Lizard Creek Campground, WY -> Sage Creek Campground, SD
560 mi
Looks like the 2025 website will become inaccessible for any edits or additions in the next week, so I will try my best to finish the road trip series of blogs today. It’s a great way to procrastinate my mountains of work as an MIT student. hahaha… – Joseph. March 8th, 2026
We woke up in Lizard Creek Campground, located on the shore of Lake Jackson, overlooking the majestic Teton Range. I was excited to see them all morning as we quickly packed up our campsite. We drove out to the shore, and I was disappointed at the lack of the recognizable tall, jagged peaks in my sight. Fog had obscured the mountains from view. On the bright side, the fog made this a different kind of beautiful view and really gave the vibe that we were in distant lands.
As much as I wanted to linger in the park until the fog cleared, we had a long distance to travel today. We had to cross Wyoming, the least populus state in the US. It is still a very large state, though. This would be my highest mileage day so far. As we made our way out of the park, we were greeted by gorgeous rivers with some of the clearest and serene water I’ve seen in my life. It perfectly reflected the landscape. We decided to admire this landscape as we ate our breakfast.
We made it out of the Tetons and continued East, until we made it to the town of Dubois. There, the National Bighorn Sheep Center caught our attention. We stopped to take a bathroom break and check the place out while we were at it. It was $5 to enter the exhibits, which we were a bit stingy to do, but we still talked to the receptionist at the front desk about the bighorn sheep. She told us that they appear around town in colder seasons, but in the heat of summer, they stay in the high elevations of the Wind-River Range. If we took the Fish Hatchery up into the Wind-River Range for a few miles, we might see some. Armed with a mission, we off the pavement and ascended. The views were truly stunning, and in a different way than everything we had seen before. This wasn’t even a park, just wilderness. We eventually saw a bunch of what looked like mountain goats running around but figured that they couldn’t be bighorn sheep. After all, bighorn sheep need to have their big horns, right? We made it to the end of the road and saw a glacier in the distance, but no bighorn sheep. On the way back, we saw herds of these mountain goats and decided to record them (these videos no longer exist, rip Ramona’s phone). On the way down, we also stopped at an outhouse. I distinctly remember thinking that it was one of the cleanest outhouses I had ever stepped foot in. As we descended further, we came to the realization that all of these mountain goats were probably the very bighorn sheep we were looking for, but we were too ignorant to notice. Haha.
We carried on deep into Wyoming, eventually stopping at a gas station in the tiny town of Wright with showers advertised. They were $20 per person… Unfortunately, a shower is not worth that much, as much as it pains me to say (Lizard Creek didn’t have a shower, and neither will our destination this night, yikes). We then turned onto the desolate Thunder Basin National Grasslands. It felt as empty as Northern Nevada was, and almost as dry.
As the day started to leave, we finally made it to the Black Hills, at the border between Wyoming and South Dakota. It was nice to see trees again after passing through dry grasslands all day. Since we were in the area, I wanted to see Mount Rushmore, an iconic piece of Americana. It was just bright enough when we got there that the faces could be seen. It was cool, but the $35 spent on parking felt a bit overpriced. We walked to a large auditorium where someone was giving a very good speech on the history of Mount Rushmore. I could feel the patriotism surging through my body.
Leaving the Black Hills, we still had to drive over an hour and many miles on a dirt road deep into the Sage Creek Wilderness of Badlands National Park. It’s always a strange feeling driving through the darkness and not seeing any buildings or other cars. It’s like you’re driving through the void. We made it to the road loop that was Sage Creek Campground without much issue. There were a lot of other campers around, but we were able to find a good space. We started to set up camp and cook in the darkness, and the Dark Sky certification of this place quickly became obvious. Skies just as clear as what we had seen in Capitol Reef painted the sky above while we cooked. At some point, we heard a pack of coyotes start howling close by. Ramona was understandably spooked, but I was more fascinated than anything. A bit later, I heard another coyote howl from a different direction, much closer to us. I shined my headlamp into the distance and saw its two eyes staring back. Spooky. We had some ramen for dinner and fell asleep with the rainfly off our tent to soak in the starry sky.
MIT Spokes 2026 
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