Suzanne's Blog: Day 10 - Loveland, CO to Riverton, WY

This morning the 4 of us, Dad, Ellen, Margo, and I, set off for the first day of our group trip. It was a beautiful morning, in the low 60's and sunny, as we went north to Fort Collins and then west-northwest along Poudre Canyon Road. Poudre Canyon surrounds the Cache la Poudre River, which flows from up in the mountains down into Fort Collins, eventually flowing into the South Platte River east of Greeley, CO. My dad says that French trappers once hid a stash of gunpowder near there and marked it on a map as "cache a la poudre" and the name stuck. We rode the winding roads up through the canyon until we reached the top at Cameron Pass (elevation 10, 276 feet), north of Rocky Mountain National Park and then started the descent towards Gould and then Walden. Gould is known to have a population of moose, so I was hesitantly hopeful even though we were passing through there later than they would usually be seen. I've been hoping to see a moose somewhere since the upper peninsula of Michigan, but no luck so far. We stopped briefly in Walden for gas and coffee and then pressed on into Wyoming, passing through Saratoga and Walcott to take Interstate 80 west 20 miles to Rawlins, where we stopped for lunch. There were some dark clouds on the horizon when we arrived in Rawlins so I checked the weather map on my phone and, sure enough, there was a thunderstorm coming our way, but the road we were going to take to the north from there seemed like it was mostly clear of the rain. We did not get out the door and on the road quickly enough though. As soon as we walked outside to put our rain gear on, it started to pour and there was a deafening thunderclap. Back under the overhang we went. The wind kicked up and then it started to hail! Back inside to wait it out. Fortunately for us, the worst of it passed quickly and we were able to get going again, albeit with a little rain still falling, but that only lasted about a half hour before things started to dry out again.

We rode north on route 287 through Muddy Gap and Jeffrey City to Sweetwater Station, where we took a quick break before the last 37 miles to Riverton, our end of the road for today. Along the way, we saw signs for the Chief Washakie Trail, the Wind River Reservation, and at Sweetwater Station, information about the Oregon Trail, which made me look for more information on all of them. This area has traditionally been home to several tribes of Plains Indians, including Eastern Shoshone (Sacagawea of Lewis and Clark fame was a Lemhi Shoshone from Idaho) and Northern Arapahoe. Chief Washakie was a highly regarded Shoshone leader who led a delegation to the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1851, where the US agreed to territories laid out for 8 different tribes, agreeing that it was all native American lands, and the tribes all agreed to allow safe passage through their lands for people traveling the Oregon Trail west. The path of the Oregon Trail passes just 2 miles south of Sweetwater Station and goes on to Lander to the west. To the west of our travels today, also of note, was the Great continental Divide Basin, and area that does not drain into any ocean. Instead, all of the precipitation that falls there, west of Rawlins and south of the Sweetwater River, simply evaporates as it has nowhere to drain. It is also called the red desert for how arid it is, and the Oregon Trail detoured north of it in order to avoid the inhospitable conditions - probably a good idea for a wagon train that probably traveled as far in a day as we can today in about 15 minutes.

Tomorrow we will head for Dubois and then Grand Teton National Park.