Day 4 – Laramie to Ogden 25 June 2012

Terrain & Route Map, Laramie to Ogden

Day 4 – Ahhh, the woodsy smell of camp fires and exploding coffee makers…

The smoky air woke me up in Laramie around 5:30 am. Even with the A/C more or less working on the goopy gas, the haze from forest- and grassland fires in the West permeated everything. I got up and turned on the coffee maker, which promptly went “PFFFFZT!”, emitted a spark or two, and sprung the ground fault outlet, casting the kitchen of the RV into darkness. I put it down to the spectacularly damaging 87 volts being put out by the Crisco-fueled generator the day before. Before the crappy stuff killed any more appliances, I decided to walk across the parking lot and buy a new Mr Coffee in the Walmart. This would make the second new appliance we’d purchased at Walmart since we started the trip, and since we’d used their free parking lots twice as well, I figured it was almost worth it. Of course, staying overnight at an RV park probably wouldn’t have cost us $75 a night either, so on that note the $150 or so we’d spent so far to sleep for free didn’t quite work out. By the time I returned with a new coffee urn and got it perking, the sun had come up and was casting an orangish glow on everything, and you could see the haze across the mountains.

 

Today’s trip would finish our westward portion, for the most part. It shouldn’t take us much more than half a day to get to Utah.  I’d been looking at the guidebooks, and it seemed like a quick tour around the Great Salt Lake might be fun once we got there. There was a big state park based on Antelope Island, which jutted up into the lake from the southern corner. Since we didn’t need to be in SLC until Wednesday, and it was only Monday, we had time to look around a bit. Our route today would take us across the southern tier of Wyoming – mostly treeless, flat plain; high desert with not much to see except some random cattle, the odd oil shale refinery, and barbed wire. Nearer to Utah, we would however pass by the Rock Springs/Green River area, a somewhat more exciting geologic oddity, with high bluffs and more dinosaur fossils in the rubble than you can shake a pterodactyl wing at.  But that was still 300 or so miles in the future.

We wound our way back through Downtown Laramie, chock-a-block full of students at the University. I wondered to myself why the place was so overrun with kids on the last week of June.  In any case, within a few miles we were out drifting across the high plains. Scenery was not spectacular, unless you like the desolate, moon-scape kind of stuff.  I took a couple of pics anyway, before the windshield started to get so splattered with bug guts that you couldn’t see out. The haze on the horizon was ever-present. This part of southern Wyoming was mostly flat treeless scrub land, with the occasional hillock or little stream cut to break the monotony. 

The High Plains Drifter

One thing of interest I noted were the occasional overhead warning signs, and matching on-ramp barriers, that were exercised in the winter when snowfall pretty much made the road death-defying to use. Once the drifts reached six feet high or so, they’d shoo everybody off the interstate, and keep new vehicles from entering.  I don’t know where they expected everybody to go once off the road, though, since it’s not like the place was crawling with Holiday Inns and Motel Sixes. 

About 90 miles out of Laramie, we came up on the Fort Steele State Park, so we decided to pull in, wash the windshield, and take a quick look around. I didn’t see a fort, but there was a lot of gravel, a railroad track, and some trees. As state parks go, I’d seen better.   Oddly enough, our old friend the Platte River gurgled noisily on the edge of the oasis. It was an interesting diversion, and I found out that it wasn’t really a state park, just a rest area, later on – the state park was about 10 miles up river.  Fort Steele was an actual stronghold built by the Army in 1868 during the construction of the trans-continental railway, to protect against the roused-up locals who didn’t cotton to the noisy, smoky, fire-breathing locomotive busting across their lands.  There was also an historic meeting there between a bunch of Army bigwigs like Grant, Sheridan and Sherman, and the as-yet not-in-jail officials of the Union Pacific, to find out where all the money was going. It turned out the money was going into pockets, not railroad ties and payroll.  The fort was abandoned twenty years later, and burned down about 10 times since then. There’s one small shack, and a hunk of stone foundation left, but as the site’s ever-hopeful website notes, “Although the number of structures has declined over the years what remains standing is living testimony to the flourishing and subsequent passing of several frontiers.”

 

Mile after mile of flat desert flew by.  We passed a large refinery at Sinclair, looking for the big green dino.After another hour or so, Rawlins came by, a roughneck town tied to the petro & drilling industry. We caught up with a miles-long, slow moving freight train that clicketey-clanked its way through the arid Wyoming dust.

The crushing weight of humanity

After Rawlins, it really got desolate.  We paralleled other roads at times, small dirt or lightly gravelled county type roads where the cars and pickups raised clouds of dry dust, and the railroad tracks kept coming up and then moving away. This was just high desert plains, Cretaceous-era crude shale a couple of dozen feet underground, and not much else. In places, the road stretched out in the distance for as far as you could see. Somewhere out there, we crossed over the Continental Divide, at about 7,000 feet in elevation. I got out to pee, and in about 700 years or so, give or take, some one in Oregon will make ice cubes with it.

Gee!  Ology!

Rock Springs was about a hundred miles down the road. The surroundings finally got a little bit more interesting, as this was the outer edge of the Uintah Mountains, a Pre-Cambrian layer of uplifted sedimentary rocks and sandstone cliffs. Helpful Jeopardy Fact: The Uintah are the highest range in the continental US that runs east-to-west.  I remembered driving past these bluffs over a quarter-century ago, and it was interesting to see them again.  There was about 3.8 billion years of geology on display as we rode by some of those outcroppings. It’s real Dinosaur country.

Along with Inner Mongolia, (which, bye the bye, bears a striking geographic similarity) this part of southwestern Wyoming is one of the most dinosaur-fossil-rich areas of the world. The place is just full of old Jurassic-era ocean floors and Cretaceous jungle swamps, such that if you trip over a rock almost anywhere, chances are its a Diplodicous foot or a Pterydactyl wing or some such.

River Crossing #9 – The Green River

A little ways farther on was Green River,  notable for being the first city to ban door-to-door solicitations, and is the birthplace of Curt Gowdy.  The river flows south, into the aptly named Flaming Gorge Recreation Area, where there are red and vermillion cliffs full of dinosaur bones.

A disappointment in the Middle of Nowhere

Green River receded in the background, and we started seeing signs for the famous “Little America” after a bit. L/A is an oasis in the desert, a stop-over on the truck route between Cheyenne and Salt Lake City, the west’s answer to I-95’s South Of The Border.  Created by a hotelier back in the mid 50s it started life as a truck stop and gradually grew into a motel/restaurant/gift shop kind of place. I remember stopping there in 1975, the huge array of monolithic fuel pumps and gasoline islands a beacon of light in the night sky as we approached it one evening. But our stop today was oddly disappointing.  Accurate or not, I remembered it as being somewhat schlocky and trashy, touristy, hawking fireworks and cheap junk and postcards and all sorts of crazy stuff. But in 2012 it was horribly clean and sanitized, neat sidewalks with well edged grass, gleaming gas pumps, a sit-down restaurant with actual menus, and a gift shop with no fireworks or bamboo back-scratchers in sight. It looked like Vermont. I was crushed.

 

The Highway to Heaven, Onward to Evanston and Utah, The Promised Land

The guy who thought up L/A went on to own the Sinclair Oil company and make a boat-load of money. So how about that? It was desolate out here, there were a couple dozen huge windmills, the random cow, and that’s about it.  I did get a neat shot of a long stretch of I-80 that shows an interesting perspective of the Old West. Famous among I-80 denizens and freeway travelers, it’s often dubbed “The Highway to Heaven”.  It’s the header image at the top of the page. Next stop, Evanston. Tucked away in the lower right corner of Wyoming, it was just a few miles from the border with Utah. We climbed up the slopes to it, dodged a few spotty rain showers, and then came out into Brigham Young’s promised land. Great place to see, but don’t park there.

Utah!

The first part of Utah was just like the last part of Wyoming, for my money. But then about 20 minutes in, the scenery started changing again. We were on the eastern slopes of the Wasatch Range, a small group of hills and almost-mountains tucked away in the far northeast corner of Utah. On the western slopes were the famous ski resorts like Park City. But here on the east, it was gently rolling and sloping ridges with foothills arrayed on either side of the roadway.  We’d climb for a little bit, and then descend for a little bit. It was a good change from the rather boring flatness of the last two days. We hadn’t seen elevation changes like this since western Maryland on Friday. Difference was, we were 7000 feet above sea level now.

Take the fork in the road…

We were heading for a split in the road, at Echo Park, where I-80 would jog slightly south-west towards SLC, and a spur, Interstate 84, would keep going fairly on course directly west and a little bit north, towards Ogden and the north-south Interstate 15. That was our path.

 

This ended up being one of my favorite stretches of road during the whole trip. A stretch of long, broad, sweeping turns downhill and then uphill and then sideways. We kept criss-crossing with the railroad tracks and a small rushing creek or river for several miles, to our left for a bit, then to the right. All around, the hilly mountains, or mountainous hills, were covered with a layer of green and brown and gold, and every now and then we’d get a glimpse of a peak with a splash of white which I knew to be still-unmelted snow, here a week before Independence Day, an observation with which Uncle Hal disagreed. He could not, however, come up with a logical alternative. So I won.

 

Ogden beckons…

We stopped at a pleasant little rest area just as the hills flattened out. It was a memorial to Peter Skene Ogden, namesake of Mt Ogden, the Ogden River, Ogden Valley, North Ogden, Ogden and whatever else they could find that needed a new name back in the 1850s.

Back on the road, we passed what appeared to be a hydroelectric facility, but it may have just been an antique. We were coming down out of the mountains onto the flatland pretty quickly now. About ten minutes later, we came down out of the hills and ran smack dab into I-15, and headed south. In the little town of Syracuse, we headed out to the ranger station and entrance to Antelope Island State Park. We were going to check out the camping/overnight facilities on Antelope Island. Down here in the flats, it was deadly hot, about 105′ and with a good stiffish breeze as well.

 

 

We stopped at the ranger station at the beginning of the causeway out to the island, and inquired about camping. Told that the sites were “primitive”, and that there was no shade to speak of. we looked at each other, and the light covering of grime coating each of us more or less nudged us in the direction of getting a ‘real’ space overnight, and getting a shower and some laundry done. We turned around, and zoomed a few miles up the turnpike to a very nice campground in Ogden, right off the interstate. We did about three loads of laundry, got some good hot showers, and relaxed a bit. Tomorrow we’d head back down to the state park, spend about half a day there, and then continue on to Salt Lake City. It was still very warm and windy, and the RV park was not very crowded, so we walked around and just relaxed. Even though we were only about 40 feet off the interstate, I don’t remember road noise being a problem. We passed a restful night, with the A/C going full blast to keep the buggy cool. Even as the sun went down, it was still near 90′, windy, and dry. The setting sun turned us all to gold.

Day 4 – Mileage 413
Number of States : 2

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