Wanderung 3

Rocky Mountain Ramble

May - July 2003

June 21st - Pine Bluff, Wyoming

Hustling down for the free “Continental Breakfast”, we found only sweet rolls and toast so I’d have to say it was more “Continental” than “Breakfast”. Even that is somewhat unfair to Europeans—in Germany (see Wanderung 2) and England we generally ate very nice breakfasts with eggs, meat, and cheese as well as bread. Still, the carbohydrate did quiet the hunger pangs while we drove about 45 miles east to Pine Bluff, Wyoming for the first official walk of the 2003 AVA Convention. Yahoo!

The Pine Bluff walk started at a community center that had, fortunately, lots of space for parking. We joined the throng inside and whisked thru the process due to the fact that we had pre-registered for this walk by mail a while back. We joined up with Bonnie from our walking club back in Virginia and David and Judy from Maryland for this walk. It was a lot of fun to talk with other folks while walking—we had been walking just by ourselves for the last 4 weeks or so.

The walk first went down the main street of Pine Bluff, which was empty enough to resemble a ghost town except there were several businesses and even two branch banks! On the edge of downtown we passed a town museum that was open and the friendly folks invited us in. We spent a good 15-20 minutes looking at the collection of Western things in the main museum building, which was an old powerhouse that had generated the town’s electricity up until 1960. Two walls of the old powerhouse were almost covered with a collection of varieties of barbed wire used in the west over the decades—I had to ponder why all these different varieties were developed and where each one would be most useful.


 

I also saw some very interesting examples of old clothing that included something called a “farthingale”. It was used to support a lady’s hoop skirt in the 1800s if I’m right--I read about it in a book on changes in garment fashions over the last 500 years. If a person is trying to understand human social behavior and interaction like I had for many years, they may end up reading some mighty strange pieces of research like I did!

We took a quick peek at two other museum buildings, a small Catholic church and a one-room schoolhouse that were both used in the Pine Bluff area. I had a particular interest in the schoolhouse as my mother used to teach in a one-room schoolhouse in the Port Sanilac area of Michigan around 1920. This one had the old wood-burning stove and desks, and even an old school bell that Bonnie tried out while we were there. We didn’t visit the old boardinghouse that was nearby—we had really just started the walk and wanted to press on.

From the museum the route led us out of town and to the extensive area of bluffs that lie across the interstate just to the south of town. As we worked out way up the bluffs we visited an archeological dig that was housed in a large building there. This was a real scientific dig in progress and the site contained debris from up to 15,000 years before present. A woman there explained the careful excavation and documentation process quite well. The public isn’t usually allowed in a scientific excavation, and I enjoyed seeing the methods I had read about in actual use. I was a little surprised that they didn’t use a laser range finder for measuring elevations rather than a method requiring two persons and a measuring stick, but as the woman said it was probably a matter of money.

Suitably impressed, we continued walking up the bluff and starting looping around on an extensive nature trail that wound around the top of the ridges. We had great views of rock formations, pine forests, and the like, but also very nice views of several types of wildflowers. There were beautiful yellow and blue flowers that we couldn’t identify, which was a bit frustrating. One strange plant was about 18 inches tall with thick stems and seeds with feathering on them just like a dandelion. They formed a perfect ball just like a dandelion before the wind blows them away, but these seeds were absolutely huge so that the ball ended up being about 4 inches across! Mentally, I nicknamed that one the “super-dandelion”.


 

Fortunately David was also an amateur photographer and enjoyed taking pictures so I wasn’t the only one holding up our progress by snapping photos. He also had the “photographer’s eye” that you get after a lot of experience trying to make good photographs—not everything that looks good will photograph well—and he saw some shots that I didn’t. It was nice to have, as he put it, “2 sets of eyes” so we could get as many of the really nice shots along the way as possible.

The top of the bluff had an iron sculpture of an Indian on horseback where we posed for pictures, and then we passed by a city golf course. This golf course did not, however, have the usual manicured lawn grass I was used to out east. The rough was really, really rough. It consisted of either something that looked like prairie grass and stood well over a foot tall in a thick mat, or gullies with covered with thistles, twisted trees, and rocks. We laughed about how many strokes it would take to actually punch out of some of those roughs.


 

The greens were also completely different since no irrigation was used up there. One type of green was covered with some form of artificial grass like Astro Turf. The other form of “green” was a plot of small pebbles that were raked into some semblance of levelness by each player. David said the rule was to rake it so that you could putt to the cup, and then also rake it level after you had holed out. I joked about carving a trough that would guide the ball directly to the cup, and he said that such things were not generally permitted by the rules.

From the bluff we curled back to town along a country road with a nice, gradual, incline and saw some of the newer houses on the edge of town. Walking thru the town was rather quick as it was, after all, a small town, and we were soon back at the community center. They were starting to run out of food, though, so we drove back to Cheyenne after having our books stamped to find some fast food, and then continued south to Fort Collins, Colorado, for the night.

After having found a motel room and taken a nice nap, we drove through town to find a Dairy Queen for a banana split. We must have passed all the major chain restaurants, from Appleby’s to McDonalds, before finally finding the DQ. But there it was and the banana split and the hot fudge sundae for Monika were as good as they were in the old days in Lawton, Oklahoma when they had specials on banana splits for 39 cents. Next door was a used bookstore, which helped end our dry spell on books to read on the road.

Copyright 2004 by Robert W. Holt and Elsbeth Monika Holt
Prolog Map Epilog

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