Wanderung 3

Rocky Mountain Ramble

May - July 2003

June 19th - Driving through Wyoming

We were up and away by 9 o’clock; it could have been earlier but the packing of the truck has been turned completely topsy-turvy by the precautions for keeping all food items from grizzly bears. Basically we had to put the food and drink cases, stove, cooking utensils, and dinnerware all in the cabin or clamshell, which completely overloaded those areas. So I had to find space for the tent, screen house, table and other non-food items in the bed of the truck. Designing an entirely new packing scheme delayed us a bit, but having a breakfast of cold cereal was quicker than other types of breakfast and made up some of the time.

On our way out of the park we spotted another moose in the trees off the road at Jackson Lodge. Given our experiences, I’d say if you want to spot moose take a close look in the trees beside any likely habitat. Even if you spot one, however, it may be doggoned difficult to get a decent picture of one—I surely couldn’t.

From the park we went up and over a 9,000+ foot high pass and back down into the Shoshone National Forest. As the mountains leveled out into a high plateau the trees faded away and the land became more and more arid, finally turning back into the type of sagebrush desert that we had seen in central Wyoming on the way over to Yellowstone.

As we passed thru the Wind River Indian Reservation we were astonished at some of the magnificent scenery. It first started looking like the severely eroded and barren landscape that we had seen in the Badlands of South Dakota, but then suddenly there was a section that looked for all the world like the Painted Desert and the Grand Canyon in miniature! In the “Painted Desert” section I saw beautiful color-banded hills with yellow, red, and purple colored earth separated by beige or black stripes. To the best of my recollection, this matches the most colorful parts of the Painted Desert to the south.

Similarly, we saw from the road a pocket Grand Canyon that mimicked the heavily eroded, red-banded landscape carved by the Colorado River in Arizona. I’m not sure how extensive this pocket is, but the piece we saw was spectacular. All this wonderful area was fenced off and completely undeveloped, and I was really curious why the local Native American folks don’t use this as an economic resource. I, for one, would be very strongly inclined to take a walking or horseback tour of this area with, say, a native guide who could talk about the past history of the area. Martin stopped at a gas station in this area and found out that you could arrange to drive in and see the sights, but that surely was not advertised anywhere.

We curved north to follow riverbeds for most of the remaining drive to Casper, but it was so dry that we only saw crops where the farmland was being irrigated. Otherwise the land was fenced off for the official grazing of cows and sheep and the unofficial grazing of pronghorn antelope. In total, we saw almost as many pronghorns as sheep or cattle! The carrying capacity of the land for any big herbivores is, I would guess, very few animals per square mile as Teddy Roosevelt remarked in one of his articles about the West.

We arrived in Casper around 3 in the afternoon, which gave us time to shower, and shower again, and then bathe as well as wash our clothes and get the oil changed on the truck. With everyone and everything thus refreshed, we were prepared to move on to Cheyenne and start Volksmarching again.

Copyright 2004 by Robert W. Holt and Elsbeth Monika Holt
Prolog Map Epilog

May 2003
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30 31
June 2003
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30
July 2003
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30 31

Return to the Wanderungs Homepage.
Sign the Guestbook or Read the Guestbook.
Comments about this site? Email the Webmaster.
Contact Bob and Monika at bob_monika@hotmail.com.