I woke up in a where-am-I-and-who-are-these-people-walking-around panic. While Brad slept I said hi and related the story of our late arrival to a couple of interested people that walked past, everyone else seemed pretty busy getting ready to go out in the field to work, they had to put in a half day in spite of the holiday. I finally saw Jackie walk in, she was a bit surprised to see us but gave me the micro-tour anyway. The group of cabins had been purchased by YES to house researchers year-round while they were working in the park, any unused cabins were rented to tourists. Jackie and the rest of the small mammal team left at 05:30 so they could get out there before the squirrels woke up, I went back to sleep.
While everyone was out working Brad and I got cleaned up. I was so hungry that nothing sounded good to me but we made some rice and that got me going, I was craving all kinds of food in no time. Jackie got back as we were starting the second pot of rice. She introduced us to a bunch of people, everyone working there was super cool.
Jackie borrowed a truck and took us into Cooke City. We walked around a bit, bought some beer for that night and a round of ice cream cones for immediate consumption. The Miner bar had pool and air hockey tables so we played a three way game of pool and then had a mini air hockey tourney before heading back.
Everyone was sitting around taking it easy some people had gotten into the beer. It was a nice way to relax after the previous day/nights 90-mile death ride.
Some poor sucker had been hard at work getting the volleyball court setup all durring the day and we recognized their efforts with two 7-on-7 games. Brad and Jackie were on the wrong team and got destroyed by my non-looser team in both games. I heard Brad mumbling some thing about being pool champ for the day afterwards, it seemed to make him feel better.
The towns of Silver Gate and Cooke City have a combined fireworks show put on by the Volunteer Fire Department, who by sunset are completely drunk. They were firing them off 100 feet away from the YES cabins and you could actually see the firemen staggering around. As the fireworks started someone turned on Bruce Springstein's Born In The USA, we all rocked out and sang along.
After grabbing another beer we all walked down to The Range Rider where some country cover band with a Texas flag hanging behind them was playing. Dawn Adams is the only other person I've been around who was as stoked to get drunk and go dancing as Jackie was. When I visited her in Spain all Dawn wanted to do was go dance all night at Etchacalte, Jackie had been telling us all day that tonight some dancing was going to happen. The two of them should get together in Reno and go rock out. It was fun taking turns dancing with everybody, contrary to what my partner may say I had nothing to do with the dropping of that beer. [Brad reminded me to mention that they played a Rolling Stones cover. Annoyingly they knew no Johnny Cash though, I asked.]
Once the band finished up we walked up stairs (this is the second largest freestanding log structure after all it's got two floors) and looked at the signs with the old prostitutes' names over the doors of their rooms. People were getting tired so we went back up to the cabins. At 02:30 we were the only two still up. Sitting in the kitchen listening to the Grateful Dead we decided that this was the last 4th of July we'd of expected to have but that we were pretty all right with it.
andrew
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