A short stretch of the original Yellowstone Trail, shot during spring break 2015

During a presentation I recently gave about the Yellowstone Trail to the UW-Stevens Point LIFE group (Learning is Forever), which I admit rambled too slowly toward its goal, one of the bolder students pointed out that I had yet to inform the group where the Yellowstone Trail actually is.

I’ll just do the spoiler here: to see exactly where the trail goes — sort of — look at the wonderful links on the Yellowstone Trail Association website.  Visitors to the YTA site will need to click on the state links on the left-hand side of the page see available state-by-state maps and written descriptions of existing or obscured trail locations.

But back to my rambling:  the comment from the LIFE participant was, as one would expect the words of mostly retired, highly intelligent and no-nonsense folks to be, a bullseye.  Being too enamored with the things I was talking about, I was having too much fun on the journey of my talk.  At least some of the audience eventually wanted to get to the destination.

A road is simply an idea … a way we think we can use to get where we want to go.

My answer probably didn’t help some listeners, because it has two critical foundations: (1) where the trail still is kind of depends, but (2) it really doesn’t matter.  Or at least it doesn’t matter to me.  I hope a good number of my students will feel the same way.

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