Today I started in Evanston WY which is the farthest western part of the state (about 4 miles from the Utah border) and tonight I am in Gothenburg Nebraska.
The day started out with temperatures in the teens at sunrise as I got on the road and stayed in the twenties pretty much all through the trip across Wyoming. There has been a LOT of new resource extraction activities that have come in since the last time I was through here (admittedly back in 1985). I passed at least a half dozen refineries along the highway – big ones. They looked like they were converting coal into oil? I also passed a big mine that had a lot of these trucks zooming around
Additional things – I managed to cross the Continental Divide TWICE. I am not totally clear how I managed that one as I was heading east the whole time. Seems like a bit of an oxymoron? The signs quoted an altitude of about 4900 and 6000 feet independently of each other – weird.
I stopped at the Wagonhound Rest Area in Wyoming since I was having a hard time finding a place to get some good photos – turns out it is a very interesting area (double click the photos below to read the signs). Very scenic too and evocative of the far west in winter!
Wagonhound Rest Area – you definitely could see that the wind has been blowing hard around here – all the snow fences had deep drifts behind them (downwind)
The highway shoots the gap between a number of mountain ranges – which you can see here
A panoramic photo of the same area – note the snow fences
Panoramic shot of the scenery at Wyoming rest stop
The rest stop had a fair amount of people when I was there but from the amount of snow in the parking lot, that was not typical
Wyoming rest area – very cool and dry – around 22 degrees Fahrenheit
Interesting info about the general area around the Wagonhound Rest stop
Interesting information on the interstate system – while I was aware this was something that Eisenhower pushed through, I thought it was more influenced by the Germany Autobahns and the need for ad-hoc runways in case of Soviet atom bombs – but apparently, he had been thinking along these lines for a long time…
Crossed into Nebraska without problems and cruised along nicely – then I looked down and noticed it was 60 degrees. This was about when I crossed the time zone from Mountain to Central time. The temperatures have leveled out in central Nebraska to about 65 degrees Fahrenheit. Very different from Wyoming which was stubbornly cold all day. The jetstream must be blasting hard and doing a full push up from the Gulf of Mexico?
Road side on I-80 in western Nebraska – march 7, 2015
In a word – pretty flat. The middle of the state actually gets a bit rolling and has a lot of water along the highway but out here it is the flat prairie
While I was unloading the car today at the hotel, several hundred, if not a thousand, Snowy Canada geese flew overhead. Lots of mixed V formations and a bit of confusion on their part. I wonder if we are on part of their ‘fly way” ?
Pretty much it for today – enjoy the call of the wild below!