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Finally leaving Idaho after more than a month we continued on our way south, with our next stop in Provo, Utah. Originally known as Fort Utah, the town was settled by Mormon families just two short years after the arrival of the first Mormon pioneers in the Salt Lake Valley.

Here’s the backstory, briefly: in 1830 Joseph Smith founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints after translating the Book of Mormon, a text that he claimed he was given by an angel. Smith and his fast-growing church needed room to grow so they moved west from New York reaching Kirtland, Ohio in 1831. From there they moved to Missouri but their attempt to settle ended with the expulsion of all Mormons from the state. In 1839 Mormons purchased land in Nauvoo, Illinois. The town quickly swelled to over 15,000 residents, most, but not all, of them adherents to the Mormon religion.

In 1844 Joseph Smith was killed by a hysterical mob fearful of Mormons and their teachings, and in 1846 Illinois also expelled all Mormons. Seeking freedom from religious persecution, Mormons—now led by Brigham Young—began a western migration to the isolated Salt Lake Valley. The area was specifically chosen for two reasons, it was part of Mexico, and it was basically unpopulated. The remote valley was not entirely devoid of humans though since several Ute tribal groups called the area home. (The Utes were relegated to reservations shortly after the area became part of the United States in 1848.)

The 1,300 mile route from Nauvoo to the shore of the Great Salt Lake became known as the Mormon Pioneer Trail. Between 1846 and 1869 over 70,000 Mormons traveled the long trail. Those emigrants had an easier journey than travelers on the Oregon or California Trails since Young ordered settlements, ferries, and resupply outposts be established along the route. Organized with a military-like precision most Mormon emigrants made the trip without major mishap. The settlement of Great Salt Lake City was just as methodical; within four days Young designated a site for their grand temple near the center of the new town. Under his close supervision trees were felled, houses built, and crops planted. Young even dictated the width of the streets saying they should be wide enough for a wagon team to turn around in without the driver “resorting to profanity.”

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This month we have a mystery photo for you to decipher. The challenge is to identify the animal hidden somewhere in the image. Please be as specific as possible. Good luck!

(Click photo for larger version.)

Instructions: When you think you have figured it out, enter your guess in the comment field below. Be sure to check back next week to see if you were right.

The photo has not been doctored; it is the glorious combination of two things, my lack of ability as a photographer and the subjects’ stubborn refusal to be photographed. Happy guessing!

On Sunday we secured our belongings, stowing any items that might shift during travel, and left Ashton, Idaho driving south on Highway 20. After a quick 50 miles we joined I-15, the major thoroughfare that we will follow all the way through Idaho and into Utah. It was a short travel day for us since we drove just 125 miles to reach our new home for the next week, McCammon, Idaho.

Tiny McCammon is an agricultural community roughly 25 miles southeast of Pocatello. As part of the Great Basin the area receives very little precipitation so fields are irrigated with water diverted from the nearby Snake and Portneuf Rivers. The Snake River is one of two connections that the area has to Yellowstone National Park. The headwaters of the Snake River are in the center of the park. After the Snake leaves Yellowstone it follows the curve of the much older Snake River Plain south and then west through Idaho.

The hotspot that now fuels the famous geothermal features of Yellowstone is the second connection. The foundation of the Snake River Plain was formed through volcanic activity over the past 12 million years. By tracking the geologic ages of the rocks you can trace the route of the Snake River Plain-Yellowstone hotspot as the North American plate slowly floated over it. The volcanic rocks on the western edge of the Plain are older with the age of volcanic material decreasing as the Plain curves towards Yellowstone in the northeast. Past volcanic activity is much in evidence around McCammon, in between fields is a thick, lumpy layer of basalt and several nearby hot springs have been developed into popular tourist attractions.

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To accompany Erin’s account of our visit to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, Wyoming’s Crown Jewels, here are four videos illustrating our time in these two beautiful parks.

First, see what a Moose or two can do to traffic on the main highway going from Grand Teton to Yellowstone. Just outside Jackson Lake Lodge, we stopped to watch a cow moose and her baby. While Erin got close for photos, I took a quick video of the craziness. Just after taking this clip, two tour buses arrived and dumped another sixty people on the scene…

Moose Car Jam[mp4 1MB, 22 sec]

Next, from the Mud Volcano geothermal area in Yellowstone, watch this bubbling, roiling, reeking caldron of muddy water. It was loud, and the stench was incredible.

Churning Caldron[mp4 836KB, 18 sec]

Of course, I have to share the beauty and power of Old Faithful. I start the clip with a funny sound bite from a young boy, then the geyser performs mightily with an extra bonus: a rainbow.

Old Faithful[mp4 4.6 MB, 1 min 40 sec]

Lastly, just as the sun was setting and we were leaving Yellowstone, we caught a male Elk thrashing his antlers in frustration. He really tore up the grass!

Elk Antler Rub[mp4 1.5MB, 33 sec]

We had a weekend to explore Yellowstone, not nearly enough time but we were determined to make the most of it. Yellowstone, the first national park in the country, indeed the world, was created on March 1, 1872 when President Ulysses S. Grant signed The Act of Dedication. Primarily located in Wyoming, but also spilling over into Idaho and Montana, the heart of the 3,468-square-mile park lies atop the Yellowstone Caldera. The geysers, hot springs, fumaroles, and mud pots that have made Yellowstone famous are found inside the massive 34-mile by 45-mile caldera, a depression formed after a volcano erupts and collapses in on itself.

Considered by geologists to still be active the Yellowstone Supervolcano is fueled by a rare example of a continental hotspot in the Earth’s mantle. The crust over this pool of intensely hot magma is less than three miles thick compared to an average thickness of twenty-five miles elsewhere on land. Called the Snake River Plain-Yellowstone Hotspot this pool of magma has a history of eruptive events spanning 17 million years. Not all of the eruptions occurred in the Yellowstone area as the North American plate was, and still is, on the move, slowly gliding to the southwest. One of the oldest eruptions related to this hotspot is on the border of Nevada and Oregon and someday in the future the famous geothermal activity of Yellowstone could potentially be in Canada. But that is a very long time from now.

The only thing we have to remotely worry about is that the Yellowstone Supervolcano has previously erupted on a cycle of roughly 600,000 years with the last supereruption occurring just over 640,000 years ago. But don’t worry, geologists and volcanologists have labeled the area as “high threat” and they are monitoring the situation… Until then, Yellowstone remains the place to see the most geothermal features and geysers in the world (over 10,000 and 300 respectively). It was this concentration of features that confounded the first white explorers in the area.

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I came across this while wandering through the quaint streets of Wooster, Ohio, with my two dear cousins—who also happen to be good friends.

Obviously we don’t think this sign refers to all relatives…

It was a long weekend of travel for us, instead of driving our usual 200 miles or less we tackled a whopping 504 mile journey. We maybe could have shaved off a few miles by taking smaller roads but this time we stuck to the Interstates. As I mentioned before, the Idaho Panhandle is rather isolated from the rest of the state due to some incredibly scenic yet very rugged terrain. So in order for us to get from Hayden in northwestern Idaho to Ashton in the southeastern corner of Idaho near Yellowstone National Park we had to leave the state and drive through Montana. Just over 400 of our miles were spent in Montana!

It was a lovely day for a drive, the weather was sunny and mild and there was very little traffic on the road. As we left Coeur d’Alene, I-90 was squished between the side of a mountain and Lake Coeur d’Alene. Apparently Idaho presented the biggest challenges to the construction of our northernmost Pacific-to-Atlantic Interstate. Running from Seattle, Washington all the way to Boston, Massachusetts I-90 is the longest Interstate in the country traversing close to 3,100 miles. The section along the lake was one of the most difficult stretches for the government and it required the construction of a huge bridge, which offered us great views of the lake as we headed east.

Leaving the lake I-90 crossed over Fourth of July Pass before dropping down into the Coeur d’Alene mining district more famously known as Silver Valley. Prospectors flooded to the area in the 1880s when placer gold was found. The gold was quickly played out but by then large veins of silver, zinc, lead, and copper ore had been discovered and the mining boom was on. Silver Valley has produced more silver than any other mining district in the country. Looking out the window at the peacefully meandering south fork of the Coeur d’Alene River, the tall trees, and the lush green grass in the narrow valley, it was hard to imagine the area’s violent past.

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We were heading into the Big Sky state for the weekend. It truly is big, the state is the fourth largest in the U.S. after Alaska, Texas, and California. I think the name of the state may be a bit misleading, Montana is the Spanish word for mountain. While the western side of the state is crowded with many mountain ranges—part of the Rocky Mountains—over half of Montana lies in the High Plains, the semi-arid, westernmost prairies of the Great Plains.

Montana has long been utilized for its natural resources: gold and silver mining and timber in the west with ranching, farming, and oil and coal extraction in the east, but Montana’s rugged beauty has the potential to bring in even more money. Tourists flock to the state, eager to visit Yellowstone National Park (Montana has three of the Park’s five entrances), Glacier National Park, and Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument while Montana’s rivers are renowned among fishermen for their excellent trout fishing. It is a gorgeous state, at least in the summer—I don’t think I’d like it so much during the long winter when the temperatures drop.

I read somewhere that Montana holds the record as the coldest in the lower 48, with minus 70˚ F (measured in 1954). Brrrrrr. On the plus side, though, Chinook winds are known to blow over the Rockies and warm things right up, by sometimes as much as 50˚. The downside is that they can come barreling over the mountains with hurricane force winds and they don’t stick around long; as soon as the winds leave the temperature plummets. As you can imagine, there are a great many stories about the sudden warming power of Chinooks. This is my favorite: A man was driving his horse-drawn sleigh to town when a Chinook started to blow. He kept abreast of the wind; while his horses were running belly deep in snow, the sleigh rails were running in mud up to the buckboard, and the cow that was tied behind was kicking up dust.

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Listen to this male American Bison grunt to try to get attention–it is mating season, after all. (Turn up the volume to hear his grunts.)

Bison Grunts[mp4 1.4MB, 31 sec]

This video goes along with our post about the National Bison Refuge and Glacier National Park: Wild About Montana.

The results are in…

Congratulations to Rick for acing our quiz! As with every Travel Challenge winner, Rick will be receiving one of our always interesting, sometimes useful, usually strange prizes. Lucky man!

1. “Consort” is the name given to a group of young Whooping Cranes.
False – I admit to utilizing a common but oh, so sneaky school teacher trick here; I substituted a very similar word. The actual term for a group of adolescent Whooping Cranes (Grus americana) is “cohort.” Young cranes are usually tolerated by their parents until they are a little over a year old after which the youngsters bond with their peers in small groups until they are ready to mate. We were fortunate to watch a cohort of three young males feeding at Aransas National Wildlife Refuge in December 2006. One of them caught a blue crab, said to be the crane’s favorite food, but he handled it clumsily and the crab fell back into the water. Apparently, that crane still had some learning to do.

2. The River Otter’s fur is so dense that it has 1 million hairs per square inch.
False – The River Otter has a measly 165,000 hairs per square inch (roughly, counts do vary by a few thousand). It is the River Otters’ ocean-dwelling cousin, the Sea Otter, that sports over a million hairs per square inch. Sleek Sea Otters need all those hairs, and the air that they hold, to regulate their body temperature since they lack a thick layer of insulating blubber. Kathi made a good point that it would depend on which part of the body you counted the hairs but I think the real question is, “Who counted all those hairs?”

3. Coyotes and Badgers will team up to hunt underground prey.
True – Almost inconceivable yet there have been too many documented cases of this co-hunting behavior to dismiss it as accidental. Rick raises a valid question, Is the American Badger already digging away when some ever-resourceful Coyotes join in? That could very well be the case but don’t feel sorry for the hard-working mustelid just yet. If the badger manages to catch the desired prey I have no doubt in its ability to fend off a couple coyotes. Though weighing only 15-20 pounds badgers are incredibly fierce and have been known to chase off even mountain lions and bears.

4. Name two animals of the American West whose popular names are misnomers…
As for our final question, we had two specific animals in mind but Karen and Rick get extra credit for mentioning two other critters prominent in the American West that are saddled with technically incorrect popular names: the Prairie Dog (Cynomys) and the Turkey Buzzard (Cathartes aura). Kathi gets extra special credit for her incredibly creative answers!

Prairie Dogs were saddled with their cute, but incorrect, name as a result of their warning call which sounds like a dog bark. A more appropriate common name for the burrowing rodents would have been Prairie Squirrels. Native to North America there are five Prairie Dog species: black-tailed, white-tailed, Gunnison, Utah, and Mexican. In southern Arizona there is a desert-dwelling species, the Round-tailed Ground Squirrel (Spermophilus tereticaudus), that often is mistaken for a Prairie Dog.

The Turkey Vulture (and the American Black vulture) is sometimes referred to as a buzzard, a term that is used in the Old World in the same manner as we use the word hawk. In America, the word has negative connotations and is used to describe scavengers such as vultures and even ravens. As an aside, most, if not all, the Turkey Vultures in Idaho have already left on their annual migration south.

Though the above critters are technically correct answers the ones we were seeking are Pronghorn Antelope and Buffalo. While the word antelope has been dropped from most written material about the Pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) it is not uncommon to still hear people mistakenly calling them by that name. The North American Pronghorn which is native to the American West, was given the name because it resembles true antelopes which are found in Eurasia and Africa. However, Pronghorns are the only surviving member of the Antilocapridae family while true antelopes belong to the Bovidae family. The horns of Pronghorn are, as the name suggests, branched or multi-pronged and they are shed. True antelopes are closely related to cows in that their horns do not branch and are never shed.

Pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) grazing in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming.

The American Bison (Bison bison) suffered a similar fate as the Pronghorn, picking up the commonly used name of buffalo based on its resemblance to true buffaloes. Though Bison vaguely look like Wild Asian Water and African Buffalo they are only very distantly related. Though American Bison once roamed the west in vast herds the species was reduced to a few small pockets of animals by the beginning of the 1900s. Today there are over 350,000 American Bison but fewer than 15,000 remain genetically pure since the rest have interbred with domestic cattle.

American Bison (Bison bison) — National Bison Range, Montana.