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Published: September 20th 2009
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We headed north again to Riverton to visit with Frank's long time friends. The drive took us about 3 hours. The only two rest stops with bathrooms on that 3 hour trip through the desert were closed for renovation. I thought that was rather a cruel thing to do to people of our age. Our bladders are not as young as they used to be.
Riverton is a city in Fremont County, Wyoming. It is both the largest city in the county and the largest within the historical boundaries of the Wind River Indian Reservation. The city is an incorporated entity of the state of Wyoming, on land ceded from the reservation in 1906, a situation that often makes it subject to jurisdictional claims by the nearby Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes.
One of the more scenic spots along the trip was Red Canyon. The slopes are crucial winter range for over 700 elk. We saw none on the trip but then we didn't linger to do any viewing.
We arrived about 12:30 so first stop was lunch after which we went to see some of the scenery surrounding Riverton. One point of interest was the Sacajawea Cemetary.
Sacagawea was
a Shoshone woman who accompanied the Lewis and Clark Expedition, led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, in their exploration of the Western United States. She traveled thousands of miles from North Dakota to the Pacific Ocean between 1804 and 1806. She was nicknamed Janey by Clark.
Reliable historical information about Sacagawea is extremely limited, but she has become an important part of the Lewis and Clark mythology in the American public imagination. The National American Woman Suffrage Association of the early twentieth century adopted her as a symbol of women's worth and independence, erecting several statues and plaques in her memory, and doing much to spread the story of her accomplishments.
The Sacagawea dollar coin issued by the United States Mint depicts Sacagawea and her son, Jean Baptiste. The face on the coin was modeled on a modern Shoshone-Bannock woman named Randy'L He-dow Teton; no contemporary image of Sacagawea exists.
Next stop was Sinks Canyon State Park is a Wyoming state park located in the Wind River Mountains, 6 miles southwest of Lander, Wyoming on Wyoming Highway 131. The park is named for a portion of the Middle Fork of the Popo Agie River. The river flows into an
underground limestone cavern at the Sinks, and emerges 1/4 mile down the canyon in a pool named the Rise. The exact route of the underground passage is unknown, and dye tests have shown that the water takes over 2 hours to make the 1/4 mile journey between the Sinks and the Rise. Additionally, more water flows from the Rise than enters the cavern at the sink. The Madison Limestone Formation was carved by glacial movement, leaving extensive underground fissures and steep cliff walls. The gradual recession of the ice left glacial moraines along the canyon floor.
The summit of a pass above the sinks provided up with some gorgeous foliage and a fabulous view of the valley below. It was late afternoon and a simply gorgeous day with temps about 74. The weather is due to change tomorrow and be a little overcast and rainy.
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