Dubois

We learned quickly that Lander was not a place that we wanted to spend a significant amount of time. Its isolation might explain the odd interactions that we kept having with the locals. Or perhaps it was the fact that they would be celebrating the fourth of July by having armed local militia walking the streets and setting off commercial grade fireworks from dusk to midnight...to each their own?

Our only stop within the city limits was Sink Canyon State Park which had a weird natural feature where a river enters an underground cave through limestone cracks and emerges a quarter of a mile away in "the rise." However it apparently takes more than two hours for the water to make the journey, there is more water and it is warmer than when it sank...more oddities from this odd place. We walked from the cave to the rise, which was filled with gigantic trout, but with clouds overhead we decided not to do any extra hiking for risk of lightning.

A collective sigh of relief was breathed when we saw Lander in our rear view mirror. We drove through the Wind River and Arapaho Indian Reservation with the Wind River Mountains to our left until we arrived in the town of Dubois. We stopped in the visitor center to find some local hikes and the staff told us to stop at the Bighorn Sheep Museum next-door for free bratwurst. We could tell immediately this was our kind of town!

We feasted on our lunch and toured the museum which showcased the efforts made in the local area to maintain the bighorn sheep herds in the wind river mountains. Based on the number of taxidermy sheep showcased there is either a large population to draw from or they have mostly been turned into furs...

Then we found ourselves heading up a dirt road toward the conservation camp where we hiked part of a mountain to see some amazing petroglyphs. There are herd paths that lead around them and a sign reminding hikers that the area is always on camera. These carvings by the ancestors of the Shoshone Tribe were much different than the ones that we had seen in Colorado and Arizona - they were much rounder and more alien looking.

The rest of the afternoon was spent by the Wind River picking tunes and walking through the town. With menacing clouds moving through the area, we just didn't feel comfortable hiking into higher elevation with little tree cover. That being said, Dubois is certainly a place to explore but we feel the need to move on for now with the Fourth of July weekend coming up.