked up at Inverey in a near empty car park and assembled the bike. I had taken a rear wheel from an old bike to replace the buckled wheel from my last outing, but it had only 8 cogs instead of the 9 cogs on the original. I needn't have worried it worked well. I had decided on the journey up to Inverey to climb Sgurr Mor first, it would be an easier cycle ride and I knew it would be hard to summon up the energy to climb Sgur Mor after the more difficult ride up Glen Ey to climb the two munros.

I was soon speeding along the 3 kilometres to Linn of Dee, enjoying the scenery and the sunshine. The views from the bridge are a microcosm of all that is best in the highlands. It is a further 6 kilometres of riding up to White Bridge from where I took the path on the north of the river Dee leading to the waterfalls at Chest of Dee and then on to the Lairig Ghru. I met a family of four attempting the walk and admired their sense of adventure as well as their choice of a perfect day to attempt this walk.  I left the path and headed up the first large burn and then across interminable heather slopes before reaching the fine granite spur south of the Sgur Mor summit.

A steady breeze had sprung up to cool me during the ascent but even on the summit a T shirt was all that was needed. The eroded granite gave a carpet of orange/pink granules and the rocks provided a sculpture trail to the summit. The views across into the Cairngorms were very impressive with the massive shapes of Cairntoul and Ben Macdui guarding over the Lairig Ghru.  I looked over to Carn Bhac in the south east and realised that I had quite a distance to cycle and walk so set off running to make a more direct descent to my bike.

The Cairngorms are one of the few areas in Scotland where deer are largely absent following the culling of recent years but I was also surprised at the absence of grouse in the lush heathers that  inhibited progress even more than the boggy ground on the descent. I collected my bike and made a speedy descent passing several groups of young people quipping that they wanted to buy my bike. Although only a gentle gradient, I managed to keep a good cadence all the way back to Inverey. The optimistic schedule of 3 hours that I had set myself had been achieved. I felt suitably pleased and took 15 minutes to change shoes and have some lunch before setting out for the second cycle/walk of the day to Carn Bhac and An Sogach

The river Dee by Linn of Dee

Pine forest at Linn of Dee

The Dee before White Bridge

Sgur Mor summit

Cairntoul to Ben Macdui from Sgur Mor

Happy and Clyde at the Glasgow Commonwealth Games

Men's Hurdles At Hampden

Well despite the rain over the last few days, the shortage of buses to the athletics at Hampden in the first couple of days and the excruciating handover to the Gold Coast at the closing ceremony, the Glasgow Commonwealth Games was a roaring success. This could be measured by the full attendance at all events, loads of medals for Scotland and England, superb coverage by the BBC but most of all by a Happy and Clyde-friendly atmosphere and positive patter that was contagious during the 11 days of competition.

Unfortunately, my attempts to obtain tickets had not been very successful, mainly because I only tried for athletics and cycling and on my second attempt I was thwarted by the ticketing website crashing. Nevertheless, a day at athletics plus a couple of days in Glasgow and most evenings in front of the television gave a wonderful take on sport as it should be played and an enthusiasm from the spectators that was so infectious that Usain Bolt was dancing to the Proclaimers.

I enjoyed watching the Nigerian sprinter, Blessing Okagbare, the Grenadian 400-metre runner, Kirani James, and rugby sevens which is so much better a game than rugby. The success of Erraid Davies, the 13-year-old Shetland girl in the para-sport swimming together with Jo Pavey and Emma Pooley, two mighty tough women who won silver medals in their last events before retiral provided the most emotional victories. Most of all I was delighted that Geraint Thomas of Wales won the hardest event of all the 168km cycle race in torrential Glasgow rain. He was the only British finisher in the Tour de France this year and had led the peloton day after day riding with immense commitment and was the stand-out rider in the very disappointing Team Sky.

Daniel Purvis and Daniel Keatings, the Scottish gold medal gymnasts who train in England, were both part of the excellent tranche of athletes graduating from the Institute of Sports coaching that started in the late 1990s using Sports Lottery money. They are normally members of the unified GB team in a similar way to the Scottish cyclists who have trained at Manchester and the swimmers at Bath as well as Stirling.

Hampden worked so much better as an athletics stadium than it does for football. This is maybe because I prefer to stand at football matches and the tribal nature of fans is diluted in the shallow and spacious seated terraces. For athletics, the watching is more relaxed, more supportive of excellence and the underdog and certainly less trenchant. I was also pleased that England beat Australia in the medals table for the first time in a generation and that Scotland had their best-ever medal haul.

There had been a truce between the 'Yes' and 'No' campaigns for the Scottish Referendum during the games. Still, yesterday Nicola Sturgeon, the deputy first minister, broke the truce and reverted to type claiming that the cascade of Scottish medals would boost the Yes campaign. It is this sort of dubious statement that makes us despair of politicians whose motives are risible. My experience at Hampden was typical of thousands of others, we sat next to a young family who had originally hailed from Trinidad and Tobago and by the end of the session we were hollering with them for Trinidad and Tobago and enjoying their warm friendship. The cheers of the crowds throughout the games were for effort, grace and bravery rather than narrow nationalism.

If anything the games broke down barriers between nations as the crowds were unified in humour and humanity and the athletes displayed a humility that is sadly absent in most professional sports This was encouraged by the integration of the para-athletes into the games and by the emergence of new young talent in swimming and gymnastics in particular. Multi-sport games also dilute the win-at-all-costs mentality that sometimes dominates the Olympics. This has been the case since Rome in 1960 when the United States and the Soviets used sport as the frontline for political propaganda.

So Nicola I suggest you go away and think again. Everyone should be proud of what was achieved by Glasgow in the organisation of the games, by the Scottish team, by teams from the other home countries and by the developing  Commonwealth countries. Most of all we relished the friendship between nations. To claim that "the games have provided a perfect platform for a yes campaign victory" is a gallus and a sad indictment of small-minded politicians. It is certainly not in accord with the majority who have enjoyed the friendly games that, if anything, have reinforced a belief in both the 'family of home nations' and the banishment of intolerance amongst nations.