From the Rockies to the Wyoming Plains

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Friday, 27 June, 2014



We left the campground this morning and drove to the Beaver Meadows Visitor Center just outside the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park. I went inside to use their internet to post yesterday's blog. Sean followed a ranger to the picnic area to hear his program on bears. Kerry went to see what the ranger with the telescope was watching. When I finished inside, Kerry told me I had to look through the telescope at sun spots. I had never seen sun spots, so once the clouds moved out of the way, I finally did. Cool. By then the bear program was over and we headed east.



We left Estes Park on Highway 34 which ran along the Big Thompson River to Loveland. This is part of the area that flooded badly last September and evidence of the damage was easy to see in the great boulders filling the river, the fresh dirt on the hillsides from landslides, and the scraped-clean appearance of the river's edges. We got on I-25 at Loveland and continued north to Wyoming.



We'd been watching the ominous-looking clouds for a while when we finally ran into rain, sometimes light, some heavy. Just north of Cheyenne the roadsides and nearby rooftops were white with hail. Luckily, we just missed driving through it.



We stopped at Fort Laramie National Historic Site to see what it was about. It was a much larger area than we expected with a lot of the original buildings from the 1860's and thereabouts. This was in the middle of Indian Territory back then, but was basically a peaceful place, more likely to solve minor disagreements between fur hunters than major problems with the natives. Sean got his second junior ranger badge at Fort Laramie. I just wish I'd known he'd be interested in the junior ranger program five parks ago.



Eastern Wyoming is quite pretty with rolling green pastures and interesting rock formations mixed in.

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Photos

Pony Express Monument
Fort Laramie, WY