Finding hangry adventures in Rocky Mountain National Park
Mike and I decide, once again, to take a road less traveled
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We packed up and left Sibley Lake in the Bighorns of Wyoming early in the morning, with Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado on the GPS as our next destination. The drive out of the Bighorns, Highway 14, also known as the Bighorn Scenic Byway, definitely bears mention. If you only have one day to see the Bighorns, this route, ending (or beginning) in the town of Graybull below the mesa-like mountain area, is a sixty-mile-long feast for the senses.
Bittersweet future nostalgia filled me as we drove through the Bighorns’ timeless meadows, sighting raptors and moose on our way. Would I ever be here again, to see these sights? It’d already surpassed my expectations that we’d returned to enjoy these mountains thirty years after we drove through with our small children in 1992.
Even as I was mulling on that, we spotted a herd of cattle being driven from one pasture to another by two cowboys on Appaloosas. They wore ten gallon hats and were swinging ropes. I couldn’t get my camera app ready in time to capture the scene, but I now could place favorite shows like Yellowstone, Outer Range, and Longmire in context. Any one of them could have been set in the Bighorns with authenticity. That the ranching way of life still exists in real-time fills me with delight.
After leaving those rolling meadows, the Scenic Byway switchbacks down through brightly rocky Shell Canyon on its way to Graybull at the base of the mountains, and the rest stop on the Byway at Shell Falls was perfectly timed for a leg stretch and bathroom break. This opportunity was taken advantage of by all manner travelers, and we parked beside a large pickup truck filled with noisily protesting sheep; they also wanted to get out and stretch their legs.
After using the facilities, we explored a well-designed viewing platform and pathway area that overlooked precipitous Shell Falls, a slash of gushing cold cleaving the rocky cliffs.
Plaques along the well maintained, winding pathway informed us of the Native American tribes who called Shell Canyon home for millennia. They were driven out by settlers who tried ranching in the canyon with little success.
The native way of life trumped the ranching one in the river dominated, arid Shell Canyon as all the settlers eventually gave up, leaving nothing but a few mud bricks among the cottonwoods—but it was too late for the tribes to ever return.
By the time we made it to the bottom of the mountains we were grumpy after a quarrel about where to eat breakfast. This had devolved into the various things we find annoying about each other; one of them being that I’m happy to grab a coffee and pastry anywhere, while Mike insists on a sit-down meal and being waited on. Since he’s the driver, he gets to call it, but his preference created parking and time management challenges that often seemed to occur when we’d both waited too long for a meal and were “hangry.”
After circling several blocks looking for parking (always a concern while towing a trailer) we finally entered a restaurant we wanted to eat at in Graybull. Our tempers were frayed by then, and the belated food didn’t do much to help calm the savage beast(s). Mike and I are a couple that needs plenty of personal space, and by that point in the trip, we weren’t getting much of that at all.
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