Great American West Adventure
Steamboat Springs, Colorado to Jackson, Wyoming - September 2017
We left Steamboat Springs and headed northwest to Jackson, Wyoming.
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It was a pretty long driving day but along the way we saw .... lots of rocks and dry land. And sage brush.
But seriously, it is a very interesting landscape. Very, very different from what we see along the highways in Virginia. Most of this area has a semi-arid climate. The average rainfall is around 9 inches per year total. Semi-arid climates typically do not support large trees, so most the vegetation is going to be grasses and tall shrubs, which is exactly what we saw until we got almost to Jackson and then it turned very alpine.
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We saw such a variety of mountains. Some very sandy looking. Other very rocky. Lots of ranches along the way. And lots of energy fields. I'm guessing some of it was natural gas and some was petroleum. It was all underground except for mechanical equipment every couple of miles.
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We also saw some wildlife but perhaps not as much as I would have expected. We saw a lot of cows although for the first two-thirds of the drive, the herds were very sparse. Only a couple of dozens at a time. In the last third, the herds were much larger. We also saw a few herds of a small, very strange deer. At least, that's we we think they were. They had short antlers pointing backwards.
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Surprisingly, to me anyway, we saw very few birds. You would have thought that there would have been plenty of small rodents in those fields for the raptors to dine on, but we only saw a couple of them along the whole drive.
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We crisscrossed a couple of rivers over the course of the last couple of hundred miles, and we saw a good number of people flyfishing in them. A river literally runs through it.
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We took a slight detour to Daniel, Wyoming (population 150) to check out a tiny old gas station on the side of the road. Super cool that they have preserved it.
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It's amazing to see so much dry, barren land. Hundreds and hundreds of miles of it.
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Tonight we are staying in Jackson, Wyoming and are going to check out Grand Teton National Park tomorrow.
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Let the record show that we traveled almost 2,300 miles only to stay in a place called "The Virginian".
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BONUS: The Full Moon is tonight. It's a bit cloudy, so I'm not sure how much we will be able to see.
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Apologies in advance, there are a LOT of pictures below. All the scenery just kept changing. I also took a timelapse video of the drive with the GoPro. #BugGuts
