Favorite Views:
- The drive across Wyoming is certainly one of our favorites. After leaving West Yellowstone we encountered massive road reconstruction across the Togwotee Pass (elevation 8, 530 ft) on Rt. 287. The delays in getting across gave plenty of time to soak in the views. The whole road will probably be one of our all-time favorites, as it went on through Dubois, Lander (I want to return to visit historical sites), and then picked up the Oregon Trail through the valley. It continued on through the Red Desert, which is the Great Divide Basin; an area inside of the Continental Divide which drains nowhere! Wyoming was a series of mountains, hills, and valleys, something we did not expect, and the mountains, such as Elk Mountain in SW Wyoming, are spectacular.
- The cracked and weathered granite piles (mountains?) at Split Rock, were a major landmark on the Oregon Trail. The landmark had many connotations, including the fact that the Mormons knew that they were about a week from Salt Lake City.
- Harry enjoyed the girl surveying on I-80 in skin-tight jeans
Things We’ve Learned:
- At the Trail’s End Motel in Dubois, Harry naturally struck up a conversation with our neighbors, who were on huge Harleys. One of the riders was a 60-ish man who is a bee keeper in Buffalo, Wyoming. Each December he loads 5 semi-trailer loads of bee hives and sends them to California to pollinate almond trees. In the summer he works nights, moving his bees frequently as farmers spray their fields with pesticides. If you want to know whether our food is grown safely, ask a bee keeper.
- Butch Cassidy bought a huge ranch near Dubois, Wyoming with money stolen from train heists.
- Dubois, Wyoming was originally known as Never Sweat, Wyoming, but the postal service refused to use that name and changed it to Dubois. In protest, the natives pronounced it DEW boys.
- Often the Mormon wagon trains traveled on the other side of the river from the Oregon Trail trains going west to avoid confrontations.
- Every road in our country is either being rebuilt or repaved – your tax dollars at work.
- Ramada Inns apparently think it’s a good thing to put down comforters and six pillows on their beds, even when it’s a 100 degree summer. That requires that everyone run their air conditioning full blast all night so that they can sleep under the covers. I heard the coal-fired power plants in Nebraska humming away all night. Good-by Ramada.
Animals we’ve seen so far:
- Beautiful bald eagle circling above us in Yellowstone
- Dead red fox on road
- Dead pronghorn antelope (unusual) on road
- Harry saw a black bear running on a dirt road by the interstate near the Wyoming-Nebraska border.
- Deer, which do not count.
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