The Rocky Burger Run

Wilson's final thoughts

2011-08-09T22:00:00.000+01:00

I've made it back to Denver. 8,700 miles, 280 hours of driving, 14,000 feet in elevation change from the Pacific to Pikes Peak. Burned some gas, ate some burgers, got wet, got hot. Took a few pictures along the way.

Time to take stock of the last 50 days.

Return to splendour (and some teeth gnashing)

2011-08-09T14:00:00.131+01:00

I spent my final few days wandering along the canyons, ridge roads and forests of Northern Colorado in the Roosevelt National Forest and the Rocky Mountain National Park.

The scenery is spectactular but, outside the National Park, it's also highly settled - a combination of old history where settlers hit the Rockies and stopped, laying down backwoods roots and new history where lots of new money simply buys a piece of forest, builds a house on it and comes to 'summer' or 'winter' here (Americans do love to turn nouns into verbs). The good stuff is only an hour or so from Denver airport so it's become a popular destination.

Compared to the wilder states I'd been through over the last 50 days, where similar scenery felt more open and less controlled, my frequently thwarted attempts to find parts that weren't privately owned or prohibited from parking/swimming/enjoying became quite frustrating. The constant stream of fences, private property (how does one feel about possessing wilderness?), 'no parking dusk to dawn' and 'fee required' areas really started to chafe, accreting a hard to ignore noise that my roadtrip was coming to an end and I would soon be returning to civilisation.

2 Doors Down bottomless fries burger - 17/25

2011-08-06T12:00:00.002+01:00

After what felt like a thousand hours on the grassplains of South Dakota and Nebraska, I was jonesing for a decent burger.

A quick survey of the locals (including a pair who specialise in car repairs due to damage caused by frequent hail in these parts, yes really) uncovered 2 Doors Down, a dedicated burger diner/restaurant a short walk from my motel in the centre of Cheyenne, Wyoming. Their vibe is cool, fresh and genuine and they set out their stall early with a claim to have been "Flippin' great burgers since 2009".

Just like Gourmet Burger Kitchen back in the UK, you order from a blackboard menu at the front, take a number flag and from then on it's table service all the way. There's a few key differences though, the standard drinks fountain (soft drinks, coke, lemonade etc) is bottomless but, potato lovers, so are the fries. Whenever a member of staff wanders by they latch onto an empty looking vessel, spirit it away and return with more of the same. It's a gimmick, but a great one.

Stir crazy on the grasslands of Nebraska

2011-08-05T12:00:00.007+01:00

There's a lot of grass in Nebraska. After a peaceful and picturesque overnight car-camp in the middle of it, the long long drive South East back towards Wyoming and Colorado began to take it's toll....

Interesting road name nose following part 3

2011-08-04T18:20:00.024+01:00

This time towards something called 'Toadstool Geologic Park'. After negotiating a textbook 1/2 mile long train crossing and 11 miles of track spearing off into the middle of nowhere, I found myself arriving at this location straight out of a doctor who episode.

Sculpted mountains and windy caves in South Dakota

2011-08-03T11:45:00.000+01:00

Can you spot the President in this picture?

At last, I turn South on the final side of the rough rectangle back to Denver where I started way back in June. The Black Hills area of South Dakota are a pretty fierce set of granite hills and dense forests, but aside from mountain goats their chief claim to fame is the home of Mount Rushmore.

You've got to admire the sheer hutzpah of the visionaries/crazies who conceived of the idea of sculpting a mountain way back in post-depression 30s USA.

Close encounters of the iconic kind

2011-08-02T20:30:00.019+01:00

No visit to Wyoming would be complete with stopping by one of the most iconic natural / unnatural formations in the World. If you haven't seen Close Encounters Of The Third Kind go get it and see what Spielberg was up to before ET.

From storm clouds to fluffy clouds

2011-08-02T15:00:00.027+01:00

My first day back on the road was a stormy start with heavy skies for most of the morning. As I headed out of the Greater Yellowstone area and onto the prairies of Northern Wyoming it was back to blue and some serious heat with it. Hotel for the night was courtesy of the Old Ten Sleep Highway, now replaced with shiny blacktop leaving it forgotten and empty as it wound it's way off into the hills.

Diggin' on human power in Wyoming

2011-07-31T10:00:00.024+01:00

America loves the motor car (well in fact they love girt big trucks masquerading as cars), so much so that most touristy places I go end up with a 1/2 mile exclusion zone around the car park beyond which 80% of Americans will not walk.

This is A Good Thing because it means the application of a little human powered activity i.e. walking or, in this mornings case, paddling, results in accessing proper wildscapes without screaming kids, revving engines, yakking people or white socks pulled half way up to the knees.

The Bird 'Ghetto on a Good Day' Burger - 19/25

2011-07-28T16:00:00.144+01:00

The more places I see, the more it reinforces how incredibly important personality becomes in a restaurant. Branded chains drown under a wave of greying conformity, no matter how brightly coloured their arches. Mom & Pop places should have personality oozing given their independence and owner/operator control, but too often they make no statement at all and end up just as grey and forgettable as the generica.

In any endeavour where you want to have people take away positive memories and experiences , you can't do that unless somebody somewhere in the organisation puts a big old stake in the ground and says This is what we are about. It doesn't have to be complex (it's usually better not) or be grand, but as long as you have something concrete to hang your business, band or restaurant off that's what matters and it's what will lift you out of the murky depths of average.

The Bird had it in spades for me. It's an idiosyncratic pub just South of Jackson, Wyoming. Opened in 2010 by two New Yorkers via Berlin it's become the #1 Restaurant on Tripadvisor in Jackson (all this I found out after the fact as I was tipped off by some locals from my namesake town earlier in the day when I enquired 'who makes the best burgers around here' and got told, "Hands down, The Bird").

A Wilson got to Wyoming before me

2011-07-28T14:00:00.000+01:00

After the magnificence of Yellowstone, I was prepared for a duller landscape, but immediately below Yellowstone lies the Grand Teton mountain range and national park so there was no let up in the jaw dropping scenery. In Winter this area becomes one of America's prime snow destinations, but seen under Summer skies, there's a whole other life to be had.

Sulphur and furry backsides in a still active caldera

2011-07-27T16:00:00.066+01:00

It could only be Yellowstone National Park. One of the few places in the US that have never been fenced or farmed it's also one of the first National Parks and treasure trove of just about any kind of geographic feature you care to name. Plains, hills, mountains, canyons, forests, lakes, rivers and marshes all sit inside the 40 mile wide caldera left behind by massive volcanic eruptions 2 million, 1.2 million and 600,000 years ago.

Much of the park is basically sitting inside the crater of a supervolcano ready to go off beneath it. The magma close below the surface results in extraterrestrial surface features like acid burned basins, sulphur spewing vents and superheated rainbow coloured pools caused by all the geothermal goings on.

Big Jud's Double Rodeo Burger - 13/25

2011-07-25T14:00:00.001+01:00

Big Jud's is a small chain of Idaho burger joints whose chief claim to fame is the 1lb Burger and multiples thereof, as seen on Man Vs Food. Call me a wuss but, I didn't fancy ploughing my way through one of those bad boys (1lb of beef isn't a problem, it's the 1lb again of topppings, sauces and cheese that puts me off) I compromised and went with a Double Rodeo Burger (basically an onion ring, bacon + homegrown BBQ sauce, layered twice as it's a double).

Experimenting with roads and kites

2011-07-24T10:53:00.003+01:00

I have found Idaho to be harder than any of the preceding states to sniff out places to overnight in, or at least the options feel limited because so much more of the state is given over to fenced off ranch land. Maybe it's a relic of the fact that early settlers got this far and couldn't face the depradations of the Oregon Trail further west so simply set roots on this side of the Cascades. Either way, I've had to work harder to find the good stuff. Having said that, when I have, the results have been entirely worth it.

From baking to freezing in a thousand year old lava tube

2011-07-23T19:34:00.013+01:00

Day 4 finds me moving further East across the middle of Idaho. After a brief stop at Silver Creek for a dip it was on to the Craters of the Moon National Monument: a massive lava field stretching for miles across the plains. Thousands of years old flows have solidified and in places left behind lava tubes and caves you can climb or walk in. It was amazing how cold they were just a few feet below the baking hot surface.

More photos from Craters of the Moon

The only human in 100 square miles

2011-07-23T10:00:00.011+01:00

On the way back down from the mountain forests of Sawtooth, the peaks gradually lose height, the trees thin out and the landscape starts flattening back to plains and rolling hills. A little real map planning had a small road, ID46 leaping out at me to link back to the US20 East. Halfway down the road, out of the corner of my eye I saw a tiny sign for 'City of Rocks Road' pointing off to a winding track to the West. Game on.

Chipmunk fishing in Sawtooth Forest

2011-07-22T14:00:00.006+01:00

Day 2 in Idaho finds me traversing the deep twisty depths of the assorted National Forests of Challis, Boise and Sawtooth. The forests don't seem as dense from the road as in Oregon, but there was a lot more evidence of Forest Fires leaving behind dead blackened or sun bleached blasted trees.

Hotel, schmotel - car camping is the way to go

2011-07-21T14:00:00.000+01:00

Coming down from the misty Oregon mountains and continuing inland towards Idaho, the first signs of high desert plains began to appear with horizon spanning rolling hills of sagebrush. For the early Oregon trail travellers, trying to reach the West coast going the opposite way, the contrast between sagebrush track plains and deep canyon dense forest would have been harsh, if not deadly in winter.

All quiet on the Western Burger front

2011-07-19T04:55:00.000+01:00

The keener foodies among you (no names no pack drill Beef), might have noticed a distinct lack of Burger updates from last few weeks. Fear not, I am still attempting to ferret out the good stuff, but of late it's been a pretty poor showing with only distinctly average fare presented. I took an executive decision (because hey, it's only me, it's my damn blog and my mission) to only write up the good stuff as no-one remembers that which only hits the giddy heights of good enough.

Herewith the scores on the doors so far. The calibration is holding steady, with GBK firmly mid-table.

Joint	Score	Total	%
Fish & Farm	20	25	80.0%
Ford's Real Hamburgers	16	25	64.0%
Cherry Cricket	19	30	63.3%
GBK	15	25	60.0%
Crown Burger	17	30	56.7%
True Grit	13	25	52.0%
Boss Hog	15	30	50.0%
Polkers Gourmet	11	25	44.0%

From 3,000 years old to 33 million years old

2011-07-18T14:00:00.044+01:00

Yesterday was a bit of a geology field trip day. I spent time in the various units of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in mid-Oregon and drove through a barren black lava field up near Mount Washington.

The John Day Fossil Beds are a geologically significant area due to the many layers of rock exposed through erosion that document a 30 million year period in the planets's evolution. The place is crawling with fossils and paleontologists as a result. The coloured layers are caused by different minerals in the volcanic ash that formed them and because of the dry climate have remained essentially unchanged for multi-millions of years.

My own private America

2011-07-17T19:45:00.006+01:00

Dolpin or Bedouin ancestors, you decide

2011-07-15T15:00:00.001+01:00

Oregon Coastline

2011-07-14T15:00:00.016+01:00

Quick post of some shots I took on my trip up the Oregon coast featuring some beautiful beaches, dangerous guillemots and enviable property. I had two days of brilliant sunshine followed by 2 days of fog and rain, so got the timing just right. This coast is a lot more accessible than California, which was either too rugged or too built up for my taste. Sections of this trip reminded me a lot of the North Cornish coast. All it needed was a pasty to make the day perfect.

Oregon Coastline pictures

Random Americana

2011-07-14T10:30:00.000+01:00

For those that like sort of thing, I'm keeping a little scrapbook of Americana snaps here

Get off the map and stay off it

2011-07-13T18:19:00.002+01:00

Spent 4 days touring round the depths of the National Forests of Klamath, Shasta, Trinity and Lassen, a huge area of mountains and forest taking up most of Northern California. In the process, I have become adept at snaking out awesome spots to overnight at, preferably with a river close by for morning dips. Had some epic drives, which completely blew Sat Nav Lady's mind (or maybe it was the canyons, fog, switchback roads, deep forests). I lost count of the number of legal U-turns she was desperate for me to make to force me back onto main roads. The more she does it the more I relish ignoring her..