This morning I braved the tourists and sales shoppers to buy some post-Christmas birthday presents in the city centre. The roads were fairly quiet but the pavements were full of people. I had to step into the road to avoid the horde who were taking pictures of Greyfriars Bobby. My purchases completed, I headed back to the flat via the West End. I always have a look at the mural on St John’s Church which is usually very challenging. As I could not take a photograph due to the building work going on around it, here is the Christmas photograph for 2016 taken from their Facebook page:
Back at the Meadows it was sunny enough for some people to sit out.
At the flat the sun on the bare cherry tree branches made a very abstract pattern and might turn into an abstract painting one day.
A wood pigeon was waddling around feeding underneath. Almost every house I have lived in has had wood pigeons in the garden or next door. I think the only exception was a student flat in Aberdeen where there were no trees nearby. One year I was doing the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch which takes place at the end of January each year, in Edinburgh. I did not expect to see as many different birds as I do in my garden in Cheshire but it was rather cold and frosty and I counted 18 wood pigeons on one shrub eating the red berries.
Now that the trees are bare, I could see the sun disappearing behind the west end of the Pentland Hills through the trees next door. Some energetic people were watching it from the top of Blackford Hill which must have given them a great view but I walked 4.7 miles this morning so I was content to look out of my window.
If you are after the precise timings of sunrise/sunset/moonrise etc there is a very useful piece of software for use on a computer or as a mobile app which can give the timings on any given date, anywhere on earth:
http://photoephemeris.com/
I am continuing to read David Bain’s book and have just read the chapters on Wyoming. I recall driving through the places he describes, seeing the Medicine Bow and Wasatch Mountains and learning about the Sand Creek Massacre of the Cheyenne Indians by US Cavalry in 1864. I also remember passing through Medicine Bow and seeing the Virginian Hotel, the most impressive building in the town. It is often said to be the place that Owen Wister wrote the novel ‘The Virginian’.It became one of the cowboy shows on TV during my childhood. However, Bain knows that the hotel was built in 1911, 11 years after the novel had been published. There were also significant dinosaur fossil finds in the area, many of which are now displayed in museums in New York and Washington. Bain and his family stayed in the Virginian Hotel and found themselves in a room over the bar and could hear the music and noise all night plus the early departure of railroad construction crews who were also staying there. We had a similar experience when we walked the West Highland Way in 2009. We stayed at the Drovers Inn at Inverarnan, a historic hostelry. Our room was above the bar and unfortunately, Friday night was music night. Added to that it was someone’s 40th birthday. Over at breakfast next morning which is served in the newer building over the road, I said maybe we would have been quieter in a room in that building. Another couple told us that it had been quiet until 1am when the birthday party contingent had noisily returned to their rooms shouting that they had never been so drunk in their lives. I shall be more careful when selecting rooms in the future.
Tag: Wyoming
Wyoming and into Utah
The first thing to remember this morning was to send birthday wishes to my aunt who is 85 today. We then left Laramie on the relatively short portion of the Lincoln Highway which is on US30. It heads into the prairie where cattle and elk were grazing. We had the Laramie Mountains to the right and the railway and Medicine Bow Mountains to the left. Signs informed us that we were on the Sand Creek Massacre Trail. I had to look this up and discovered that it was a massacre in the American Indian Wars on November 29, 1864, when 70 Colorado militia attacked and destroyed a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho, killing and mutilating around 70–163 Native Americans, about two-thirds of whom were women and children.
One bizarre sight was seagulls so far inland. This does happen in the UK but we are never too far away from the coast, I did not expect to see some in Wyoming. I also spotted a heron perched on a rock beside a pool and a prairie falcon sitting on a fence post. Leaving Elk Mountain behind, the road all too soon joins the interstate and the Lincoln Highway route is I80 for the rest of the state aside from a few short stretches in towns along the route. It also reduces photographic opportunities. West of Rawlins we crossed the Continental Divide at 7000ft and the road runs just south of the Great Divide Basin. The names of towns reflect the passing landscape: Red Desert, Table Rock and Point of Rocks. We crossed the Continental Divide for the last time (6390ft) and descended past large quarries and rocky outcrops down to Green River where we had a good coffee. The river takes second place to the rocks surrounding the town. The only place in Wyoming I have seen a Lincoln Highway marker was at the museum but of course it was closed on Sunday.
Back on the interstate the Wasatch Mountains appeared on the horizon. Near Granger, R30 leaves the Lincoln Highway having been with it since Philadelphia. It heads towards Grand Teton and Yellowstone which I would love to visit but we don’t have time for that on this trip. A small oasis just off I80 at Evanston is Bear River State Park. We had our picnic lunch here and had a short wander by the river but could not explore it fully as we had many more miles to do. I did learn that Wyoming has 31 varieties of willow which chimed with my experience in Australia when I tried to differentiate between the different gum trees before discovering that there are hundreds of eucalyptus varieties and giving up. The strong wind meant flower and plant photography was not possible.
The Utah state line is understated with none of the ‘Welcome to……’ notices seen elsewhere. As we are in the mountains all the first exits have ‘no services’ but gradually we head further into the state. Red rock appears and Weber Canyon is shared with the railway and Sunday kayakers on the river. Signs reminded us that we are again sharing our route with the Oregon & California Trails and the Pony Express. We eventually found our hotel. Most of the surrounding restaurants were closed but an Irish Pub was open and provided dinner. The wind has brought cloud and rain to the mountains but we hope it clears for tomorrows exploration of the Salt Lake.
Over the mountains to Wyoming
As we left Boulder yesterday morning, several cyclists and climbers were also getting away. I had hoped to see Boulder Canyon Falls but they were closed due to a high risk of rockfall. Instead we had a break at Barker Lake in Nederland where I watched fish jumping and swallows diving for insects as it was too windy for flower photography. The plentiful insects also fed on me. Ducks were feeding with their ducklings and another bird on the water was too far away to identify even with binoculars. We had coffee in the hippyesque Happy Trails Café and relaxed on the comfortable seating there. It has the first restroom I have been in which has a skeleton lounging in a bath and a moose toilet roll holder.
We continued on the Peak to Peak Highway and just north of Raymond had the first emergency braking for a moose running across the road. Something akin to the Elk Test that Scandinavian car manufacturers put their vehicles through. Twelve years ago in Victoria, Australia I had the iconic Australian experience of a kangaroo jumping over the fence and across the freeway in front of me.
As we approached Estes Park the traffic got heavier and the Chapel on the Rock near Camp St Malo was also busy with visitors. The wind had brought clouds in and very soon we had a thunderstorm. We spent the night in Estes Park to be ready for an early start in the Rocky Mountains National Park this morning. I had read all sorts of horror stories in guide books and the Park’s website about heavy traffic in the high season but we were treated to a fairly quiet run on the Trail Ridge Road – the USA’s highest continuous paved road. Its highest point is around 3,500m. I had not been at such alpine altitudes and seen glaciers since my trip to the Himalaya in 2010.
We saw some wildlife; several elk, a raven and had a close encounter with a Yellow-Bellied Marmot. The road goes over the Milner Pass and crosses the Continental Divide. This zig-zags around in these parts and we crossed it later and will do again in Wyoming. We walked a small section of the Colorado Trail in the shade of the forest as it was starting to get hot and then descended into Grand Lake for coffee. The grass was growing around the snowmobiles here and boating was the big activity. Heading south to just outside Granby, we were back with the railway briefly and for once saw a passenger train. R125 passes into ranching country and heads north alongside the Willow Creek and through the Arapahoe National Forest where like elsewhere in Colorado, they have lost a lot of trees to a beetle infestation.
We crossed the Continental Divide again over the Willow Creek Pass and descending, could see the smoke of fires behind the north end of the Gore Range off to our left. Heading towards Laramie, the road winds through small communities in the Medicine Bow Mountains where the town hall is a hut and on into the town where we will rejoin the Lincoln Highway tomorrow.