We've been happily at home in Oregon for over three weeks, but I'm still road-trip blogging — because there are still fun pictures and experiences we don't want to forget .
After we left Colorado on our way to the Utah stop I showed last week, our route took us across southern Wyoming. We don't drive a lot of miles in a day, so we did stay overnight in Rawlins, but, as it's been on most of our cross-country trips, Wyoming was pretty much a drive-through State.
Blue sky, green grass and red rocks when we first hit the Wyoming border — outside of Laramie — but it wasn't many more miles before we began to see the landscape that defines this part of the State … endless miles of sagebrush.
It gets monotonous, but Sagebrush is an important part of the ecological system ….
(click for easier reading)
… as the above sign (at a highway rest-stop area) explains.
In the mosaic above, one farm animal behind the fence and some wild animals in the open are browsing that sagebrush. We always lose count of how many pronghorn we see when driving across Wyoming. I think there might be more of them than there are people.
Among the 50 States, Wyoming ranks 50th in population but is the 10th largest in area. According to Wikipedia there are 584,000 people populating just over 97,000 square miles. (That leaves a lot of room for sagebrush and the wildlife it supports.)
We stopped in Kemmerer for lunch. It is in this tiny town that James Cash Penney founded his first department store in 1902. This, the "mother store" is still in the same downtown location where it all began. Nowadays, you would almost always find this national chain store in malls. (If you found it at all, the way things are going these days. ) That very morning, we'd read yet another story about how brick and board stores are rapidly declining as more and more of us do our shopping on line.
We arrived at Bear Lake (on the Utah/Idaho border) that afternoon and that was where we took the bird pictures I showed last week. That State line is one of the few in the country (in our experience) where you actually notice a difference in terrain and landscape almost as soon as you cross into the next State.
Bear Lake Valley as seen from Logan Canyon Scenic Byway, Utah
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