Wyoming power!

coal train

Black Thunder Coal Mine in the Powder River Basin

natural gas refinery near Glenrock, Wyoming

The Black Thunder coal mine in eastern Wyoming's coal fields is one of the largest coal mines in the world, scraping enough coal off the earth's surface to send 25 miles of full trains out around the country every day (or 8% of all the coal used in the US). This place explains how so many of the trains we saw crossing the grasslands here headed to distant power plants measured well over a mile whenever we bothered with the odometer.

Wyoming has been through so many booms and busts in its short modern history, and right now its energy extraction economy is certainly booming.

Powder River Basin, Wyoming

pronghorn antelope

windy picnic

Upton, Wyoming

After passing through Upton (population 872) there were 106 miles to drive before the next town appeared. Bill (population 11) had a post office, a small motel where railroad employees mandatorily change shifts, and a tiny general store.

Looking for recreation in the coal fields of the Powder River Basin, we stopped to buy cold drinks for a picnic. I finally found the National Grasslands map I'd been looking for since before we left New York. It was pinned to the wall, yellowed and curling apart at the folds. Oh well, most of the public lands were behind us, so we picked a spot next to the highway a bit out of town and laid out our blanket, cracked open our root beers and looked through the barbed wire fence at the horizon so far away.

Thunder Basin

Wyoming's Powder River Basin

WY450 in Wyoming's Powder River Basin

the closed open-range

A dead horse near the highway alludes to the powerful storm the night before.

Driving southwest out of Sundance, we entered the Powder River Basin, an immense open area in northeastern Wyoming where the grasslands began to turn to sagebrush. It is hard to cross this great steppe without goosebumps. The freedom of the open range sweeps through the imagination like an unobstructed wind. -That is, until you try to walk out into it. Huge tracts of this land are publicly owned, and leased by the government to ranchers or corporations specializing in extracting natural recourses. These leases aren't always open to the public, and a vast network of barbed wire holds the land down like a net.

Still, with a map of the Thunder Basin National Grassland, you could wander out into the great mysterious space and let the sun, the wind, or the storms of the high plains take you into another world...

Sundance, where the kid got his name...

Turf Bar, Sundance, WY

rainbow over Sundance Mountain

The Turf Bar fashion generally consisted of bandanas, ponytails, and leather vests. Clutching beer bottles by their necks, several people swayed -eyes closed, faces turned to the ceiling- to heavy metal ballads playing on the juke box. The swaying was more woozy than that of a sober person by far. Unlike many biker bars where so many "bikers" seemingly dress up in weekend costumes, it was more obvious here that they work, drink, smoke and party in these clothes every day.

Jen and I were watched with curiosity until after we'd ordered beers and burgers and were finally asked where we were from. The guffaws at our "New York" answer basically sounded like, "what planet did you say?!?", so I was quick to add that we were on our way to visit my parents in Wyoming. They eased up at this, and the conversation turned to how awesome the plains are and that, yeah upstate New York isn't that bad...

Looking outside I noticed as the storm-front blew east the evening sky took a chance to brighten up before nightfall. Inside, the barmaid hung up the phone and reported that her brother's barn, sitting deep in a valley twenty miles north of town, had been vaporized by the tornado a half-hour earlier.

The wrath finally catches up...

threat

mammatus clouds

end of the storm...

The power went out in the Wyoming Welcome Center before the storm hit. Nasty weather had been threatening most of the afternoon, but this time it was accompanied by a tornado warning. We found a motel (a series of what look like mobile homes cut into smaller units) to spend the night in Sundance, a small mining town in northeastern Wyoming. We turned on the T.V. in time to read in the warning scrolling across the screen that a tornado had been spotted 15 miles northwest of town -heading east.

The local bar had to be safer than our little box, but on our way there the sky turned green and opened up with 1" hail and slamming gusts of wind. A bank drive-through overhang provided the only emergency shelter we could get to until the worst of it passed.

The plains aren't so innocent...

minuteman missile

peering down into a missile silo

seemingly doomed herd of cattle

The high plains apparently served as a good location for intercontinental ballistic missile silos because the ground elevation there would have saved a lot of launch energy and flight time for the missiles. Advancements in nuclear weapon technology have rendered most of the silos (constructed in the 1960s) obsolete, but the one pictured above has been converted into the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site. The tiny museum with a short film occupies a trailer, but the silo is well worth stopping to peer into.

The missile in that silo would have reached its targeted communities in 30 minutes. 30 minutes says two things: 1) the missiles are very fast, and 2) the population of families, cooks, farmers, steelworkers, students, prisoners, office workers, nurses, artists, criminals, bartenders, hairdressers, and street vendors, etc. making their livings in the areas targeted are in so many ways very close to us -just over the horizon.

Great Plains scavenger hunt item #9: missile silo

A missile silo is an underground, vertical cylindrical container for the storage and launching of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). They typically have the missile some distance under the surface, protected by a large "blast door" on top.

-Wikipedia

Superstorm

advancing storm over western South Dakota

advancing storm over a gas station

advancing storm reaching for a pickup truck

The storm that loomed in from the west threatened us through much of western South Dakota. Once we got back onto the interstate toward Wyoming the speed limit let us accelerate to 80+ miles per hour. It was like leaving the dark basement as a kid: if you walk calmly, the basement doesn't scare you, but if you start to run you get goosebumps and freak out and run faster. This storm reached out its tentacles as soon as we started running.

Mammatus clouds

mammatocumulus (mammary cloud)

mammatocumulus (mammary cloud)

As we left the Badlands we were headed for an approaching storm that darkened the western sky. These mammatus (mammary for obvious reasons) clouds, when appearing underneath cumulonimbus clouds as shown above, are a sign of a particularly violent (and possibly tornadic) thunderstorm. A weather professor in college once told me he refused to board a plane when he saw these outside an airport in Colorado Springs. The flight was later cancelled.

Scenic overlook

approaching storm

Badlands National Park

looking east beyond "the wall"

scenic overlook

I like to imagine how the above photograph turned out. Wherever it's being displayed now, instead of showing what the badlands look like, it tells the story of that family's visit there together in the summer of 2009.

I remember growing up reliving vacations and events by looking through all the photo albums my mom put together. As I grew older my own memory of our vacations blended with the story contained in those pictures until I could no longer distinguish between them. The blurring doesn't matter -each enhances the other.

(By the way, I think the railings designed for safety should also be designed with personal photos like this one in mind.)

What planet?

badlands

Jen hiking the badlands

badlands clay

badlands

Despite Jen's injured knee, we set off for a short hike through the wilderness of baked-hard mud. Shadows and colors were almost eliminated by the high mid-afternoon sun. For all the austere beauty that the prairie holds surrounding this serrated 100-mile interruption, here it is the beauty of martian dreams.

Great Plains scavenger hunt item #8: Badlands of South Dakota

For half a million years, water and wind have sculpted fantastic rock art in southwestern South Dakota, mesmerizing visitors to Badlands National Park. Life is scarce in these stark buttes. But a surrounding ocean of grasslands includes healthy numbers of buffalo, coyotes, pronghorn, and birds of prey. Here the prairie endures.

-National Geographic