Heading Toward Cooler Weather

We’ve been to Santa Fe several times and felt no need to explore the city itself, so the only major day trip on the agenda was a visit to Los Alamos.  It’s a fairly substantial drive from our campground and all that sitting had caused me severe back and leg pain so I was not exactly in a good frame of mind to enjoy the glories of Los Alamos.  It’s a very pretty drive up up up into the mountains where the city sits perched on a flat-topped mesa. 

Once arrived, we found there was not much to see or do.  The Historical Society Museum was in transition, housed in two rooms with a bare-bones display and short film while a new facility is being constructed down the street.  The Bradbury Science Museum tells a more complete story of atomic energy and the work done at Los Alamos but it’s a fairly sterile museum, relying more on story boards and photos than on actual artifacts.  After trudging through museum after museum over the years, we have come to appreciate the enthusiastic docent who can bring to life what we are seeing.  Bradbury did not offer such a docent, just some fairly brusque people pointing visitors in the right direction.

And what goes up up up must come down down down.  The homeward trip did not require much fuel but the brake pads got a good workout.

Our departure from Santa Fe was questionable thanks to a high-speed chase that ended in a police stand-off near Glorieta Pass.  The highway was closed the evening before our departure and only reopened an hour or so before we headed out.  As we drove past the Glorieta exit, there was still a large police presence gathered around the SUV in which the suspect had made his escape.

We made a brief two-day stop in Raton and then went up and over the pass to Monument, Colorado where we were crammed face-first into a site meant for a much smaller rig.  The campground, which is on a hillside and heavily wooded, is a challenge to enter and leave and on this visit was crawling with small children and barking dogs.  It’s nice to know we don’t have to go there ever again.  But the housing situation did not keep us from enjoying the area thoroughly.  We visited Colorado Springs and Florence to troll the antique shops and made several nice finds.  On another day we raced south to Pueblo to meet Marcia for a fine lunch of Sloppers at Gray’s Coors Tavern.  It remains to be seen if I can duplicate that little taste treat in my own kitchen; the last attempt didn’t quite get there, perhaps because of the raisins in the green chili.

Due to a conflict with Frontier Days, we weren’t able to get a site in Cheyenne so we pushed northward to Wheatland, Wyoming for a few nights.  As the owner of the campground said, it wasn’t the middle of nowhere but if you stood on a five gallon bucket you could see it from there.  He was not kidding.  We were surrounded by wheatfields as far as the eye could see.  Thank heavens the campground offered a strong wifi signal so we had something to distract us ‘cause the t.v. sure wasn’t any help.

And because our original plans had been to stop in Cheyenne, we had an extra day to kill in Casper.  We had to check in to one campground for an over-night and move again the next day, not something we usually do.  But the second campground promised cable t.v. and wifi and by that time we were suffering from current news deprivation.  As it turned out, neither was terribly functional.  One of our biggest pet peeves is a campground that charges “resort” prices for various amenities and then doesn’t deliver.  Cable reception was fuzzy and the wifi erratic. 

In earlier stops, we’d pretty much “done” Casper so we confined our touring to a meager number of thrift and antique shops, stocked the larder and headed west to Dubois for a much-anticipated tour of Grand Teton National Park and Jackson Hole.

Our campground in Dubois is delightful with an enormous treed site and a view of the Wind River.  Within moments of arrival I spotted a deer tip-toeing across the river and into the bushes.  A flock of Canadian geese shows up frequently along the shoreline, guarded by an overly vigilant gander.  The cable t.v. situation is pretty good but the wifi comes and goes at will.  A short distance away one begins to see the fantastic color striations of the Painted Cliffs, always with the fast-moving Wind River at their base.

Unfortunately, for a week before our arrival a fire has been burning in a heavily forested area perhaps 15-20 miles away and a great pall of smoke lies over everything.  Known as the Lava Mountain fire, it had burned 12,000 acres already and threatened some populated areas.  People were evacuated and the small town of Dubois was bursting at the seams with firefighters.  They come from all over and are being kept particularly busy this summer.

On our first full day in Dubois we visited the Bighorn Sheep Center and the Historical Museum plus the usual stops at libraries and thrift shops.  It seemed like a good idea to head away from the forest fire so we took a day to make a giant loop to Lander and Riverton before returning to Dubois.  It’s a long trip but the roads are good and traffic is light…very light.  Seeing another vehicle became cause for celebration.

Lander is home to the Fremont County Museum, a large new building with nicely displayed artifacts.  Everything was in fine condition, clean and labeled.  One of the first things we spotted was this fabulously beaded deerskin, intricately worked with size 11 seed beads.  As a beader of only modest skills, I can scarcely imagine the hours of painstaking work it took to complete this project. 

 

Except for an uncommunicative person at the front desk, the place was devoid of humans who might be able to add to what we were seeing.  We were the only people wandering around although two other couples arrived just as we were leaving.  The museum struck us a fine resource being totally under-used.  On the same grounds are numerous small beautifully restored buildings, early examples of Fremont County structures…but they were all locked.

There was slightly more traffic on the highway between Lander and Riverton, but not much.  Plans had been to visit another branch of the Fremont Museum but we got snagged up at the Jake Korell Wyoming Wildlife Exhibit on our way into town and just ran out of time.  What the Lander museum lacked in interesting docents, this little museum more than made up for.  Riverton is known as the Rendezvous City, where mountain men came to trade, and Jake Korell was a latter-day mountain man who kept the tradition going with re-enactments.  The front part of the museum is crammed with dead animals, most killed by ol’ Jake.  The docent told us perhaps a little more than we’d care to know about taxidermy but it was so nice to share his enthusiasm for what we were seeing.

To the rear of the building was a Wax Museum that was moved to Riverton from Cody.  The buidling was not air conditioned and it was a surprize that most of the manniquins weren’t just puddles of molten wax on the floor.  Maybe that’s how “Broken Hand” Fitzpatrick lost his fingers. 

 

Some of Wyoming’s most famous and infamous characters were on display and it was here that we had a reunion with our old friend, Big Nose George Parrott.  Here he is being operated on by Doctor (soon to be Governor)  John Osborne but, as the docent pointed out, George’s manniquin was damaged on the trip down from Cody and Richard Nixon’s likeness was used instead. 

 

The reason for being in Dubois in the first place was to visit Grand Teton National Park so, fire or no fire, we took off for the longish drive to the Park.  Like Glacier NP, Grand Teton is not meant to be seen from the road and most of her glories are accessible only to those to can hike, bike or ride in on horseback.  Being ‘way too old for any of that, we had to content ourselves with what could be seen from the car, which was severely compromised by the poor air quality from the Lava Mountain Fire.  We could barely make out the glaciers on Mt. Moran and there were no mountains reflected on the calm surfaces of Jackson and Jenny Lakes.  As we progressed south in the park, the air did clear a bit and the crags of the Tetons were in better focus.  Smoke or no smoke, the park was crowded with tourists and traffic was quite heavy.  We did not see any wildlife, which was a major disappointment.

On the way home we were detained by a flagger allowing only one-way traffic as the road was being chip-sealed.  The stop was at the eastern most edge of the Lava Mountain Fire and we could see wisps of smoke still drifting upwards.  Charred trees were in evidence, some quite close to homes and  businesses.  This is dude ranch country and the fire is certain to have harmed the local economy in ways too soon to tell.