Wyoming - Day 25 - errands and sightseeing in Cheyenne and Laramie

Laramie KOA, Laramie

Saturday, 25 September 2021

today's route on the road

and the route through Cheyenne

On the road

I guess we started climbing not too many miles out of Laramie, though I didn't really notice it.  It wasn't long before I found we'd gotten to a pass.  But all the sign said was Pass - elev. 8,640' - which seems to be a respectable enough height to deserve a name, but I had a hard time finding one.  Finally, someone's flickr.com page told me that Sherman Summit, elev. 8,640', "is a mountain pass on the crest of the Laramie Mountains," and holds the distinction of being the highest point along the entire transcontinental length of I-80.  Why couldn't some government agency - like the highway department - have told me that?

An oddity: the city of Laramie isn't in Laramie County; it's in Albany County.  Cheyenne is in Laramie County.

I passed a large wind farm, this time with most of the turbines working.  Cows, huge fields, lots of rolling hills.  Lots of billboards eastbound for Little America.  I thought that was a town in western Wyoming, which it is, but this place is an expansion of the operation there, and here it isn't a town but a destination stop - you know, hotels and restaurants and entertainment.

Cheyenne

I came to Cheyenne, elev. 6,062', but oddly no sign telling me the population.  Online I found that the 2018 projection was 63,957.  It is, of course, Wyoming's largest city.  I should note that all my life I've pronounced this name shy-ann, which is wrong.  They pronounce it: shy-enn - like cayenne pepper.

My first stop was the only Chase Bank in the state.  I was almost completely out of cash because it's been months since I last found a branch.  And this one only opened about 6 months ago, so I was lucky.

Then I went to one of the few CVSs they have in WY.  This is where I'd asked the Greybull doctor to call in my Rx refills.  While I was in there, a sign reminded me I still hadn't gotten even the first of the 2 shingles shots and, since I had the measles light years ago, I figure I've been lucky not to have been hit with the disease yet.  And while I was at it, I asked for this year's flu shot as well.  The pharmacist wanted to give them to me in different arms, not for drug reasons but for pain reasons.  I told him my left arm was already hurting so to put them both in that arm and I'd barely notice the difference.

During the time I was there, I was heartened to see 2 youngish adults sign up for the COVID vaccine.  One was a mother with a newborn baby.  I wondered what had made them finally decide to get the shot but was afraid if I asked it'd discourage them.  A good sign, I thought, that they were doing it.

From there I drove past a large park - Cheyenne seems to be an attractive city - and found the state capitol, beset by roads closed due to construction.  But I finally found a spot where I could take a photo.

Wyoming State Capitol

The cornerstone was laid in 1887 - unusual because Wyoming didn't become a state until 1890.

The state museum was catty-cornered to the capitol, and I tried hard to find a place there to park the RV but finally ended up parking back in front of the capitol.  I took the dogs out on the big lawn (no deer poop) by the state supreme court, we ate lunch, and then I spent a couple of hours at the museum.

They had some really nice exhibits there, and I found a lot that was very interesting.  But I'm trying hard to get these blog posts caught up before I get to Utah so I'm going to wait on detailing what I saw there.  I'll notify you when I've updated this with that information.

That makes 5 museums I need to catch up on: the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis; the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum; the Oklahoma History Center; the North Dakota State Museum; and now this one.  I promise I'll get this situation cleaned up, mainly because I'm still saving the photos and am still interested in the topics.

After my time in the museum, I took the dogs back out for a walk, this time on the capitol grounds to see the statues they've got there.  We passed a group of 10-12 folks carrying 2 full-sized US flags and a Trump 2024 flag.  At the time, they were all reading off a piece of paper while one of them read it aloud.  I wasn't close enough to hear what it was about.  

Earlier I'd seen a man wearing some signs front and back that were hard for me to read.  One read: "There is Blood on Your Hands."  I don't know why.  Another read: "Right To Try ___[something]," and still another read: "Free ___[something else]."  Not an effective way of getting a point across.  He left the area when I took the dogs out.

Across the street from the capitol is this statue:

Bill Gollings
Cowboy Artist

The top plaque explains who he was.

At the side of the capitol was this amazing piece:

The Spirit of Wyoming
A Monument to the Citizens
of the State of Wyoming
1986

The plaque at the base of that statue has nothing else on it but the names of all the coal, oil, steel, chemical, and railroad companies that paid for it.

This one's right in front of the building.

the state seal, placed squarely in front

Okay, this next one's not a statue.  On the side of the capitol opposite the bucking bronco was a bison statue, looking just like I've been seeing them with the heavy coat on the front half and bare skin on the back half.  Because I've been taking photos of the real thing, I didn't bother with a photo of this statue.  But across the street at the museum, this is the first thing I saw:

That bison indubitably has hair on its back half.  I asked one of the museum folks and he told me the bison here has its winter coat on.  But in the summer they shed all that back hair, and I've been seeing them in the summer.  Mystery solved.  They don't go around hairless in the snowy northern winters.

Back on the road

Driving back to Laramie, we had the usual Wyoming wind but it wasn't as strong today as I've seen.  I was surprised to see a sign going back that I hadn't seen coming over which was: "Strong Winds Can Constitute A Severe Blow-Over Risk - Pull Over."  I'm not sure why they had this sign for the westbound folks but not for the eastbound ones.

I saw several billboards with the headline "Forever Ruined" that seemed to be opposed to the wind farm I've been seeing around here.  The "forever" part seemed a little overstated to me, especially given the open pit coal mines I've seen in this state (which these folks advocate) that I suspect will not return the land to its original state once they're depleted.  But anyway, I looked it up and learned that these anti-turbine folks are dead serious, though I'm not certain how well-informed they are.  Here's some explanation I found:   https://wakeupwyo.com/turbine-project-opinion

A sign told me I'd entered the Medicine Bow National Forest.  Scarcely a tree in sight - though that changed as we went farther west.

I'd planned 2 stops and a detour before going back to the campground.  The first of the stops came up about halfway along the drive: Tree In the Rock Historic Site.  The state had created a rest area in the middle of the interstate - one of those you can reach from both directions by exiting left, which I hate to do.  But I wanted to see this place.  Sure enough - there's a tree growing out of a rock, sort of.

Tree In the Rock

These signs explain the situation:

You can just see this plaque buried
in the stone around the tree.
The cable it refers to is the one
that seems to be holding the 
rock together.

Also at this rest stop were these informational signs:

I was glad to see this sign, because on my way east
I found myself wondering what were these rocks I was 
passing, so I stopped on the side of I-80 and took some photos.

The rocks in these 2 photos were connected
with each other.

I don't know if you can tell how odd they looked
because I was 4 lanes & a median & a large
field away from them.  But I found them striking.

My next stop turned out to be at the summit I'd passed through earlier.  There's a rest stop for westbound folks (not one for eastbound) that has something called a Lincoln Memorial Monument, and I decided to take a look.  Certainly is an unusual depiction.

Lincoln Memorial Monument

This is the plaque embedded
in the base of the monument.

This sign is nearby and commemorates the
highway itself and one of the men
instrumental in getting it built.
I guess the name of the highway is the reason
this monument was placed where it is.

Also at this rest stop were 2 more signs about the various significances of this area.

The abrupt angle of this photo was
required to avoid glare from the sun.
I think it's still legible.

Back in Laramie

In case I didn't mention it before, Laramie's population (2010) is 30,816 and the elevation is 7,165' - 1,000' higher than Cheyenne.

I finally found a non-off-brand gas station that sold regular for a semi-reasonable price - I think it was $3.23, which was the lowest I've seen in weeks.  So I filled all the way up with thankfulness for finally getting rid of that worry.

This is a town of higher learning, I found out.  I passed both Albany County Community College and Laramie County Community College on my way to the campus of University of Wyoming.  Road construction kept me from following the route around campus I'd intended, but I still drove through a fair sampling.  It's a very attractive campus with lots of large lawns and buildings of stone and brick.  It was founded in 1886, before statehood, and the school shows a well-established presence.

You may remember Matthew Shepard, the Univ. of WY student who was killed in a pretty ugly manner a while back.  I remember hearing that he was killed for being gay; now I learn that no one knows for sure how much that fact contributed to the crime.  Here's a link to the story of the crime.   https://www.wyohistory.org/murder-matthew-shepard  I can't seem to find any memorials to him and his parents didn't even bury his ashes for fear of vandalism.  But a few years ago, they got permission to bury him in Washington National Cathedral - unusual to say the least.   The Smithsonian Magazine had an interesting article about the situation.   https://www.smithsonianmag.com/matthew-shepard-buried

Not far from the campground I passed the Wyoming Territorial Prison State Historic Site.  As the name (territorial) indicates, it was built in 1872 as a federal prison and was later turned over to the state.  It was used as a prison until 1901, and then as an agriculture research facility.  It's now open to the public, and there were dozens of cars parked there when I went by.  Yeah it's a sunny Saturday afternoon, but I wondered if there were some sort of event happening because it didn't seem like the kind of place where upwards of 100 folks would all decide to go visit at the same time.  I saw a woolly mammoth and a bison - neither were alive - which I guess were for the kids to play on.  Sometime I'd like to stop, with fewer people.  This Wikipedia page details its history, including the numerous jailbreaks and prisoners like Butch Cassidy.   https://en.wikipedia.org/WY-Territorial-Prison

We got back to the campground at 3:00, which made it a 7½ hour trip.  I was tired.