move along now...

A lot is going on now in life that is very exciting -especially regarding the nexus of my own geographic and visual lives- so I need to find a way to make this blog relevant again and stop seeing it as just a journal that I'm badly behind on...

Home in Kemmerer

Finally in Kemmerer to visit with the folks, as always it feels like home again. I've never spent more than ten days at a time there but it's all so familiar for being so far out there... 

the Great American Desert

Independence Rock graffiti

Independence Rock

sunrise on the Oregon Trail

on the Oregon Trail

Oregon Trail marker

On the road through central Wyoming the desert is so unbelievable. It's so easy to imagine walking along with a convoy of covered wagons and cattle, carrying all you own in the world having left everything you know to start a new life... But to start it by making your way across a wilderness unlike almost anything left on earth today is so much to fathom.

so, as I was saying...

We headed west along the Oregon Trail, among others. The museum we stopped at in Casper reminded me again what fun little dioramas can be...

Out of the Emptiness and onto the Oregon Trail

shade in Douglas, Wyoming

a jackalope in Douglas, Wyoming

drive-up liquor window in Douglas, Wyoming

Casper, Wyoming

We emerged from the huge emptiness of the Powder River Basin at Douglas, situated on Interstate 80. The town provided the first shade all day in the form of cottonwoods and a tall jackalope.
From there we picked up the route of a number of trails responsible for the westward expansion of the US, including the Oregon Trail, the Mormon Trail, the Pony Express and the Santa Fe Trail...

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.