Remembering the vast and lonesome high desert of southwestern Wyoming in Daydreaming on the Porch

Sometimes I really understand why the ocean is such a magnet to me. It is the lure of the horizon, coming to the end of the road, stopping, getting out of the car and making your way to the edge of the continent and looking out over 180 degrees of sea and sky. Expansive, free, limitless. I never feel surrounded, crowded in, closed off when I’m looking out over the ocean.

Being in the desert provides similar sensations of spaciousness and infinite vistas. In addition to the silence of the open spaces, there is the dry, clean air, the dried-out dirt crunching under your feet as you walk a trail, the essentialness of every plant and object existing in these harsh conditions, defying the odds for being there at all.

I’ll never forget the first time I encountered truly arid lands. It was in the Spring of 1984. I had embarked a week earlier on the first of my five solo road trips around the country. I had left the far northwestern corner of Nebraska, was traveling the high plains of northeastern Wyoming, heading toward the Rocky Mountains. I was in absolute awe of the vest, empty desert ahead of me. From atop one high plateau, I could see the desert open up to the horizon, 30-40 miles distant, along a straight stretch of highway that seemed to have no end. It made me apprehensive at first, this open landscape, since I was so accustomed to being surrounded by woods, developments, and settled, urban areas. But here there was no sign of civilization, no other cars, just the wind and the desert.

Now, sitting here so many years later, I can only attempt to imagine what it was felt like, looking to past journal entries to recapture the feelings and mood of being out West.

On my return trip to New Orleans in August of that year, I crossed a portion of Wyoming again, this time from the southwest and then driving south into Utah. On that portion of my trip I came across the Hams Fork river valley, a narrow and sinuous ribbon of life in the enormous vastness that is Wyoming. A desert stream or river, particularly a perennial one, is a wonder to behold. Often large cottonwoods line the banks, their leaves fluttering in any slight breeze. The waters of these streams enable life to flourish in otherwise inhospitable landscapes. Migratory birds find food and shelter. Miles upstream the rivers have their sources in mountain snowmelt and are often nudged along with inflow from springs.

The Hams Fork originates high up on Fontenelle Mountain in the Bridger-Teton National Forest. By the time it reaches the high plateau and desert, it’s a stream of some significance, at least in this arid world, and it has a rich history with pioneers in the 19th century trekking west to California.

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Crossing the Ham’s Fork River - Stories Retold Blog

https://blog.storiesretold.com/crossing-the-hams-fork-river/

I took a picture of the river from an overlook on the road to the town of Kemmerer. It’s so hard to believe that was 40 years ago.

https://flic.kr/p/2qHQFZ5

By the time I got to that spot overlooking the Narrow Hams Fork valley, I was deep into some kind of travel-induced bliss. I knew that when I got back home to New Orleans, no job awaited me (although I was soon to get one, however, and it was awful beyond words), and I was not in the best position to feel real comfortable about my life. But the complete and utter wonder and joy of getting up each morning to a totally new landscape with unknown adventures and never-before-seen places up the road, completely upended any worry and anxiety I might have felt otherwise.

I loved being in Wyoming and reveling in the freedom to experience the immensity of its great deserts and high plain spaces, open to the sky and clouds, and full of 180 degree vistas. In the town of Rock Springs, I wrote in my journal on Aug. 8, 1984 these words:

…This is terrain where you can get out of your car atop a rise in the land and gaze out over 10-15 miles of open desert and small canyons. Dry creekbeds are reminders that water has flowed over this parched land. There are springs dotted here and there but which probably take some persistent backroads searching to locate. This is country where the silence is born of so immense an area that the sound of an occasional car is quickly swallowed up in the stillness.

On the windless morning when I passed through, the silence was so great that it almost seemed unnatural and hard on ears so accustomed to a multitude of obnoxious noises in the city. What must it be like to live out there and know the early morning stillness firsthand?

Wyoming is so sparsely populated that it seems to defy, and then gobble up in its lonely reaches, the dwellings, accoutrements, and markings of its inhabitants. What stubborn and persistent people take up residence in these tractless desert areas. I think you have to really want to be far apart from the mass of humanity, far from city and town alike…