Carpe Skiem: Return east: Day 2

Got up, ate breakfast, shook the rain off the tent (rained overnight) then hit the road.

First stop was (exciting) the Buffalo Bill Dam. Buffalo Bill was quite a character. This was the tallest dam in the world at the time it was built and Buffalo Bill had to do with it. I took pictures of the reservoir but didn't go in to see the dam itself.
Then I drove through a tunnel and rolled into Cody. They love Buffalo Bill there.

Then it was flat and open for a while.

Here is a really good song about driving:

And when I got there my left arm was tan.

Sammy is bored.

Near Greybull, WY, there is a little airfield with a bunch of vintage aircraft around. Eventually it's going to be a museum dedicated to firefighting aircraft.

See http://personal.tctwest.net/~flight/photo.html.

A Canadian Royal Air Force C-119 Flying Boxcar, apparently with a JATO unit up top.

C-45 Twin Beech Smokejumper.

There were loads more, too. These were just the ones I could see clearly without climbing a barbed-wire fence:

View Larger Map

Then it was on up into the Bighorns.

Up Shell Canyon, just east of Shell, WY. Quite exciting. A couple times per mile were signs indicating which geological time period was exemplified by the canyon wall at that elevation and location.

Geology is possible!!!!

Shell Falls.

Granite Pass gave way to a huge flattish area, a prairie on a butte.

Interesting cliff bands laid into the mountains here, descending US-14 off that plateau after many miles. Horseshoe Mountain.

See also http://mw2.google.com/mw-panoramio/photos/medium/42154715.jpg

Bighorns behind.

Is there any other kind of woman? ...just kidding, Rosie...

Ah, a civilization.

I guess something had to fill the vacuum left by the vanishing buffalo, and civilization was what showed up.

To Devil's Tower! Land ho!

Devil's Tower was created when three sisters were out with one brother, and for some reason that brother was transformed into a bear. This bear tried to snatch them up, but then a tree stump erupted out of the ground, raising the sisters up out of the bear's reach, and as it sank its claws into the bark it was raked with scratches. However, the stump erupted a little too fast, because the sisters were actually catapulted into the heavens where they became the Pleiades.

I may be missing some of the subtlety of the original.

All this happened before the cows brought civilization to Wyoming (see above).

Or maybe it was an underground hollow filled with liq-uid hot mag-ma which later cooled, causing stress concentrations at the boundaries of columnar crystals resulting in long cracks, but making the magma-rock more resistant to erosion than the surrounding earth. That sounds good too.

Teepee included for scale.