Oct. 21. Thursday
We stopped to see some friends in Park
City, Utah (7000 ft.). They both looked good though we’d caught them
at a bad time. They were just back from
a couple of months in Hawaii and
were leaving in a few hours to a funeral in southern California. We only had a few hours to visit. Their home is unlike any other I’ve seen, and
I’ve seen a lot of homes. This one was
probably worth five million dollars in an ordinary market. We took pictures and lapsed into fun
conversations about everybody we know.
They fell in love with Abby (normal course of events). We went out for beer and Mexican food and
laughed over all our old nonsense.
Today we’re headed to Laramie,
Wyoming , as there’s a snow storm headed
this way from the south. It’s now 28
degrees and I nearly froze my hands getting us ready to go. Trailers require a lot of work inside as well
as outside whenever you want to move.
The rolling hills are perfect in the morning sun. About fifty miles east of Park
City the sky’s filled with smoke. Out in
the middle of nowhere. We can’t see a
fire’s origin.
The whole road has turned wheat color. Wyoming
is only 400 miles wide. The fire is a
bit of a forest fire we see as we pass by.
Range cowboys are out there with massive herds of sheep. I hadn’t associated Wyoming
with sheep. And next appeared a small forest of windmills
lines along the mesas. I suppose this is
because the wind whips up from the valleys and is at its best on the
mesas. Otherwise, the wild west is stark
and scattered buttons of sage kept it from looking like moonscape. Not even any billboards.
Snow fences run along the highway. That fire we passed must have been pretty big
for its smoke to spread out all the way to Ft.
Bridger. Maybe Ft.
Bridger was once a military
outpost. Now it’s a little town of 400 people,
situated at the base of a vertical
series of mesas with a river at the bottom.
Aspens and Cottonwoods soften the area’s presence.
People coming through here on a stage coach would either be
tough cookies or lost puppies. Canadian
geese are hurrying south overhead. A
bunch of pinto horses were running and
playing that morning. I wanted to stop
and watch them but there really was no place to pull our rig off the road. I wonder if the horses will be left out in
the coming snow with the sheep and cattle.
I also wonder why people are all crowded into huge cities when so much
of our country is absolutely empty.
Next we could see the mountains, striped horizontally from
their different mineral generations.
They all had flat tops and thankfully no wind machines. Fire smoke still followed us. The sun is so far south that time of year
that I had a ball of sun on my face all day in the Excursion. Even sunshades didn’t help much. Pretty soon I considered doing a mother and
putting newspapers up to block the sun.
I don’t know how, but it was even more desolate near
Granger, on I-80. At Green
River we spotted about ten chemical plants spread along the
horizon north to south. They were
natural gas plants that are in time going to run from here to California. We saw the other (west) end of the pipeline
in Cedarville, where a whole village was being built to house the workers. The pipeline sits like a snake along the top
of the ground for a thousand miles where it’s being welded in sections then will
be buried in the trenches also being run alongside it. What a massive enterprise from Wyoming
to central Oregon. Its green line runs from both our horizons,
east-west. Green River
town seems to be a giant ten-track trainyard.
The river itself is a beautiful big thing if there’s anything alive left
down there. You gotta wonder. Train tracks squat, holding innumerable train
cars spread out like dirty snakes along the valley floor. Rock Springs
is equally ramshackle. This area is
where the Oregon Trail, The Mormon Trail, the Pony
Express Route, The Cherokee Trail, The overland
Trail, Old Emigrant Trail and the California
Gold Rush Trails
converge. A person could spend months
researching the routes of all the trails still existing as well as their
history.
I think the charm of the place must be that it’s between the
Sierra Mountains
and the Rockies and is basically flat and high.
We saw Pronghorn Sheep grazing along I-80. Otherwise THERE WAS NOTHING HAPPENING out
there. I think we needed to find a back
road so we could see civilization sooner or later.
