I left Greybull this morning and headed east on US16/US20. About 35 miles south of Greybull, US20 heads south and US16 heads east through Buffalo, Wyoming. I had never been on US16 before and never been in this part of Wyoming, but it was simply beautiful.
Right outside of Worland I came upon this rather large grass fire. I had seen the smoke for miles and it turned out to be right beside the road in a farmer's wheat field:
About 30 miles east of Worland I came upon the little town of Ten Sleep, Wyoming, population 304. (They just don't name places in the East like they do "out West", do they?) Ten Sleep is in the Big Horn Basin, just west of the Big Horn Mountains. Ten Sleep Canyon runs from Ten Sleep (the city) east up to Powder River Pass (9,666 feet) over the Big Horn Mountains. (Confused yet???) Anyway, the area was beautiful and the rise from Ten Sleep (4,426 feet above sea level) to the top of the pass at 9,666 feet was really impressive.
Here are a couple pictures of Ten Sleep Canyon itself:
This was Powder River Pass at 9,666 feet:
And this was Loaf Mountain, about 10 miles past the crest of the hill:
I continued on down the mountain and into Buffalo, Wyoming, where I picked up I-90 for the ride of about 140 miles to Devil's Tower. Pat and I had been here 30 or so years ago when we lived in Denver, but it's still an amazing sight. Here is the Tower from about 5 miles away:
Inside the Park, you could get up right beside the Tower and walk completely around its base. If you want, you can also climb the thing. This is a close-up view of the Tower itself:
Take a real close look at the center of the Tower in this picture and see if you see anything:
If you look real close in the center of the picture (enlarge it by double-clicking and then clicking again), you should see four climbers headed up. They are about 2/3 of the way up the Tower and it's already almost 3:00 pm local time. It looked to me like the most difficult part of the climb was still to come, so I don't know if they made it up before dark or not.
On the way into the Monument, there is a rather large Prairie Dog colony and I snapped a picture of this fellow on the way out:
I left Devil's Tower around 3:15 local time and headed on to Rapid City, SD. Tomorrow, I'm planning on seeing Mount Rushmore and the Crazyhorse Monument before heading east on Saturday.
Miles today: 353. Total: 5,468.
