Road Trip to SD - Day 6 - Following the Pioneer Trail

At the end of  Day 5 we had stopped at the Horsethief Lake Campground in the Black Hills National Forest, still in South Dakota.

We had looked at the map and planned the direction to start for home, wanting to roads that we hadn't traveled before as much as possible.

We headed toward Wyoming...

...and saw this along the road.

I had been collecting postcards to send to my 3-year-old granddaughter but hadn't mailed many yet so today I was going to search out post offices in the small towns along the way.

A gorgeous building across the street from the post office in Newcastle. From there we took Highway 450  west through the Thunder Basin National Grassland toward Wright.

We were driving through the country where huge herds of cattle had been driven as far north as Canada, grazing along the way, and then shipped by railroad to eastern markets. Belle Fourche, where we had been a couple of days before was one of the important shipping points. (Lonesome Dove fans, note the sign on the post.)

According to the sign 2500 head of cattle strung were strung out for a mile, traveling 10 to 15 miles per day. They could gain weight over the 300 to 500 mile trip.

Alternatively picture the thousands of bison that once roamed here while the Native American's called this home. Same place. Different eras.

Before we got to Wright near the western edge of the Thunder Basin National Grassland we saw the first glimpse of a major industry in Wyoming...and the sky was more gray.

According to Wikipedia, the Black Thunder Coal Mine is the world's largest coal producer.

This is an immense operation.

I couldn't get photos to show the scale of what we were seeing. You can see a tip of the excavator down in the pit. Wikipedia says "Black Thunder’s dragline excavator is the biggest in the world and produces enough coal to load up to 20-25 trains per day."

The excavator fills this truck with one pass of it's giant scoop. This is a huge truck--the driver is sitting in that little cab above the wheel.

Take a look at the photo below to see the true size of this structure.

More of Wyoming prairie. This is between Wright and Edgerton.

Someone has decorated their oil/gas well.

I have included this photo because of the two dinosaurs and it reminded me of a photo op that I missed earlier in the trip. The dinosaur seems to be the mascot for Sinclair gas stations. We passed a gas station somewhere along the way  where they had a dinosaur the size of these and it was tied to a fence post with a rope around its neck. I still think it's one of the funniest things I saw on this trip. It would have looked natural to have a horse tied up right next to it.

We drove through Casper and took Hwy. 220 towards Rawlins.

We watched lightning in the distance. Do you know how hard it is to take lightening photos?

We were still following the trail of the pioneers...

...and we stopped as they did when we reached the Independence Rock, which is now a State Historic Site.

In one of the earlier posts (Day 2) we had stopped at South Pass. Then we were heading east, backwards from the direction the explorers and pioneers travelled. They would have been at Independence Rock first, looking west towards South Pass, 100 miles to the west.

Independence Rock was the first major landmark after leaving the North Platter River to follow the Sweetwater River to South Pass.

There is a trail around the rock for modern day visitors. You can see where early travelers left initials and names scratched into the rock.

This is the remnants of the trail heading on southwest.

We were back on our trail towards Rawlins.

We crossed the Continental Divide.

I used to think that you crossed the Continental Divide once and then were on the other side. I found out that there is an exception in Wyoming (and when I looked at a map of the Continental Divide, also in Mexico). Wikipedia again: The Great Divide Basin is an area of land in Wyoming's Red Desert where none of the water falling as rain to the ground drains into any ocean, directly or indirectly." I highlighted this on the map so that I could see it more clearly. South Pass is near that northern route of the Divide.

We found the Post Office in Rawlins (this was across the street)...

...and then crossed the Continental Divide again...

...and again.

Near Green River on I-80. From here on we were backtracking where we'd already driven.

It was dark when we got to Evanston, just on the edge of the Wyoming-Utah border. Looking at the map book and trying to find somewhere to spend the night I had found one more point of interest for the next day. We still hadn't figured out a good place to camp so we stopped here for gas and Subway sandwiches and took the maps inside for closer scrutiny.

To be continued...

Road Trip to SD - Day 3 - Devils Tower

After a morning spent touring Mountain Meadow Wool we headed east toward Devils Tower National Monument.

This is part of a coal facility near the town of Gillette, home to 12 coal mines which provide 1/10 of the jobs in the area. Up to 100 trains loaded with coal leave the town every day. We noticed that the sky over much of our trip was not as blue as we expected and that is evident in my photos. I am used to the Sacramento Valley haze in the summer, a result of dust, smoke from wildfires, and probably smog, but I didn't expect this in Wyoming. I wonder if these hazy skies are from all the coal mines.

Artwork seem when driving through one of the towns.

I wouldn't call this artwork, but someone has a sense of humor. Am I the only one that sees these logs as weird animals?

As expected there were lots of cattle. This is north of the town of Moorcroft, where we turned off  of I-90 to head north to Devils Tower.

First view of Devils Tower. The Tower rises 867 feet from the base and 1267 feet above the Belle Fourche River. The diameter at the base is 1000 feet and the area on top is 1-1/2 acre.

There is a trail all the way around the Tower and it looks different on each "side".

This is looking at its southeast face. Do you see the column that is much shorter and tipped a bit just inside the part that is in shadow and that looks like it is just above the tree in the photo? Then do you see the column that rises up about twice as high as the shorter broken one?

This is a close-up of that taller column. There is a climber! Look above the next column over (about an inch on my screen). That gives you some perspective about the size of this huge rock.

This is a detail of the outer third of the Tower from that first photo (where, due to camera perspective, it looks more tipped than it really is).

Tisis a closer view of the middle of the photo above. Those things that look like sticks? Those are the outer edge of a ladder that was used to get up the first 350 feet in the 1890's. The ladder is anchored in the crack between the columns. Can you imagine? The lower part has since been removed and some of the upper restored by the Park Service in the 1970s.

This is another view that includes the area of those close-ups just to give some perspective.

The trail around the Tower is paved the whole way to accommodate the thousands of visitors  that come each year. Hot in the sun, it was very pleasant under the canopy of trees.

Speaking of trees, these are pretty substantial trees at the base of the cliffs. Another measure of perspective.

Look at those trees in this view.

There were beautiful colors and patterns in the rock.

We were at the Tower for about two hours or so. Before leaving the National Monument we had to stop at the prairie dog town.

These are certainly well-fed prairie dogs.

But I didn't realize the damage that they do to the landscape. There are prairie dog mounds throughout this photo. I have some very severe photos to share later on in these blogs.

We drove north and then east from the Monument...

...and found a campground in the Bear Lodge Mountains, part of the Black Hills National Forest. Again, we needn't have worried about the campground being over-run by motorcycles from Sturgis. Maybe the riders are not big campers. There was only one other person in this campground.

This is a rare scene--not Dan reading a newspaper--but that we actually had time to relax and enjoy the evening in camp. Point #1: we got there early enough that there was still evening left before we needed to eat or get to sleep. Point #2: There were NO mosquitoes, it wan't cold, and there was no rain. So Dan read his newspaper and I read The Shepherd's Life by James Rebanks. I found that some of the author's points resonated with me on this trip. More about that later. 

An after-dinner fire. This reminds me of the disembodied head of Oz.

Road Trip to SD - Day 3 - Wool Mill

We camped at the Lost Cabin campground in the Bighorn Mountains. We needn't have been concerned about being crowded out by hoards of motorcycle riders. There were only one or two other campers. It was hard, living and working outside in the Central Valley, to imagine needing wool gloves, hats, etc. I'm glad that I had brought those and that before we left I had grabbed my heavy chore coat off the hook where it had been since the spring. The night was cold camping at 9400 feet elevation. (I know, that's all relative, and some of you laugh at what I think is cold. But nevertheless I was cold.) It was almost dusk by the time we finished eating and cleaned up dishes and I was ready to get in a sleeping bag. I was warm enough, but spent a lot of time reading in the middle of the night when I couldn't sleep.

We meant to get an early start, but it was already well into the morning when I woke up. Hey, it's vacation time! And there is a time zone difference too. Dan made his coffee and we got on the road to Buffalo.

This was our destination.

Mountain Meadow Wool is the company that spun this year's yarn and I was excited to meet the people there and see the mill.

Here is the entrance.

It opens into a showroom and sales area.

There are well-made videos showing of local sheep ranches where the wool is sourced and the mill in production.

Ben took us into the mill. He showed us this wall where bales and bags are piled waiting to be processed. This wool will be used for Mountain Meadow's own line of yarn. It was interesting that the wool stacked here is this year's production for the Mountain Meadow lines of yarn whereas for the "big" companies that might amount to only one days' production.

The scouring line starts here.

First, is the skirting table, very similar to mine with the PVC cross-pieces. One person checks all the wool as it comes through. He will pull out fiber that looks too short, too full of VM, or contaminated with paint marking.

This was nice fiber, but Ben said that the paint wouldn't wash out so it is discarded. The fiber pulled out here goes into the baler that is behind the skirting table (photo above this one). I don't remember where Ben said that this goes, but there is a market for it when they get a large amount.

The wool goes up this belt...

...and through the bale opener before it goes through the scouring line, which Ben and his team have spent years developing to work for a mill of this size.

Nearby there were several large plastic barrels (30-50 gallons?) connected by pipes and tubing that is Ben's work-in-progress to biologically manage the solids that become waste products of the scouring process. This includes lanolin and a lot of dirt. He is still working to perfect the system that includes lanolin-consuming bacteria (if I remember correctly). This jar is full of some of the waste products.

The carder is right in the middle of this room but I didn't get any photos of it. After carding the wool goes through the pin drafter--5 times!

This comb in the pin drafter helps remove short pieces and debris to create a smoother product.

Spinning is next.

It takes about 6 hours to spin up the fiber in each box unless they are spinning very fine yarn. Then it can take 2-1/2 days! No wonder it costs more to have fine yarn spun.

Combing is an additional process...

...which creates a product called "top", that has no short pieces or cross fibers in it.

There can be a lot of waste after combing but Mountain Meadow Wool uses that waste to create dryer balls. My dryer balls are here.

Yarn is then wound on cones and/or skeined.

Mountain Meadow Wool also has a dye kitchen for the yarn that they market.

Ben took us into a room with finished goods, experimental products, R&D. Mountain Meadow Wool offers some pieces for sale and also the option to have some items made with a producers own wool. I admired the blankets being woven.

People have sent fibers to see how the mill can handle them. The fiber above is a coarse plant fiber. I can't remember what it is--something like agave, or at least it reminded me of that plant family.

This one I remember. Someone sent Ben bear fiber to spin.

I appreciate Ben taking time out of his day, and at the end of a week when they have been short-handed, to show us around. It helped me to discuss with him fiber prep  and fiber quality. Quality control of the yarn begins at the producer's skirting table. I love the yarn they are producing at this mill and it's nice to know the family.

Where to next? It was about 1:00. We at lunch at a local sandwich place and looked at our maps. It wasn't far to Devil's Tower National Monument--only about two pages away in the map book. Onward!

Road Trip to SD - Day 2 - Wyoming

We left Day 1 in the middle of the night in the middle of Utah.

Several years ago Dan built a sleeping shelf in the truck (that comes out when we're not using it). That way we can put gear underneath and leave sleeping bags, etc on the shelf. So it was easy enough to pull into the rest area near Aragonite and sleep. Just to be accurate the map book shows two spelling for this: Argonite and Aragonite, about a mile apart, and both with the symbol for abandoned settlement or railroad siding (and both on a railroad). Aragonite Incinerator is shown as a Point of Interest. It turns out that it is a hazardous waste facility. All of these points are a mile or more from the highway and the rest area.

This is a view, looking north to the rest area and all the trucks parked there. There is a trail from the rest area to a rocky hill and a sign that says something about wild horses--so of course I needed to climb the hill. It's not really as far as it looks--that's just the perspective of my phone camera.

Some of the rocks on that hill.

After my walk we got in the truck and started driving. There is one point where the highway crosses  the southernmost part of the Great Salt Lake. Notice the salt built up around those fence posts.

The highway goes over most of Salt Lake City and then heads northeast to Wyoming. We got there mid-morning.

Remember these are all drive-by photos, some with my camera and some with my phone. This is not sharp but a photo of range sheep along I-80 west of Lyman.

Where there were alfalfa fields there were often pronghorn.

I just looked up "pronghorn". I didn't know that they are not really an antelope and the closest living relative is the giraffe.

At about noon we stopped at a Visitor's Center in the city of Green River. This is a view of the Green River from that point.

There was an outdoor exhibit about Trona. If you're like me you'd say, "Huh?" From the brochure that calls Sweetwater County the Trona Capital of the World: "a naturally occurring mineral ...is a much-needed industrial material because it yields soda ash. Soda ash is used to make glass, paper, laundry detergents and many other products. It is also used in the manufacturing of other chemicals...baking soda and sodium phosphates." Trona occurs in other parts of the world, but not in deposits of mineable quantities.

There is a plaque with information about the equipment in the photo above. This is a Face Drill and the plaque tells about a Joseph Francis Joy, who at age 12 in the 1890s, went to work in the coal mines as had his father and brother. I assume that he went on to create this company or to inspire the more sophisticated equipment, but the sign doesn't explain that. However any machine with this many levers seems interesting.

I found the Visitor's Center to be informative and interesting--a good way to break up our drive. I was curious about a reference to the Intergalactic Spaceport and looked that up later. Wikipedia: "On July 5, 1994 Resolution R94-23 of the Green River city council designated this landing field [the airport at Green River] as the "Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport", for inhabitants of Jupiter who might wish to take sanctuary in Green River in the event their planet is threatened by collisions from comets or meteors, in apparent reference to the contemporary Comet-Shoemaker-Levy9 impact". Evidently there is a sense of humor in this town.

Back outside, there were two horses from the BLM's Wild Horse & Burro program.

This is the code used for the freeze branding.

Speaking of wild horses, I saw on the map the BLM Wild Horse Corrals just north of Rock Springs. That is where we were turning north to head up Hwy. 191 so we stopped to look. You can request tours, but we hadn't made any plans, so satisfied ourselves with looking from the overview. The facility can hold up to 800 horses and is the only off-range holding facility in Wyoming. It also is a rest stop for horses being transported from the West to points farther east.

Heading north. It looks like all the hay that is baled around here is put into round bales. I googled "weight of round bales". It can vary from 450 to 1700 pounds depending on size of bale, density of bale, moisture content, etc. So don't ask me how much a round bale weighs.

Between Rock Springs and Eden.

More Wide Open Spaces.

East of Eden, WY. Isn't that a book by John Steinbeck?

In case you are wondering about what we were doing meandering northeast through Wyoming, our first destination was to be Mountain Meadow Wool in Buffalo. We didn't decide the order of our trip until we were actually on the road and I talked to someone at Mountain Meadow to ask about the best time to visit. This was all pretty last minute although I had the time blocked out on my calendar for months.

As you know if you've followed our road trips in other years (search back in Wordpress) we tend to stop at the historical markers we find along the way. Most of the main roads through the West were originally traveled by the Pioneers.

A Wyoming History website says about the Parting of the Ways: "This may well be one of the most subtly dramatic sites remaining on the emigrant trails. Here, in the middle of an open, sagebrush plain, the trails diverge. Emigrants had to decide whether to stay on the main route and head southwest towards Fort Bridger or veer right and cross the Little Colorado Desert on the Greenwood or Sublette Cutoff. The cutoff, opened in 1844, saved about 46 miles but included some fifty waterless miles." This site, however, is the False Parting of the Ways, wrongly identified in 1956 and marked with the tall marker in the background. The correct site was identified about 30 years later and the flat plaque was installed here. The sentiment remains the same though--this is part of the Oregon Trail and the country looks pretty much the same.

It is so hard to imagine traveling this "road" and covering 10 to 20 miles per day.

Rabbitbrush near the trail.

About 7 or 8 miles away we came to the South Pass Overlook and Interpretive Site. "South Pass is the lowest point on the Continental Divide between the Central andSouthern Rocky Mountains. The passes furnish a natural crossing point of the Rockies. The historic pass became the route for emigrants on the Oregon, California, and Mormon trails to the West during the 19th century. It has been designated as a U.S. National Historic Monument." Remember, we are following the trails backwards. The pioneers would have crossed this and then come to the Parting of the Ways and the deserts beyond.

Our modern marker for South Pass.

After traveling north for another couple of hours it was hard to miss this sign on the mountain. We thought "sure, anyone can say they have the world's largest anything".

Then we saw it and thought they might be correct. This is in Thermopolis, population about 3000 in 2010. Back to Google and Wikipedia. "The springs are open to the public for free as part of an 1896 treaty signed with the Shoshone and Arapaho Indian tribes."

This is the landscape just north of Thermopolis. Beautiful green alfalfa contrasts with the red rock.

The landscape reminds me of southern Utah.

Look at what I saw on the map coming up! A town named Kirby, which happens to be the name of the cutest granddaughter ever. I should get a hat or a shirt or something there.

The Kirby Bar and Grill looks promising.

Kirby is not a big town.

This is pretty much it, except for a few gravel roads with houses. That's the Bar and Grill to the left. There were people there, but no "Kirby" items to buy. We wondered about the big building at the end of the road. It seemed odd to be in this tiny town. This is Wyoming Whiskey, a distillery started and owned by a Kirby cattle ranching family. They give tours but it was closed when we were there.

More landscape in the Bighorn Basin.

It was evening when we got to the Bighorn National Forest, part of the Bighorn Mountains. We hoped to find an open campsite. We had blocked out two weeks in which to take this trip and then chose the first week so that we would miss the hoards of people traveling to this area on Eclipse Weekend. What we didn't realize was that this was Sturgis Weekend, a motorcycle rally that draws 500,000 motorcycles, mostly (it seems) Harleys, to the small town of Sturgis, South Dakota, just over the border from Wyoming. The national parks and towns surrounding Sturgis gear up for the onslaught of people, but evidently, those people weren't interested in camping in the Bighorn National Forest.

It was getting close to dusk and we saw people parked on a pullout along the road. Our Yellowstone experience taught us that where there are people standing and pointing there might be something to see. Two Moose!

Check back for Day 3. At this point I am so jealous of my friends whose wildlife photography is outstanding in its clarity. Photographer or lens? Probably both.