I have a tendency to overdo it a bit on these road trips, attempting to squeeze as much exploration into every day as I possibly can. This causes me to change plans and drive further - sometimes much further - which makes for very long days. Today was one of those days.
But it was a very good day, for the most part. I drove through the amazing Wind River Canyon for the second time, the first in over a decade. I visited several very touristy towns and the nearly forgotten Shoshoni. And, due to my aforementioned propensity to always need to see more, I ended up driving through the Bighorn Mountains on U.S. Highway 16. By time I reached my destination in Casper, night had already fallen.
Wyoming is a beautiful, desolate, vast place. There's just so much to see.
The mountains are calling
Today I visited Wyoming's Snowy Range for the first time since a family vacation way back in the summer of 1992. It was far better than I remember, absolutely beautiful and such a sudden change from the high plains on either side of the range. I took a short hike along a boulder field and found myself in awe. A great reminder of the enormity and awesomeness of nature, and the relative unimportant nature of all the little day-to-day stresses that have a way of consuming a person.
This marked the first time I've been in the Rocky Mountains since I visited Colorado in 2010. It was far too long.
I also crossed the Continental Divide to the tiny company town of Wamsutter, one of the few populated places located in Wyoming's Great Divide Basin. Nothing but semi-trucks and flat, sage-brush covered semi-desert as far as the eye can see. And a relentless wind.
Tomorrow comes central Wyoming.
Five hundred miles
From Omaha to Laramie, Wyoming, mostly at 80 mph on I-80. Medicine Bow and the Continental Divide tomorrow!
It seems to me nothing man has done or built on this land is an improvement over what was here before
Yesterday was a much better day, photographically-speaking. I headed home from Goodland, Kansas along US Highway 24 on a very (very) warm Sunday. It was one of those days where most everything seems to go right and there are photographs everywhere you look.
We'll see where these images go from here. I'm kicking around the title Sunflower Blues for a series of images that would likely need a few more visits to western Kansas.
Post title: Kent Haruf writing in West of Last Chance, a photobook by Peter Brown