Medicine Bow

Miguel and his wife wrinkled their noses at me when I said I was headed across Wyoming. “There’s nothing there”, they both agreed, “nothing.” Its not nothing exactly, but its one of the reasons I loved crossing Wyoming. Prairie grass, sagebrush, mountains and sky.

Past Rawlins I traded billboards for reduced speed zones and soft shoulders. I headed south on WY 130. I stopped in Saratoga for a map of Medicine Bow National Forest then followed 130 east through the Snowy Range.

Something in me settled as I wound up to 10,000 feet through the no-holds-barred bloom of late summer wildflowers, past Mirror Lake, which held the full panorama of the Medicine Bow mountains. The name Medicine Bow comes from the Ute bands that gathered here to harvest mountain mahogany, which produced exceptional hunting bows and the annual Powwows they held on these grounds. I longed to get out, to hike up into the thin air. I was giddy with a last encounter with the Rockies, with snowfields in August, with one last chance for a rosy finch.

But I couldn’t stay long. Traveling east, the changing time zones had shortened my days to twenty-three hours and I was scheduled to land in Chicago in two days. I walked a half-mile nature loop past a miner’s cabin and an abandoned shaft, past Engleman spruce and pocket gophers. Then I drove on.

Descending through Centennial, WY, my rear view mirror revealed only rolling brown hills. The Medicine Bow was already hidden like a well-kept secret.