It’s Cold Here

It was 39 degrees when we woke up this morning and a weather alert has been posted for tonight.  Elevations at 7,500 feet or more may receive snow, below that elevation will get freezing rain.  We are at about 7,100 feet.  The drive tomorrow morning will probably be lousy.   We plan to hook up the truck tonight and disconnect what we can so we don’t have much to do tomorrow morning.  It will be cold and may still be precipitating.  This is August for goodness sake.  What’s up with this cold weather?  I think we have used our little fireplace (because our heater is broken) more on this trip than we have used the air conditioning.

We went to the Medicine Bow Mountains for a last drive through western mountains on this trip.  We have also seen signs calling them the Snowy Mountains.  They still have some snow.  They will have more by tomorrow morning!

At one point, I told Regis his choices for our return:  1) return the way we came through the mountains where there was road construction going on; 2) go on an unpaved road that shows up on our state map without a name so we don’t really know which road it is; or 3) continue on this paved road until it loops around back to the interstate.  The third option was the longest mileage but was probably the quickest way back.  If you all know Regis, you know he picked the unpaved road.  After much thinking and looking at maps, we finally agreed on which road it might be.  It may or may not have been the right road, but there were so many other road options along the way that were not on the map that I thought there was a chance we would be spending the night in the mountains with some potato chips, dog treats, and some water.

It was a beautiful ride but I hated to see so many dead trees.  It was probably worse in these mountains than anywhere we’ve seen on the trip so far.

The best part was seeing so much beaver activity.  We didn’t see any beavers but we saw lots of dams.  I have never seen so much beaver activity in one place.

We saw some marmots and I got at least one decent picture below.  We also saw lots of chipmunks.  On the way to the mountains and back from the mountains, we saw lots of Pronghorns.

Trivia:  According to a publication that I picked up called Laramie Discover, “in 1868, Laramie was home to 23 saloons and hotels but not a single church.”