Out in Places Like Wyoming

Looking West

On Saturday, the morning after we made our loop east to find Albin and Golden Prairie, we planned to head west into the Medicine Bow.

I got up early as I had the day before to see the sunrise. This time the sky was essentially clear. To step out into the yard in the cold, dark air at first is just an astonishing experience; the sounds of cattle lowing a half mile away and the stark contrasts between the dark and light colors as the sun approaches are nothing short of thrilling.
Overhead the sky was deep blue, gradually moderating to yellow-gold along the nearly black horizon.

Stefan was up too, both of us taking pictures in every direction. I walked up the road several hundred yards to a rise to catch the first splintering of sun and watch the colors of the grassland come alive.

The lively richness of color is astonishing. Behind me the mountains and clouds shifted colors minute by minute from blues turning to deep red hues, then to softer pastels.  Notions that this countryside is essentially monochromatic and featureless is just flat-out wrong.

We had chosen this day to drive into the mountains to see the Snowy Range up close and the Medicine Bow Peak in the Medicine Bow National Forest.


So after Stefan cooked up our eggs we drove out.

We arrived at Centennial at about 10. Not much was happening. Like our experience in Albin, no one seemed to be around. Most businesses were closed because of the lateness of the season.

Centennial is famous most recently, I suppose, because of the James Michener novel bearing its name. But it is hardly a town at all, more to my eye like a frontier settlement with trailers, ramshackle houses, and a handful of businesses -- garages, restaurants, western souvenir stores, gas station/convenience stores -- scattered along a bend in the highway just about where it begins a fairly steep ascent into the mountains.  There seemed to be a lot of "junk" lying about.

I don't want to be unfair in my description -- every tourist town has its less than pristine sections.  And perhaps there was more to the town than we could see, or perhaps things get cleaned up in the spring when the new tourist season starts. We stopped at the Centennial Museum but found it, too, closed for the season.  We went into one store and had a good look around at the assortment of western souvenirs. We decided not to buy anything, but I did find a rather interesting sign in the Men's room.

The clerk told us that a foot of new snow had fallen in the mountains the night before but the roads should be open. We thanked him and left















We drove up through the Snowy Range on Wyoming 130.  There had, indeed, been new snow, and the road was, in fact, clear and dry.



Just minutes after we left Centennial in the dun foothills, we were winding through high mountain, snow-covered woodlands. The road above Centennial actually has a gate that can be closed during bad winter weather.  They can literally "close" the road.

For a while we were stopping frequently to take pictures, to admire the long view, to feel the wildness that still characterizes much of this land.

Then we realized we would never make it to the top if we stopped every time we thought we could get a good picture. There was just too much gorgeous scenery for one short trip. Besides, the wind was blowing pretty hard and the cold quickly invaded our jackets and gloves and got under our hats. So we became more selective, stopping less frequently, viewing more from the car.

We did stop at the summit for a quick taste of arctic air and at a viewing spot facing the Medicine Bow rock face where a plane had crashed sixty years ago.  I have a vague memory of my parents discussing the plane crash, but it's one of a handful of memories from that time when my parents talked in hushed, serious voices. I remember generalized sadness detached from specific circumstance rather than a clear memory of tragedy.

My father used to hunt up in these mountains and fish in these rivers.



The landscape is different on the west side, more rolling plains with sharper features, rock outcroppings, rivers with their groves of trees.







As with our trip to Albin and Golden Prairie the day before, these childhood trips had always seemed too long and tiresome; I was too young to appreciate them. It was almost shocking to discover just how close these places actually were, how quickly one could drive there from Laramie.

We had lunch at the Wolf Hotel in Saratoga, a nicely kept, late 19th Century building.  Saratoga itself is pretty close to what I imagine a stereotypical "western town" would look like, with wide streets that formed a grid, wide sidewalks, old small-town store with facades.

After lunch we visited a few of these stores that sold western items, and bought ourselves some touristy things to take home, including  arrowheads for $1 each.





Then we headed back the way we had come, stopping again to take pictures at different spots.  We drove right through Centennial this time without stopping.








 We got back to the ranch by 4 or so to recover and work. Stefan got out his watercolors and I got out my journal. And then we had one more sunset to catch before heading into Laramie for dinner.

Out in Places Like Wyoming

Coming in out of the rain

It had been raining in Wyoming and more rain was forecast. Through the little windows of the plane even as we descended in sunshine for landing, our view was of clouds, irregular and continuous.  Here and there the clouds opened and we glimpsed the broad, nearly flat, immense plains. Then as if by slight of hand we dropped and the clouds were above us.  Below, the grasslands, the black cattle, the pronghorn we call antelope, the long straight fences, and we were settling onto the runway of the Laramie Regional Airport. Drops of rainwater streaked the windows, blurring the view as we slowed, braking hard, and taxied what seemed like miles back to the small group of small buildings that comprise the terminal.

The trip to Wyoming, to Laramie, my home town, had been my son Stefan's idea. He had expressed his interest early in the year and proposed that he and I do a tour of places he had never seen. Laramie is background that figures into much of my extended family narrative. My parents were both UW graduates, and UW is where my father taught after he returned from the Pacific theater after the war. Three of my four brothers and I are Wyomingites by birth. The landscape is part of our DNA, as it were.

Still, I confess to being a bit surprised to actually walk out of that little airport in Laramie into the wind, toward our rental car.

The wind is different here, as strange as that may sound.  As is the sky.  Even overcast with rain clouds the Wyoming sky is impressive.

Traveling to Wyoming is chancy near the end of October. The rain that had been forecast for our first full day, Thursday, could be, might be, should probably actually turn out to be snow. The woman at the Hertz counter said as much. She wanted to know if we wanted to upgrade our rental to a 4-wheel drive jeep. The rancher from whom we were renting a little cabin said, "we are overdue."

Originally we thought to come in August, before the school year started. But that plan had not worked out, so we settled on the third week of October, which we figured ought to allow us to see what we wanted to see before winter settled in.

Because it was early afternoon and because we had not eaten since very early in the morning, Eastern Standard Time, we decided to drive into Laramie to look around, get a feel for the town, eat lunch, before driving out onto the high plains where Stefan had booked us a cabin on a working cattle ranch.

So we did that.

I had picked up a street map at the airport, but once we crossed the bridge (the viaduct) over the railroad tracks on the western edge of town, the streets opened up for me pretty much as I had remembered them, even though we moved to the east coast when I was nine.

We followed Third Street for a few blocks and then turned East onto Grand Avenue, which still appears to be the main thoroughfare through town. Like most towns in "the west" Laramie was laid out in a grid, with streets running north-south or east-west. Follow Grand Avenue east and you eventually wind up in Cheyenne, after climbing through the Laramie mountain range and crossing lots of prairie, of course.  Follow it west and you wind up in the rail yards. Look to the horizon at that point and you can see the Snowy Range in the Medicine Bow National Forest some fifty miles away.

North of Grand Avenue from about 10th Street on is the University.  Another nine blocks down Grand and three or four blocks south is the street I knew as a kid, where the house my father built is located.  We found it easily and then found the park where my brothers and friends and I played and then drove by the school we all attended during our first school years. Because it was still raining sporadically, we decided to explore on foot another day.  Besides we were starved.  So we went to lunch and then drove out to the ranch, fifteen miles west of town, across the grasslands.

When we got out of the car, finally, all my senses told me we were back in Wyoming -- the wind, the smell of sage, the sounds of cattle a half-mile away, the visceral sense of distances, and the incredible play of light everywhere.