Cache de Poudre

Over the Rockies and Through the Canyon of the Cache de Poudre

On April 20 we meandered east across the country on 2 lane highways through small town America…no fast track destination travel. Our first stop was Pinedale, WY a small town growing large thanks to Halliburton and a oil boom. This is the place to find real cowboy western gear.

Our route towards Flaming Gorge took us across the high plains with sagebrush as far as the eye could see. This is home to the world’s largest herd of pronghorn sheep. This is also the land that Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch and a host of other turn of the century robbers traveled. It was easy to imagine the posse’s and the Pinkerton Men riding hard across this land in hot but unsuccessful pursuit.

We found accommodations 2 miles down a dirt road in a converted bunk house at Spring Creek Ranch. The ranch is a center for fly-fishermen fishing one of the worlds top fishing rivers, the Green. We went to sleep to the sound of coyotes yipping.

The next day, the road took us up to alpine meadows flooded with snow melt and down 9 miles through 10 horse-shoe curves to Vernal, Utah. We lunched in the town’s oldest restaurant and headed to Dinosaur National Monument. The main building was closed for renovation so we drove through the park, past ancient petroglyphs to the cabin of Josie Bassett Morris.

Josie and her sister Queen Ann grew up in Brown’s Park, an isolated good cattle country, often visited by the Wild Bunch. Some say Ann was the sweetheart of the Sundance Kid. Both sisters were highly educated and both knew their stuff handling cattle and shot-guns. After a stint in the city of Craig, Colorado to raise her two sons, Josie came back to the isolation of this box canyon 10 miles from the nearest town, built a log cabin, raised her own food and horses, and butchered her own cattle until her death at 84 in the 1960’s.

US RT 40 took us through Steamboat Springs and over the Rockies at Rabbit Ear Pass. When it went south we went west on state route 14 through the narrow canyon of the Cache de Poudre River with its ever changing rock formations. We eventually emerged into a broad valley with the remains of old 1890’s canals, one of the nation’s first water management systems. We stayed in the University town of Fort Collins, a town USA describes as 1 of 200 towns that has managed the economic downturn successfully.(Annapolis should be one of them since we share so many things in common)
Parking is free in the historic district plaza that has captured a variety of interesting shops surrounded by gardens and public art and is home to P.J., a gem of a guy who vends NYC Nathan hotdogs. After a hotdog and sauerkraut lunch we headed east on US RT 6 past the bounce back ghost town of New Raymer where we talked with the post office mistress, a third generation citizen, about the history of the area and the difficulty of dry farming and than headed toward Nebraska.