1977

Maybe it's a result of attending Horace Greeley High School—"Go West" and all that—or a peripatetic urge that won't be quelled, but we once again opted for a summer vacation in the "big mountains." This time Yellowstone was our final destination, with stops—a long one in western Michigan, where we once again canoed a few luscious miles of the Pere Marquette River with three generations. The semi-unplanned itinerarythis is vacation, "play it by ear"—took us to the Wisconsin Dells and South Dakota, where we took in the Corn Palace in Mitchell, Wall Drug, the Badlands, Pine Ridge Reservation (where an eagle riding wind currents soared over an isolated butte), Wind Cave's boxworks formations, Mt. Rushmore, the beginnings of the massive sculpture of Crazy Horse, buffalo, and wild flowers galore. Late at night our binoculars revealed globular clusters in the starry heavens. In Wyoming we drove all too briefly through the wild and untrammeled beauty of the Big Horn Mountains, stopping to dive (literally) into a field of mountain wildflowers—20, 30, 40 different species. We de- toured to take in the mystery of the Medicine Wheel and watch a pair of bluebirds play amid tall spires of red rock, then plunged down to the plains and tourist commercialism of Cody, Wyoming, where we all enjoyed an evening rodeo in spite of ourselves, the heat, and fatigue. Up the next morning into the mountains again to Yellowstone. New vistas were revealed in the charred forests burned in the fires of '89; they're carpeted with fireweed, wild lupine, paintbrush, woolly verbena, and others. We spent six hours hiking the six-anda-half-mile round trip up and down 10,200 ft. Mt. Washburn with Kaethe and Scott—a trip the two of us would have made in a third of that time before we had children, but we were glad to have them along to share the incredible views and wildflowers, the sunshine and wind, and, of course, the high altitude snowbanks yielding cooling ice balls down the back and snowball fights along the trail. Sometimes speed isn't everything—it's enough just to get there.

Turning east once more, we visited Bill '79 and Rika Clement in Laramie and outfitted the kids with Western boots and hats before heading home. Colorado, Nebraska, lowa, Chicago, Indiana, Ohio, New York, and, at last, Vermont. 5,400 miles, three weeks later, we were home, with weeds waist-high in the vegetable garden, mountains of junk mail and office work awaiting us (no, it's not true that faculty and administrators get the summer off, though it's amazing how that myth persists), very tired of riding in the car, but spiritually refreshed and renewed for awhile.

As our final year as class secretary winds down, the news for the column gets sparser, so let us hear from you.

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