On July 10, we had a picnic and spent an hour or so at Ayers Natural Bridge.
Ayres Natural Bridge Park is a county park in Converse County, Wyoming. Occuppying 150 acres (0.6 km²) southeast of the town of Glenrock.
Over the course of millions of years, a bend in LaPrele Creek (originally known as Bridge Creek) wore away at a wall of solid rock, creating a natural opening. The creek eventually shifted course through the opening, forming a 30-foot (10 m) high and 50-foot (15 m) wide arch, today known as Ayres Natural Bridge.
Located about a mile (2 km) south of the Oregon Trail, the Natural Bridge was often visited by emigrants traveling west. It is considered one of Wyoming’s first tourist attractions. In 1843, a pioneer described it as "a natural bridge of solid rock, over a rapid torrent, the arch being regular as tho’ shaped by art."
The park is free to visit. There is a small campground in the park, as well as open picnic areas and covered tables. It is opened from April through September from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., with registered campers allowed to stay overnight. No pets are allowed in the park.
(Source: Wikipedia)
Our national parks are places where nature is preserved – and nature can be dangerous.
We have been away from news internet service for about 4 or 5 days.
A while back, I subscribed to press releases from the National park Service. While going through those that had accumulated, I noticed that there were several fatalities . Then, while I was putting this post together, I was told about bear maulings in the Yellowstone area.
Nature can be dangerous.
Some people get hurt or killed because they don’t follow the rules.
Sometimes, though, natural events are the cause. The bear maulings near Yellowstone appear to be very unusual, where no one did anything wrong. It appears to be a rogue bear.
Links on each of the picture go to the applicable news piece.
photo from July 9, 2010
We are currently off the grid and off the internet somewhere in the Idaho mountains. We will be preparing blog posts to publish when we have the opportunity to go on line.
The last three nights, we’ve been camped in the mountains west of Stanley, Idaho, at Bull Trout Campground. Our camp site is close to a small lake, Martin Lake. It’s a natural mountain lake, with very clear water.
The weather overall has been good since we got here. I think it might have got up to 80°F the first afternoon after we got here. Highs the next couple of days were in the mid to lower 70s, with lows at night in the low 40s. This morning the low was 41.1°F at 7:06 a.m.
The road coming in is a 2 mile dirt road. It was very dry and the surface was like powder. Even driving very slow, it billowed up around us. When we got into the campground, the car, which we tow behind the motorhome, was covered in dust. I used our broom to sweep the worst of it off.
Fortunately, though, it rained that night so the road was just fine the next day. Yesterday, it was already dry and starting to kick up a little dust when we drove over it. This is a popular recreational area. On the weekends, there are probably a lot of people in here with various types of motorcycles and all terrain vehicles, which is largely why the road was worked up into such a fine powder on the surface.
We’re moving on today into southwest Montana. We’re going without a reservation as we’ve seen a lot of forest service campgrounds in this area that are not on the reservation system, which right now I’m not very happy with.
We visited Fort Laramie late in the day after stopping at several other places. As a result, we were tired and didn’t spend as much time looking through it as we would have liked to – and we still were an hour away from where we planned to stop.
From Wikipedia:
Fort Laramie was a significant 19th century trading post and diplomatic site located in the U.S. state of Wyoming. During the middle 19th century, it was a primary stopping point on the Oregon Trail and the Mormon Trail and was, along with Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas River, the most significant economic hub of commerce in the region. In the 1840s it was taken over by the United States Army to protect travelers on the Oregon, California and Mormon trails.
Today, the remaining structures are preserved as the Fort Laramie National Historic Site by the National Park Service.
National Park Service – Fort Laramie
Another prominent feature along the emigrant trails is Scott’s Bluff.
This was our third visit to Scott’s Bluff. The last time we were here was a little trying.
“At Scottsbluff National Monument, where the interior of the van had gotten extremely hot while we we going through the museum, I started the engine to cool things off before everyone else made it back. Then, not realizing that my wife’s purse was in the van, I locked the doors. This was in the days before On-Star, so we waited for over an hour for a locksmith to arrive from town.”
Our kids refer to that vacation as the "trip from hell."
This time, the only problem we had was that one of our cameras got left on the shuttle bus that goes to the top of the bluff and back…, but we didn’t discover it until the driver had headed to town to refuel the bus, so, another wait.
“Fur traders, missionaries, and military expeditions began regular trips past Scotts Bluff during the 1830s. Beginning in 1841, multitudes of settlers passed by Scotts Bluff on their way west on the Emigrant Trail to Oregon, and later California and Utah. Wagon trains used the bluff as a major landmark for navigation. The trail itself passed through Mitchell Pass, a gap in the bluffs flanked by two large cliffs. Although the route through Mitchell Pass was tortuous and hazardous, many emigrants preferred this route to following the North Platte river bottom on the north side of the bluff. Passage through Mitchell Pass became a significant milestone for many wagon trains on their way westward. In one of its first engineering deployments, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built a smoother road through Mitchell Pass in the early 1850s. Use of the Emigrant Trail tapered off in 1869 when the trail was made obsolete by the completion of the transcontinental railroad.” ….wikipedia
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