The Long Drive from Badlands to Seattle - Day One

Our original plan on this day was to wake up and drive straight to Seattle. There's TONS of cool places we could stop along the way, but on our 2019 trip we stopped at so many of them and that left very little time to spend in Seattle with family, so on this trip we planned to just book it and get straight there.

But.

At the Badlands visitor center, one of the volunteer fossil lab techs told us about a place where you could see tons of mammoth fossils that was really cool. Gram and Pops looked it up and definitely planned to go, and invited us along. We went back and forth on it - it did look pretty neat in the pictures and had good reviews, and only added about 1.5 hours to the drive time, which was already at about 18.5 hours. So we decided to go.

The new plan was to wake up at 7am and pack up the tent and everything and leave by 8am.

We actually woke up at 6am because it was so bright and sunny and hot. Today's forecast was the hottest yet in the Badlands - in the 90s. It was already hot at 6am.

I took a photo of our tent setup with the van.

This photo shows the hammock in the front of the van. Katy usually sleeps there - it's a child-sized hammock.

We all got dressed and went to the bathroom. I don't know why, but on this particular morning there were so many June bugs in the bathroom! It hadn't been that way any other morning. The sinks alone had about a dozen. Lily was trying to rescue them.

Katy counted all of them. Including hollering over into the shower stall where someone was showering to ask how many June bugs were inside (Answer: 2), for a grand total of 24 June bugs in the bathroom.

It was a good thing we got up at 6am because we actually managed to leave by 8am. Starting odometer reading for the day: 167,061. We had a lot of ground to cover.

We stopped at a nearby gas station called "Cowboy Corner" and got some gas. Not a full tank because the price was $4.96/gallon.

Check out these vintage pumps! Not digital!

We saw lots of mule deer and pronghorn antelope but I didn't get any good photos. It was about a two hour drive to the Mammoth Site. The first thing we did was watch a short video about the history of the site. Basically, thousands of years ago there was a sinkhole here that filled with water and drew lots of wildlife as a source of drinking water. However, the sides of the sinkhole were incredibly slippery and steep and it was over 50 feet deep, so often animals would fall in and be unable to climb out. In the 1970s while excavating for a housing development, a bulldozer uncovered a mammoth tusk. Scientists began excavating and so far have found bones from over 60 mammoths and the excavation is still ongoing! They have built an entire museum over the dig site and you can tour it. Here are photos, it is pretty cool.

View into the actual lab. The yellow sign at the top says "For Alex" - Uncle Alex, this one is for you.

Here's photo of pronghorn antelope! These are like the ones we've been seeing everywhere while we drive. For some reasons these ones were super easy to photograph.

We had a picnic lunch and said goodbye to Gram and Pops. From the Mammoth Site we had 1,211 miles to go to Uncle Adam and Aunt Devin's house in Seattle. Google estimated it would take us 18 hours and 11 minutes. Off we went!

I didn't take a lot of photos during the drive, so just picture our family in a van for hours and hours and hours and hours.

We stopped at about 3:30 to fill up with gas. The price was $4.39/gallon in Gillette, Wyoming. We had traveled 290 miles at that point. We started to see mountains. YAY!

We kept driving and driving. I downloaded an app called FreeRoam to help us find a free campsite. We selected the Otter Creek Fishing Access Site in Big Timber, Montana. Joe suggested we play the song "Timber" by Ke$ha but yell "BIG Timber" every time that lyric comes up in the song, so we did. It was funny.

The campsite was right next to Yellowstone River, which was really fast and I definitely didn't want the kids going in it. Joey kept trying to get close to it anyway. He found a "mammoth tusk" and heaved it into the river. He threw a lot of sticks and rocks into the river.

When we got there it was about 9pm and still light out. It stayed light until almost 10pm! There was a pit toilet and it was actually pretty clean, so that was nice. We popped up the tent and went to bed. Final odometer reading: 167,671. Total miles traveled: 610. Not bad.