Fifteen minutes’ drive west of Dubois, you are hiking in high alpine forest.
The scent of sage mixes with the fragrance of pine. The air is so cool you may need an extra layer in midsummer.
Your eyes behold the most beautiful color combination in nature: sagebrush and lupine.
You’re only a few miles from the Continental Divide here.
Just a mile or two east of this spot the spectacular red-rock badlands begin. They rise stunningly over the center of town, and continue to a long distance to the the east, standing above the valley like a vast array of monuments.
From a distance they look like solid rock, but up close you find that they are slowly dissolving sand. My husband calls them “melting ice-cream,” in geologic terms.
These hikers have just completed a hot and dry hike up Mason’s Draw and back, stopping often to give the dogs (and themselves) a drink of water.
Where they turned back at the top of the draw, it seemed as silent as the back side of the moon, except for the breeze.
Here you see the kinds of flowers that dominate in one landscape (left) and the other, just a short drive away (right).
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© Lois Wingerson 2015
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