Hello, Goodbye

 

This was me on a lot of days.  Greeting visitors to the Tower Trail and answering hundreds of questions.  I was required to keep track/count of all my contacts while on the trail.  In my two to three hours of what was called 'roving' I would record on-average 200 encounters.  Then there was the four hours that Cyndee and I each spent in the Visitor Center.  Our clicker count through that little room would hit 1,200 on some days but routinely be in excess of 800.

Devils Tower NM Visitor Center.
Smallest Visitor Center we've ever been in.

Devils Tower NM is not a big operation.  The whole park is just 1,300 acres and the visitor center is a tiny one-room operation.  The information desk we worked at was tucked in the corner.  That's where the above picture was taken from.  We got culture shock when arriving after having been in one of the largest parks in the system, Death Valley, essentially the size of Connecticut.  We're about to reverse that shock.  We're finished up here at Devils Tower and heading back to Death Valley for the winter.

Parting Shot

The above picture was taken just as we finished our last shift.  We had seen thousands of visitors taking this selfie all summer long but we had never done it ourselves.  We literally did it at the last possible moment.  Seconds after this pic we were in the car headed down the mountain to get our rig ready to move out.