Day 36 - Worland to Riverton, Wyoming - 88 Miles

Wow! Did we have a great day! Part planning, part serendipity, the whole day turned out to be challenging, entertaining, educational, stimulating, delicious, and intoxicating. As an added bonus, it was nicely blessed with kind, friendly people wherever we went.

Last night we stayed in the town of Worland, Wyoming, where our somewhat "rustic" RV camp turned out to be directly across the street from a fabulous and modern museum. Once we had set up camp, we dashed right over to see what the museum had to offer since it advertised that it was open until 5:30 p.m.

We had only to step through the door, and a very nice older gentleman took us under his wing and patiently explained all the museum's exhibit rooms and told us where to find them. Then he turned us loose to explore on our own. The first exhibit room was devoted to some of our favorite sciences of geology, paleontology, and archaeology. Here, there was everything from bones of early bison to fossils from much older plants and animals.

On one exhibit card we learned that: "Primitive primates prospered during the Paleocene Epoch (66-56 million years ago). Researchers in the Fort Union formation have unearthed some of the oldest primate fossils ever found. Scientists around the world recognize their significance. These finds, and the hope of uncovering more, make the Big Horn Basin [of Wyoming] one of the best places on earth to dig for clues about primate evolution. The Fort Union formation is: "a geologic unit containing sandstones, shales, and coal beds in Wyoming, Montana, and parts of adjacent states. In the Powder River Basin, it contains important economic deposits of coal, uranium, and coal-bed methane."

Speaking of coal, Wyoming has been the nation’s leading coal producer since 1986. The state provides about 40% of America’s coal through the top 10 producing mines located in the Powder River Basin. Most Wyoming coal is sub-bituminous, which makes it an attractive choice for power plants because it has less sulfur and burns at around 8,400 to 8,800 BTUs per pound.

Concetta and I had not yet seen much evidence of Wyoming's coal production until we were headed for the Vore Buffalo jump near Sundance, Wyoming. But at one point we passed a vast railroad yard that held almost no other types of railcars except coal hoppers. Later, as we drove back from Sundance, and were headed for the city of Gillette on Interstate 90, we passed the Dry Fork coal producing surface mine and were intrigued to see that the coal seam was perfectly visible from the freeway and looked to be at least twenty-feet thick.

Interestingly, the Dry Fork Mine that we saw provides fuel for the Dry Fork Power Station via a conveyor system approximately one mile in length. The station uses pulverized coal technology and the latest generation of pollution control technologies, which results in very low emissions. Indeed, Concetta and I looked closely at the power station's several exhaust stacks, and we did not see any pollution entering the atmosphere at all.

Design capacity of Dry Fork Station is 422 megawatts; however, the maximum net generation is estimated to be 385 Megawatts. One megawatt of capacity is generally considered to be sufficient electric power for 800 homes, so the Dry Fork Station’s output would theoretically provide enough electricity for 308,000 homes.

The next part of the museum's pre-history exhibit revolved around Native Americans and their relationship with the American Bison, or buffalo. One exhibit that especially impressed me depicted the Indians' technique for caching meat supplies underground pending a future need for the supplies in times of poor hunting. As the exhibit placard explained: "Hunter-gatherers were keenly aware of how uncertain their food supply might be during a harsh winter. Setting aside some meat from a kill was good insurance against a possible shortage."

"Food left for later use had to be protected from scavengers. Large leg bones, shoulder blades, and pelvic bones from earlier kills were stacked around the reserved meat in the cache." In one cache depicted in the exhibit, the placard explained: "The skull of a five-year-old mammoth was placed on the top. Snow and slush packed around the cache pile would freeze into a solid, impenetrable wall." The cache being portrayed in the museum exhibit was found intact, which meant the group never found the need to return for it. Perhaps we can assume good fortune for them.

At this point Concetta and I moved on to the historical section of the museum where we especially enjoyed the section on shepherds and sheep herding. Two things I learned that I had never known before: first, the narrow shepherd's crook that you almost always see in museums was not meant to catch the sheep by the head and neck, but by one foot. I always wondered why the crook was so narrow, and now I know; the second thing we learned was about sheep branding. Sheep aren't branded with a hot branding iron like cattle, they're branded with a smaller implement that is dipped in paint.

Naturally, once again we were treated to a full-scale version of the traditional sheep wagon, something that we had not seen until this trip, and now we somehow see at nearly every museum at which we stop.

Okay, so that's it for last night since you didn't get much of a discussion of what we did yesterday in last night's blog. Today we set off from Worland at around 8:30 a.m., stopped almost immediately to shop at a local grocery store, than were on the road again by 9:40 a.m., with our larder and refrigerator filled.

Our immediate goal for the morning's activity was to take Route 789 south twenty-one miles to Kirby, Wyoming, and visit the almost incongruously small whiskey distiller known as "Wyoming Whiskey." The location of Wyoming Whiskey is so improbable, and so easily missed, that we sailed right past the turnoff without even slowing down. Fortunately, we caught the error immediately and we stopped on the shoulder, reversed direction when no cars appeared on the horizon, and took a second chance at the Kirby turnoff.

If you've ever been to a near ghost town in your life, you can easily visualize Kirby. I think there are actually people living in Kirby, but few of the houses appear to have occupants. Abandoned vehicles abound. Yards are mostly weeds. Streets are mostly dirt. And we saw no actual movement in town other than the couple of cars headed to the distillery.

Okay, we're nothing if not game to try most adventures, big AND small. But truth be known, I did have my doubts at how this particular adventure was going to turn out. We parked the rig across the street since the parking lot for the tasting room was for small cars only, and perhaps only six of them. The across-the-street house didn't appear to have any residents at present to object, so we locked up and walked over to the twenty by twenty-four-foot building that was Wyoming Whiskey's tasting room.

Well, it didn't take too many steps inside the building before we realized that we had nothing to worry about. The two girls on duty, Reilly and Shelby, were just as pleasant as could be, didn't seem to mind if we wandered around, took photos, or played with all the souvenirs for sale. In fact, the two girls went way out of their way to answer all our questions, offer us samples, and just generally make us feel at home.

When we first walked in there was a group of young adults doing a tasting, some of whom were from Munich, Germany. But those folks were winding up their tour and soon left. This meant that Concetta and I were the only customers waiting on the next tour, a span of about 40 minutes. Okay, they were offering their own blend of very nice -- and strong -- black coffee, and I could spend quite a bit of time savoring a few cups. Also, as Concetta and I noticed that they had their own special blend of bourbon-infused maple syrup and barbecue sauce which the girls were more than willing to let us taste. So off to the kitchen we went to do our own "tasting."

About this time the door flew open and an 11 or 12-year-old youngster with a shock of red hair, the color of Lucille Ball's, strode into the room and walked right up to me. Thrusting out his hand, he said, "My name's Luke, what's yours."

Surprised as I could be, I shook hands with him, then said, "I'm Tom. Howya doin'?"

He told me he was doing fine, and then we got into a ten-minute conversation about everything under the sun, and he kept right up as if he'd been talking to adults all his life. At one point I asked him, "well what are you shooting for in your life? You want to be a whiskey distiller, or perhaps you'd like to be a pilot?"

He looked at me for a long moment, perhaps wondering how I would react, but then he said, "farmer." My dad's a farmer, my grandfather was a farmer, and that's what I want to be, a farmer."

I told him I thought that idea was great since Americans would always need someone to grow their food. I asked what he and his dad were growing.

"Corn and soybeans mostly," Luke said.

Then we went on to discuss a farm I'd seen in Iowa that didn't clear the corn stock slash before planting the soybeans and he told me on his farm their combine chewed up the pieces and spit them out as a sort of chaff that gets plowed under. I suppose I could of learned a lot more about farming, but about that time his parents finally came in along with Luke's younger brother who had even more red hair than Luke did.

Before long it was time for tour to begin and Luke and his parents and brother, along with Concetta and me, were the only customers. Shelby was our guide, and, unfortunately Shelby doesn't exactly have a voice made for tour guiding. Much of what she said was lost on the wind, but the gist of how the Wyoming Whiskey distillery came into being has to do with bad luck in the Cattle business due to an attack of Bovine Brucellosis.

With most of the herd gone, the owners decided to start something totally new and whiskey was what they came up with. Now, less than a decade later, Wyoming Whiskey is producing about 2,000 cases on average a year. They have several warehouses full of oak barrels aging into maturity. And they have a impressive crew of eight workers to make it all happen. You just gotta love Americans and their entrepreneurial spirit.

Shelby took us all over the property, upstairs and downstairs, in the fermenting room, in the barrel branding room, in the aging warehouse, in the bottling room, you name it. There didn't appear to be any part of the operation off limits. With Shelby's soft voice, and the noise level in some parts of the operation, I didn't get too much down in my notebook. But I did learn that their mixture is 70% corn mash, 20% wheat, and 10% barley. A barrel of whiskey holds right at 53 gallons, but they only put 52 gallons in them so they don't get explosions. In the barrel room we learned that an empty barrel weighs 100 pounds, and when full of whiskey it weighs a hefty 500 pounds. I also learned that their barrel plugs are made of poplar, and that they drill into the plugs themselves to insert a pipette to sample the contents of a barrel. Thereafter, Shelby said, the hold in the barrel plug seems to seal itself.

Okay, so let's get over to the tasting room and do some, well, tasting. Seriously, the sample of the single-barrel, most expensive, whiskey I found a little too high octane for me. Concetta and I found that the next one down, the two-barrel choice, was much better for us. We put a couple of bottles aside of that choice. After sipping about four different choices we made a selection of everything we wanted to buy, thanked Reilly and Shelby very much for their kind attention and interesting tour, and we made our way back to the RV. It certainly had been an educational -- and tasty -- morning.

As a parting note here, though I didn't realize that Luke and his family were leaving before we had finished with our purchases, Concetta did get a chance to talk to Luke's parents and compliment both boys on their manners, their rapt attentiveness during the tour, and their intelligent questions about the operation. For boys who were, perhaps, just nine and eleven years old, they were just superbly behaved and intelligent kids. I'm sure both will go far in their lives.

Our next quest, after leaving Kirby, was to find a nice spot to pull over and have lunch. The next town on the map looked to be Thermopolis, so we set that town as our destination and set off. So for we'd only gone 21 miles today, but damn we were having a great time.

Thermopolis turned out to be a superb choice for lunch. On the north side of town, the first thing you lay eyes on as you approach is a giant park with a couple of swimming pools, oceans of green grass and forests of trees, and the most spectacular hot pools, of mineral-laden water that you can expect to see outside of Yellowstone Park.

Naturally, when the opportunity arose, we cranked the wheel over, exited Route 789, and rolled into the park entrance -- almost. The first thing we saw as we approached the park entrance is a railroad overpass that was exactly 12 feet above the tarmac. Now I'm pretty sure that our rig will clear that, but I was not willing to bet money on the fact. I put the rig in reverse and backed away from the entrance. It was at that point that Concetta saw the sign that said, "RVs use the park entrance two blocks south."

Well that was a relief. We did get to visit the beautiful park, but we didn't have to trust the guy who measured the overpass to be correct in his measurement. With that we drove the two blocks, rolled right on into the park, pulled into a parking area almost devoid of cars, and found a nice place under a tree for our lunch.

After lunch we set out to walk the hot pools and they were something to see for sure. Maybe not quite as incredible as Yellowstone Park, but not as crowded either. The park had erected a boardwalk all around the pools, and we walked for about forty-five minutes, getting a good buffeting by the wind, but feeling good about the fresh air, the wonderful scenery, and the peaceful nature of the setting. We even got to climb aboard a suspension bridge that spanned the Big Horn River, and walk to the other side, which afforded us a terrific view of the park.

Once our noon respite was over, we once again headed south and finished up in the town of Riverton that sported a Good Sam sanctioned camp. The camp turned out to be a tad down at the heels, but, incredibly, the laundry room here is without a doubt the largest and most well-appointed that we have yet seen. Will wonders never cease?

Tomorrow, I'd like to try seeing the auto collection that is purported to be housed here in Riverton. After that, I don't have a clue where we'll be tomorrow. Sometimes it's just better to be surprised. And if decide to take to the road and see what tomorrow brings, we wish you exciting destinations and memorable travels from the Davises, the Happy Wanderers.