Hogback Junction to Casper

Up early, cold, sun on high rocks in the Snake River canyon just north of Alpine. Up the canyon, the river clean and quick, good rafting in season. 

 Turned east at Hogback Junction, named for a forgotten man with a sad but typical story - rescuced from starvation, killed by Indians a few years later - up a smaller but equally nice Hogback River onto the high prairie (7,000'), big mountains all around –

 Gros Ventre to the north then the massive Precambrian fault block of the Wind River rangE, maybe 75 miles of seriously massive and craggy peaks, carved by glaciers but still mostly over 13,000', across the storied Green River, now deep into the land of trappers, trader, Indians, later cattlemen, into Pinedale, like so many wester towns a rash of scattered houses and business before and after town, the town all things cowboy – Cowboy Bar, Stockman's Cafe, Corral Bar.

Up the hill to the Mountain Man Museum, nice newer stone building with good stuff: many old guns, knives, trappers kit, also old letters, drawings,

like the best of historical museums, brought me back to the time and place of trappers and the wild Rendezvous that happened for so brief a time before fashions changed, the beaver were trapped out, and the settlers came west.

East of Pinedale across the rolling sagebrush Green River plain, too dry for anything except rabbits and the tracks of the Oregon Trail,

 hard to imagine what it was like for the maybe half a million folks who came out that way until the railroad came west in the 1860's. Always the Wind River mountains bold against the sky to the northeast, finally around the bottom, a view of famed South Pass – as one diarist said, “now we are on the other side of the world” and it still feels that way. 

 Very windy and windy all across Wyoming. Different people, then, less fearful, less fearful of both the past and the future. Other than a few gas wells off to the south (anticline of the mountains?, mostly as wild and empty as ever. Over the Continental Divide, along a very cool canyon of bright red sandstone,

 past a brief gold mining bonanza, into Lander. More cowboyness and who knows, maybe the signs, truck, hat, boots, mustache, bumper stickers, etc really do make you a cowboy. After all, as the rappin' cowboy tells us, it's all a state of mind . . .

On the way to Casper, soon onto the Sweetwater River, headwaters of the North Platte and path of trappers and traders, later Oregon pioneers, all the way across Nebraska to South Pass. Famous landmarks: Split Rock, end of a big rough granite range parks right on the Sweetwater River,

then Independence Rock, named for the 4th of July and the hope of pioneers to be here by early July to make Oregon before the winter rains.

still dry except for a little green grass, hay, a few cattle in the little bottom land, antelope along the way, including a dozen knee deep in alfalfa near Casper, slowly the river growing larger, more hay land, first of several good sized reservoirs just outside Casper, the Sweetwater now the North Platte and much larger than you might think in early September before the rains. Isaac Walton (chapter No. 6) campground outskirts of Casper, the place worn, dry, a huge gravel parking lot full of RVs and a little dirt patch in the cottonwoods for a few tenters. Set up the tent and walked into a swarm of yellowjackets feeding on the dead bugs on the front of the van. Still windy, but it blew through with light rain in the night and left a calm, sunny dawn.