Travels with Katrina

06/01/2026

Day 6 Cowboy Country trip was to Yellowstone National Park, the world’s first national park. Famous for its geysers, hot springs and incredible wildlife – including free-ranging herds of buffalo – Yellowstone lived up to its reputation with Old Faithful - the geyser sending a fountain of steam more than 130 feet in the air. We traveled over the Sylvan Pass and saw Yellowstone Lake on the way to Jackson. Pictures of all the animals we have seen so far coming soon.

05/31/2026

Day 5 of Cowboy Country trip. We made our way through the Bighorn Mountains/Bighorn National Forests and crossed through the territory of the Great Sioux Nation.
Then we visited the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, a tribute to one of the most well-known figures of the Old West.

It rained extra heavy on our way to Heart Mountain near Cody but cleared up as soon as we stopped. This is one of the most important — and painful — chapters in American history. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor fear and racism spread across the United States. In February 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, allowing the forced removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. More than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry — most of them U.S. citizens — were uprooted from their homes and sent to incarceration camps inland.
One of those camps was the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, built in the barren high desert between Cody and Powell, Wyoming, beneath the striking butte called Heart Mountain.

Today, the site is preserved by the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation. The Heart Mountain Interpretive Center tells the stories of the people incarcerated there through photographs, oral histories, artifacts, and restored buildings. The site was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2007.

05/30/2026

Wyoming

05/29/2026

Day 4 of the Cowboy Country trip. Tatanka: Story of the Bison in Deadwood, South Dakota is a project actor and filmmaker Kevin Costner created after working on the film Dances with Wolves. It’s not just a sculpture—it’s an outdoor interpretive center meant to tell a larger story about the relationship between the Lakota people and the American bison (often called buffalo).
Costner funded and commissioned a massive artwork in the early 1990s. The centerpiece is one of the largest bronze sculptures in the world, showing:
14 bison being chased, 3 Lakota riders on horseback, depicting a traditional hunting method called a buffalo jump. The idea was to capture the life-and-death relationship between people and bison on the Plains.

05/29/2026

Deadwood, South Dakota got its name in the early 1870s during the Black Hills gold rush. Prospectors moving into the area found a narrow canyon filled with a stream choked by fallen, dead pine trees—likely killed by fire, disease, or flooding. They began calling it “Deadwood Gulch” because of all the dead timber lining the creek. When a mining camp quickly formed there, the name stuck, and the settlement grew into the town of Deadwood, keeping the same vivid description of its original landscape.

05/29/2026

Day 3 Custer State Park, Crazy Horse, Mt Rushmore. Captions are on some pictures.

05/28/2026

Day 2 - America’s Cowboy Country - Badlands National Park covers about 244,000 acres (roughly 381 square miles). It is a dramatic landscape in southwestern South Dakota known for its jagged rock spires, striped buttes, deep canyons, and wide-open prairie. The terrain looks almost otherworldly, with layers of red, tan, gray, and gold sediment carved by wind and water over millions of years.

The park protects one of the world’s richest fossil beds, where scientists have uncovered remains of ancient horses, rhinos, saber-toothed cats, and other prehistoric animals. Alongside the rocky formations, the park also contains one of North America’s largest mixed-grass prairies, home to wildlife such as bison, bighorn sheep, prairie dogs, coyotes, and golden eagles.

05/28/2026

05/28/2026

Minuteman Missile National Historic Site. I knew South Dakota was home of super secretive locations but to stand here and tour the Visitors Center for the site really made it all sink in.

05/27/2026

Look who is in the Cowboy trip with me from my hometown- Umatilla. Travel friends make the best memories!!