Carl Henning

Next stop in Wyoming was Thermopolis. It’s famous for its hot springs at Hot Springs State Park.
The state operates the bath house for free, but we skipped that. Here’s what we did see.

In Casper, Wyoming we stopped at the National Historic Trails Interpretive Center.  This was an amazing display of life on all of the trails west. We even got to “ride a wagon” fording the North Platte River. There were many…

We are traveling in Wyoming with our first stop at the Cheyenne Depot Museum. In addition to the story of the train infrastructure in Cheyenne, it houses a huge model railroad layout in HOn3 scale.. HOn3 is HO scale narrow gauge railroad. The huge layout took 30 years to build.

Along Route 50 in Colorado is Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. The canyon’s name stuck because at the bottom of the deep and narrow canyon daylight seldom reaches.

Route 50 from Folsom to Colorado Springs is a long, lonely road, but it is coincident with Interstate 70 in Utah. I70 has some scenic overlooks. And boy are they scenic:

The Great Basin encompasses all of Nevada and part of Utah. But the Great Basin National Park is smaller. We were two of the few visitors at the park on this particular post-Labor Day weekday.

Thar’s gold, not in them there hills, but in the sawmill water race at Sutter’s Mill. Discovered in January 1848, the word eventually spread East to start a rush of gold seekers, the 49ers.

Content warning: this is an engineering-related post. We were in Folsom, California visiting friends – no, not at the prison. Time did not permit visiting the Prison Museum with its Johnny Cash memorabilia. But, even better, was the Folsom Powerhouse State Historic Park.

I said in yesterday’s post (Yosemite) that our accommodations in the park were primitive. I should have used a marketing term like “old-fashioned” or “quaint.” I made the Wawona Hotel sound horrible and it was not really, just quaint. The lack of elevators was no treat for older guests, but we never turn on a TV, use the phone, or even the Wi-Fi. So we didn’t miss those. A little air conditioning would have been nice though.

We stayed in Yosemite National Park, although the accommodations were primitive (no elevator, no TV, no phone, and no Wi-Fi – except in the lobby). I took hundreds of photos, then in the last gift shop spotted the book How to Take Photographs in Yosemite.