“In these matters, the only certainty is there is nothing certain.”—Pliny The Elder
About ten minutes after the running of the 148th Belmont Stakes, the skies over Elmont, New York opened up and let loose a frog choker. Keith Desormeaux, the trainer of slop-loving Exaggerator, looked up and shook his head ruefully. “Thanks a lot,” he complained, “but I placed my order for an HOUR ago.” Bereft of precipitation, the eager Preakness winner was nowhere to be found at the Belmont finish, fading to eleventh in a field of fourteen.
“Actually, I was hoping this race would dispel the sloppy track thing,” said Desormeaux. “But now that has to come into play. I think, though, it’s mostly that Belmont is a deep sandy surface and he might have had a little trouble with it.” In other words, he doesn’t know what the hell happened. Does it matter? Sure. If you can figure out what went wrong, maybe you can fix it next time. Racetrackers aren’t looking for excuses but they do want reasons. And barring injury, there will be a next time, probably Saratoga’s Travers Stakes on August 27 when all the classics contenders return refreshed trying to get a leg up on the three-year-old championship. Of course, you can’t do much about rain. Or the lack of it.
Exaggerator’s jockey, brother Kent Desormeaux, says au contraire. “The track today was in perfect shape. It’s silky sand, they have a beautiful cushion. If I could draw this track all over the world and have the surface under this horse’s feet, this is what I would ask for. Congratulations to Belmont, the track did not get this horse beat. It was wonderful.” We get it, Kent. You liked the track.
So what happened? When his rider asked Exaggerator to run at the top of the stretch, he got little response. “I thought he would blast off, not tail off,” Desormeaux related. “I couldn’t believe we were going so slow for such an animal, such a talent, such a horse with expeditious speed. The horse that was keen to progress was not underneath me. I nursed him to the quarter pole and set him down, put him down for a mad drive and there was nothing there.” It happens. A colt who appears fresh in his morning gallops is often exposed in the light of an afternoon trial. The Triple Crown campaign, three races in five weeks, is an ordeal, which is why only one horse in the last 38 years has managed to win all three races. As we mentioned last week, 8 of the last 16 winners of the Belmont ran at Churchill Downs on Derby day and skipped the Preakness. Make that 9 out of 17 now.
The Race
Gettysburg, inserted into the Belmont by Winstar Farm and trainer Steve Asmussen to insure an honest pace for their closer Creator, surged to the front, getting the quarter in 24.09 and the half in 48.48, thus not allowing Destin, who was second, to set too leisurely a pace. This bit of inspiration is almost certainly what won them the day. Gettysburg carried his lead into the stretch where he finally ceded it to Destin, with Stradivari a close third. Exaggerator was fifth at the time, earlier in the race chafing at being restrained by Desormeaux. Suddenbreakingnews, one of the favorites, lagged in tenth, where he would remain most of the race. Creator sat a comfortable sixth.
Destin ran a brilliant race under Javier Castellano, content to sit off Gettysburg until that one tired. By the time he inherited the lead, however, Creator was less than three lengths back and rolling. Destin battled doggedly but his adversary got a nose in front at the wire, with Lani, running steadily throughout, another 1 1/2 back. Governor Malibu ran fourth throughout much of the race and that’s where he finished, four lengths behind the winner. Creator, by the classics sire Tapit, was a logical winner on pedigree but nonetheless paid a sparkling $34.80 to win.
The Flying Pie was naturally disappointed, highly recommending Exaggerator and Stradivari, who finished a decent fifth. We did give Creator a big shot, though, picking him third with a chance for second at a nice price. At least one rookie punter jumped on the longshot. Longtime reader Court Lewis of Tennessee backed up a couple of Exaggerator combine tickets with a good show bet on Creator that sent him home with a profit. The key to winning at the track is to remember you are betting against the general public, most of which knows even less than you do. Creator finished a wobbly 13th in the Kentucky Derby after being knocked around and losing all chance in that race. A closer inspection of the Louisville mugging convinced us that the Arkansas Derby winner was being unwisely discounted in the Belmont. At least we were right about something.
Vacation Month Continues: Yellowstone To The Tetons
Before we were so rudely interrupted, we were discussing vacations, mainly excursions out west, where the deer and the militiamen play. One of those vacations should be to Yellowstone National Park, an American icon that lives up to all expectations. Go there in July or August. Our friends, John and Sharon Cinnie trekked out to Yellowstone in June and wound up in a snowstorm. The park is prettier snowless and you can see the albino bison better.
One of the unfortunate things about Yellowstone is that the place is in the middle of nowhere, or, to be precise, northwesternmost Wyoming, with a smidge dripping over into Montana. Getting there is not half the fun. You can procure an expensive flight to Bozeman and arrive at some bizarre hour, then drive ninety minutes to the park or you can fly into Salt Lake City for a reasonable price at almost any time of day, then take almost five hours to motor up there. It’s like dating a hermaphrodite—you have to take the bad with the good. We chose Salt Lake City. Unfortunately for us, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir was touring Swaziland at the time but we got to see the lake. It’s bigger than you think. It rode along with us half the way to Yellowstone, smiling and making alternate route suggestions. Eventually, we got to Pocatello. That’s in Idaho, for the geography-deprived.
The only things I know about Pocatello are those few scraps of information I gleaned from watching a 1931 Ken Maynard movie called The Pocatello Kid, in which Ken the outlaw takes on the identity of his twin brother, Sheriff Jim Bledsoe, and cleans up the scuzzy town. Things have changed since then. They have motels there now and we stayed in one of them. Siobhan had a glass of water in the restaurant and practically swooned. “This is the best water in the WORLD!” she raved. I would MOVE here for the water!” Or, to make things less complicated I suggested, we could always have it shipped.
Next morning, bright and early, after a disgustingly caloric breakfast at Butterburr’s fat people’s restaurant, we continued the drive to Yellowstone. We were staying the first two nights in Gardiner, Montana on the north side of the park but we stopped in at the town of West Yellowstone (I’ll bet you can guess what side that was on) to book a room for the subsequent stay. Mr Frommer’s guidebook told us the Stagecoach Inn was a wonderful and historic place to stay but Mr. Frommer neglected to mention the tiny rooms and lack of air-conditioning. We chose the dull-sounding West Yellowstone Conference Center with large rooms and whirlpools instead and we were happy non-campers that we did. I’m not sure that the place is there any more but you’ll have plenty of options in West Yellowstone.
In Gardiner, we stayed at the friendly Absaroka Motel, overlooking the fast-flowing Yellowstone River, where you can sit out on your balcony and watch an endless stream of rafters negotiate the currents. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy this sort of thing since there is nothing, make that nothing else to do in Gardiner. I’m sure there are people who’d be thrilled with the peace and tranquility but I’m one of those characters who can’t even laze on the beach for an hour reading a book. What time do the Missoula Osprey play? Is there a zip-line over the Yellowstone?
Next day, we hiked the little-heralded but nonetheless wonderful Sepulcher Mountain. We left at 7:30 a.m. and were depressed to discover the mosquitoes had also left a wake-up call notice at the front desk. As we ascended, we outhiked them, starting out along a cheery creek, through forests, along a ridge and through meadows filled with a vast array of colorful wildflowers. I thought Mary Poppins might show up. No luck there, but we did eventually get a curious deer who marched right up, failing to realize what maniacs human beings are but living to tell about it. We got to the summit of Sepulcher, a five-mile climb, in four hours. The trail was a loop, seven miles back down, taking another four. It had the decency not to rain until we reached the bottom and returned to our car. I’d say a good time was had by all except that Siobhan lost the bottom section of her fine Leki walking stick, sad for the experience but maintaining a stiff upper lip in the storied tradition of her brave English forebears.
Mammoth Hot Springs
While you are in the northwestern section of Yellowstone, you’ll want to visit the unique Mammoth Hot Springs. They’re mammoth! They’re hot! And they look pretty springy, though no one seemed to be sticking a toe in. MHS is a large complex of hot springs on a hill of travertine, created over thousands of years as hot water from the spring cooled and deposited calcium carbonate. It’s a visual delight and you won’t be running across the likes at Disney World, or anywhere else, for that matter. The hot water that feeds Mammoth emanates from Norris Geyser Basin after traveling underground via a fault line that runs through limestone and roughly parallel to the Norris-to-Mammoth road. The limestone from rock formations along the fault is the source of the calcium carbonate. Shallow circulation along this corridor allows Norris’ superheated water to slightly cool before surfacing at Mammoth, generally at about 170 degrees farenheit. Algae living in the warm pools have tinted the travertine shades of brown, orange, red and green.
Old Faithful And Friends
One of the main reasons people visit Yellowstone National Park is to investigate the geysers. SIXTY PERCENT of the world’s geysers are in the park’s Upper Geyser Basin. In addition to geysers, you get steaming vents, gurgling hot springs, mudpots and fumaroles, whatever the hell they are. Okay, fumaroles are openings in the planet’s crust, often in the neighborhood of volcanoes, which emit steam and gases such as carbon dioxide, hydrogen chloride and hydrogen sulfide. Oh, and speaking of volcanoes, scientists predict that some day the volcano that is Yellowstone will erupt, erasing the entire Pacific Northwest and perhaps half the country, making nonvisitors very grouchy that they missed their chance to see the place before it was a giant crater.
Back to the geysers. For whatever reason, we kept showing up just as they went off. People had been waiting for two hours at Old Faithful—which apparently is not as faithful as advertised—and as soon as we show up, WHAMMO! You probably thought that water from the geysers was hot, right? Maybe it is when it first comes out, but I cleverly meandered into a descending spray that was freezing. Anyway, for most visitors the geysers are the highlights of the trip, seeable in half a day. Economically, in the same area as the geysers is the spectacular Grand Prismatic Spring, a visual masterpiece with few equals. You’ve seen pictures of this miracle before, you just didn’t know it by name. The GPS is the largest natural hot spring in the United States and one of the three largest on the planet, largely famous for its spectacular array of peripheral colors which change throughout the seasons. The center is always a deep blue, the surrounding rings may be green, yellow, red, or brown. Similar boardwalks to those surrounding the geysers let viewers circumnavigate the Grand Prismatic Spring. They’re narrow, so tether the kiddies.
Yellowstone is also famous for the great array of animals which call the park home. Bison are everywhere, including the road, so watch those curves. Nothing like smacking into a bison in your little Isuzu. Elk and moose abound and there are plenty of wolves prowling the landscape. If you’re very lucky, you might eyeball a lynx, hopefully from a modest distance. The park rangers have feeding spots near the road to guarantee regular guest appearances by the elk and moose, an army of bison is usually available in the Hayden Valley.
The Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone.
Jackson Hole And The Tetons
Since you’re already in the neighborhood, might as well visit Jackson Hole and Grand Teton National Park. The drive is slightly less than two hours south and you get a great look at the mountains most of the way. If you’re counting pennies, drive straight through Jackson Hole, where summer hotel rates are laughable, and look for a nice $150 Super 8 on the outskirts of town. Save a few dollars for one grand night out at The Granary restaurant in the hills of Spring Creek Ranch. The food is excellent but the view is incomparable. Go well before dark and snatch a window table. You can even get a sleigh ride in Winter.
The two favored hikes in the area are the 25-mile Teton Crest Trail, a two-day affair stretching 25 miles, and the Cascade Canyon Trail. For the latter, a boatride across Jenny Lake takes you to the trailhead, then a steep 1000-foot ascent to Inspiration Point gets your motor going. From there, the hike is relatively level, meandering along a river bed and through patches of forest to various destinations of different distances, take your pick. There are occasional bears in the area, but not many. Also, this close to the Tetons, you might get some rain, especially in the afternoon, so bring a poncho. You don’t want to get soaked and find yourself at the dock waiting an hour for the return boat on the edge of hypothermia. Like some people we know.
The Grandeur of The Tetons
Cartoon Of The Week
Wedding Bells
Only nine days to Marital Bliss. Next week’s column may be published on Wednesday, the following week will be the Glacier Park vacation rerun. We’ll be back with all the wedding photos and mule ride stories on July 7th. Below is the address to catch the mini-ceremony at 1 p.m. Vegas time (4 o’clock EDT) on June 25th. A word or two of admonition. DO NOT send gifts via the chapel’s website or by any other means. We’ll have plenty of champagne and we couldn’t carry any more with us. If some arrives, we’ll be forced to donate it to the homeless, which, admittedly are in good abundance, but that requires an extra stop. Just send your best wishes. Or a card. Or an airplane ticket to Burundi. Cheers!
https://www.littlechapel.com/our-wedding/1143117
That’s all, folks….
