Wyoming and Colorado

From Yellowstone National Park, we dropped down to Jackson Hole and spent the night there.  I bought a fabulous painting of a big horn sheep that will one day grace a more western ranch style house.  Photo to come.  

Jackson Hole is a beautiful town in a stunning setting but requires a good deal of moolah.  It's an arty town with lots of western doodads, some of them genuine but a lot of chintzy/touristy junk too.  From Jackson Hole we made the one routing mistake of the trip and that was dropping down due south to Rock Springs and then due east to Laramie and Cheyenne.  Turns out the southern part of Wyoming is hideously dreary and nothing like the splendor of the northwest.  We should have cut over east from Yellowstone towards Cody and Buffalo.  But our route allowed me to eliminate Cheyenne and Laramie as potential relocation cities, both of which I had been seriously considering.  I may have said a little prayer of thanks that I took the time to see them for myself in person before applying for jobs there. 

We had intended to spend the night in Cheyenne but after a brief loop through downtown, we nixed that idea and drove on to Fort Collins, Colorado.  Fort Collins is an IT/computer hub which I did not know.  Intel, HP etc. all have large campuses there and if you didn't know better, you would have thought you were in Palo Alto or any generic place in California complete with hideous, standard American strip malls.  (A pox upon Walmart)  From Fort Collins, we dropped straight south through Denver, Colorado Springs and Pueblo and on into New Mexico where we spent the night in Santa Fe.  Did I mention these were seriously long days of driving?!  

The Rocky Mountains are lovely though not the sharp, breathtaking mountains I am used to in the North Cascades or Canada.  It's hard to think of any mountains that large that aren't stunning but I was a bit disappointed in the Rockies.  Like many things you imagine and picture in your mind, the real thing sometimes falls short.  The east side of the Rockies languishes into flat prairie as you get near Oklahoma and while there were short stretches between major cities that were out in the country and perched in the foothills - more of where I imagined I would want to live, you never really escape the sense that you are just outside a major metropolitan area which is precisely what I am trying to avoid.  So I eliminated the eastern side of the Rockies as well.  I figure packing up and moving is expensive, time consuming and not easily reversible with my small zoo so picky is justified in this case.  

So without further ado, here are the photos from Wyoming and Colorado.

We *finally* spied this moose standing in a field.  I know, he doesn't look real.  I love their noses...a cross between a platypus and some prehistoric dinosaur.

 

 Why I won't be moving to southern Wyoming.  Hundreds of miles of this:

We saw herds of these pronghorn sheep roaming in the dusty barren landscape between Rock Springs and Laramie.  Little known fact:  second fastest animal on earth behind the cheetah.

In Rock Springs, they had huge herds of "wild horses".  However, this is a misnomer as the herds are not technically "wild" but rather free roaming offspring of long escaped domesticated horses from the past century.  They are protected, allowed to roam the BLM lands and well cared for by the state of Wyoming.

Obviously fertility is not an issue!  There were foals everywhere.

Pike's Peak.  Though as tall as Mt. Rainier, it does not look as impressive because of the lack of glaciation and the fact that it is situated in a range instead of towering above all around it as Rainier does.  Oh yeah, and you can drive to the top.  Way to ruin nature.

Alas, we did not take many photos of southern Wyoming or Colorado as animals were few and far between and the landscape didn't lend itself to great photography, in spite of the Rockies.  Without snow, they looked more like rolling hills.  I have to confess I was also put off by the hard core, right wing religious sentiment, especially in Colorado Springs, home of Focus on the Family.  I just don't see myself being happy in a place that assails me with directives on what god wants for me and why I am already destined to burn in hell.  Just saying...!  So it was on to New Mexico.

Lastly, Hook would like to say he did not appreciate being in a cage for a week and he hasn't been the same since!