Mile 9453 – Moran, Wyoming, near Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks. We left Rawlins in the morning and drove through hours and hours of impressively desolate scenery. We crossed the Great Divide Basin, where water has no way to get to either the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans. We stopped in Dubois (pronounced “do-boys”) and had lunch outside at the Cowboy Cafe. Very enjoyable, good food, and pleasant conversation with semi-locals (a girl who lived in Lander but was originally from Wisconsin and was questioning her choice of future mother-in-law).
As we approached northern Wyoming, we saw more and more smoke from forest fires and finally encountered a big mushroom cloud from a fire about 15 miles from where we are staying now. It is creating its own towering cumulus cloud and from a distance looks like a continuously exploding atomic bomb. Fortunately, the wind is blowing it away from us.
In the late afternoon, we arrived at the Grand Tetons, supposedly named by French voyageurs who must not have seen women for a while, because those mountains are much too craggy to evoke that image for me. My idea of “grand tetons” would look more like shield volcanoes.
As we approached sunset, we arrived at the classic vista point where Ansel Adams took the iconic picture of the Snake River with the Grand Tetons in the backgound. Lots of people with super-fancy camara equipment were lined up to take their own Ansel Adams picture. Alas, the mountains were only visible as silhouettes in the smoky haze. P.J. felt very frustrated.
The Aspens are at peak here. Difficult to capture foliage glory in the smoke, but somehow my mind’s eye filtered that out. For me, it was a fabulous sight to round out a very enjoyable day.
[Photographs © 2012 P.J. Gardner. All Rights Reserved.]