Sat, Aug 1: Saratoga, WY

It is a beautiful morning, cool with a blue bird sky. Carolyn cooks cheese grits outside on the gas burner while Dick cooks up some more sausage. We eat watching the river go by carrying today’s crop of float fishermen.Several people at the campground are fishing from the shore. We watch a huge group of ducks come to check out our camp site. There must have been 40 of them.

Carolyn makes a picnic lunch and we head out for some sight seeing. The plan for today is to drive the Snowy Range Scenic Byway and make a loop through Laramie to Hanna and back home. The Scenic Byway goes by Medicine Bow Peak at 12,012 feet over Snowy Range Pass (10847 feet). This is a beautiful, alpine highwaywith many lakesand snow melt streams. There is still plenty of snow on the peaks and along the road in some places. The flowers are a riot of color. We stop at Lake Marie and Mirror Lakefor pictures and have our picnic in a parking lot where we can see 360 degrees of snow capped mountains and alpine valleys.

We pass through Laramie and drive around checking out Wyoming Territorial Prison,home to Butch Cassidy from July 1894 to January 1896, and some of the town’s frontier architecture.From there we drive a country road, Hwy 30, that has gates that close the road if the snow is too bad, across valleys with very little settlement. It is barren but pretty country side.

Back at the rig by 4:00PM, after some 225 miles, we have a leisurely cocktail hour(s) and cook some chicken on the grill. We end the evening with another gold-red sunset.