The Pause That Refreshes

We've been visiting alot of 'buildings' in the last couple of days.  Museums, libraries, capital offices and restaurants and stores.  Now there is nothing wrong with any of these, but today, after lunch in a shopping mall so we could again enjoy the best fried chicken in the world, Chick-fil-A (OK, our first choice if not yours) we stepped outside and the sun was shining, the day was young, and it was only 50 miles to Laramie, Wyoming and Medicine Bow National Forest was on the way. We needed a pause from buildings and boy did we get refreshed!

Medicine Bow IS a healing place.  When you get out of your car to capture a sight forever, you snap, then stand, and sometimes sit, and just absorb the air, the quiet, the birds, and occasionally, see...

...female pronghorn antelopes. These were grazing off to the side of the road when Mona saw them from several hundred yards away through this tiny hole in the trees.


Go Mona!





The buttes, boulders, and trees meet and blend with the rolling prairie in Medicine Bow Forest.  This makes an environment that gives you wide vistas and dramatic walls of stone rising right up out of the grass.

               

On the edges of the park are ranches of beef, cattle and horses.  Wyoming is full of farms but it has always been prime pasture land. First for the buffalo and other plains wildlife, then for the Indians horses, descendants of the Spanish breeds left behind when the Navajo and Hopi chased the                                                                                         conquistadors back into Mexico. Then cowboys and beef, and finally sheep.  But the sheep herder and cattle man range wars would take up another blog so Google them for yourselves.

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Then out of the corner of Mona's eye she spots a young male mule deer.

He sees us stop the car and begins to run but not before the camera clicks and he is captured for all time, or as long as I pay my annual Mosy Cloud backup fee.

We get to the end of state route 210, at the summit of the high hills of Medicine Bow Forest and find ourselves at a visitor's center and rest stop for I-80. The same I-80 that crosses the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan, takes the Snyder family to visit old friends in Brookville, Pa, and ends up in downtown San Francisco.  But at this rest stop we learn that in Wyoming this is also US Route 30, the first transcontinental highway in the US. And we find a museum in the midst of our Pause.  But that's OK,  Growing up and around lancaster PA we have a special place in our hearts for the old Lincoln Highway.

However, Wyoming doesn't just create a museum, and a monument made from four original stone Lincolnway direction markers. This state does their tribute up BIG. With a giant bust of Lincoln mounted high above the roadway.  No one can miss who this concrete ribbon is named for.






So we drive into Laramie to buy a couple of things and have supper, and begin the return trek with the setting sun at our backs.

This time Mona spots a small group of buck pronghorns.

Did you know that Wyoming has almost 90% of all antelope in the United States living within its borders?  Once these graceful and very fast animals were found regularly all over the plains, from Missouri west.

So we watch as the group heads off over the hill, and I take a look in the rear-view and hop out of the car to get one more pic for the day.

I've taken innumerable sunset photos on oceans, seas, and rivers.  But this one, over Medicine Bow National Forest, will always be one of my favorites. Because it was here, today, that we received the pause that refreshed.

Now its off to bed, for tomorrow is another day.  Maybe we'll stay around camp and make use of the great trail SIERRA TRADING POST has wrapped around their land. We might put out the awning and folding chairs and read a bit while we watch the Union Pacific trains roll by east and west in the distance.

Or maybe we'll take a little drive, somewhere, where another pause, or awesome sight, awaits. After all, as Mona found etched into the wall outside the Cheyenne Library the other day:

-Ken