Day 11 -- Steamboat Springs, Colorado to Rock Springs, Wyoming -- 215 Miles

Today we enjoyed an achingly beautiful drive from Steamboat Springs, Colorado to Rock Springs, Wyoming. The sky was bright and blue with not a cloud to be seen, and the road we chose, Route 13 off of Colorado Route 40, was so lightly traveled that we probably saw no more than twenty or thirty cars over the course of the whole day.

Of course on both ends of our drive we had to endure segments of the dreaded Interstate, Route 40 in Colorado, and Route 80 in Wyoming. Flocks of 18-wheelers in front, in back, and on the sides of us jockied for position in their rush to get somewhere as fast as possible. Even people towing travel trailers seemed to be determined to go as fast or faster than the law allowed. But we just kept to our usual 60 or 65mph and let them rush on by us.

Route 13 out of Colorado eventually turns into Route 789 in Wyoming for reasons I'm not sure anyone would know or care about. But the tiny track of well-worn asphalt, on which we happily traveled, meanders through mile after mile of high desert sage, sandstone outcroppings, and occassional volcanic lava flows.

On the subject of fawna, scattered everywhere on the land we saw small herds of pronghorn antelope. I've heard that the word "antelope," when used to describe these fleet-of-foot, brown and white, horned creatures, is incorrect. But I learned to call them antelope long ago and it's a hard habit to break.

I wanted very much to get a photograph of a pronghorn herd, but as usual when the pull off space was available there were no pronghorn present, and when the pronghorn were present there was no available pull-off. I even thought we might get lucky when we found a nice level acre off the highway for our lunch, but not a pronghorn did we see.

I did have some fun collecting more rocks while Concetta crafted the sandwiches. The entire road on which the RV sat had sometime in the past been “paved” with the most incredible mixture of crushed stone. The most plentiful of the paving were pieces of red sandstone so eminently typical of the red sandstone cliffs and mesas of Colorado. In somewhat lesser amounts were the inky-black chunks of volcanic basalt that is hard to mistake for anything else. Surprisingly, scattered here and there I even found small chunks of creamy white Quartz, their crystals beaming back at me in the radiant sunlight.

But the most startling and interesting rocks I found were a mixture of two rock types. Every once in a while, I’d pick up a chunk of red Colorado sandstone that exhibited a definite swath of volcanic basalt adhering to one side.

This told me that I was holding in my hand an event that happened perhaps millions of years ago, a firey collision in one tiny stone the size of a golf ball. Probably a nearby volcano had erupted and lava had spewed out, covering and engulfing the existing alluvial sediment that may have built up over eons as a nearby mountain range weathered and eroded down to a flat plain. The violent encounter of those two dissimilar rocks had formed a marriage that had never been broken to this very day.

After lunch it was back on Route 13/789 again -- for just a few minutes. Almost before we'd gotten up to speed, we saw a sign for a historic marker and we backed off the gas and pulled right in to see what we could see. Turned out we were standing there on a bit of Wyoming soil that had once been a portion of the Overland Stage Line.

Now the Overland Stage Line has never been one of my areas of study, so I went to the web to educate myself. Here's what I found: "The Overland Trail (also known as the Overland Stage Line) was a stagecoach and wagon trail in the American West during the 19th century. While portions of the route had been used by explorers and trappers since the 1820s, the Overland Trail was most heavily used in the 1860s as a route alternative to the Oregon, California, and Mormon trails through central Wyoming."

"The Overland Trail was famously used by the Overland Stage Company owned by Ben Holladay to run mail and passengers to Salt Lake City, Utah, via stagecoaches in the early 1860s. Starting from Atchison, Kansas, the trail descended into Colorado before looping back up to southern Wyoming and rejoining the Oregon Trail at Fort Bridger. The stage line operated until 1869 when the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad eliminated the need for mail service via this stagecoach."

"Benjamin Holladay (October 14, 1819 – July 8, 1887) created a stagecoach empire and he is known in history as the "Stagecoach King." Through Holladay's friendship with Utah's Mormon leader, Brigham Young, Holladay established a profitable freighting contract to Salt Lake City. His transportation empire later included steamships and railroads in Oregon."

Looking both ways where the stage road was supposed to have crossed the highway, we could scarcely see anything resembling a road, but to the west I thought you could just make out a slight swale that would probably prove to be the old stage line's path across the playa. As a seeker of old roads since I was very young, I know that often you have to depend on the most obscure clues to find your quarry. Were I fourteen again, however briefly, I would have jumped the fence and scrambled right down there to try and find more evidence of the road's existence. Alas, an additional six decades has made me a bit more conservative when it comes "bush-wacking."

This afternoon we managed to grab a spot in the KOA here in Rock Springs, a camp in which we have stayed a couple of times in the past. Though devoid of much foilage at the mostly level campsites, the folks here are efficient, the prices are lower than we've been experiencing, and their tiny store of "must-have" items is pretty complete.

Tomorrow we intend to jump on Wyoming Route 191 and head north for the village of Pinedale about two hours away or so. In Pinedale I hope to do something that I've been wanting to do for several years: visit the "Museum of the Mountain Men." On two different sojourns in the RV in previous years we have gotten within a half-day's drive of Pinedale, only to miss it for scheduling reasons of some sort. So this time, I'm not leaving Wyoming without seeing this museum.

The photo at left I grabbed off the web and depicts a real life mountain man in history, Hugh Glass, in a fight for his life with the infamous grizzly that nearly ended his career. You may have seen Hugh's story depicted in DeCaprio's movie, "The Revenant," or in Richard Harris' earlier movie, "Man in the Wilderness." Personally, I like the Harris movie better as it's more believable and less violent.

As an interesting sidelight to the story, it was young Jim Bridger, a relative newbie in the mountains then, who was one of the two men who left Hugh Glass to die. They even took Hugh's gun and other gear in the process. Jim would, of course go on to become a famous trapper, guide, and frontier entrepreneur later in his life. Probably a good thing that Hugh Glass didn't track him down and kill him once he had crawled back to civilization. We would have missed out on some great history.