Clean Air at Fossil Butte

Posted on October 2, 2011 in Vacation Fall 2011

Morning started when we awoke at 6:30 am. We were in the truck and out of Jackson, Wyoming by seven fifteen. Our Mapquest directions took us through a list of turns that took us into Idaho for ten miles, but most of the way kept us in Wyoming.

They call the land around Fossil Butte a “cold desert”. It’s nothing like the desert that I have taken the time to explore on and off over the years in Southern California. This was no Mojave. No Joshua Trees or Barrel Cactus. Just miles and miles of sagebrush. I remember that the big landmark of the trip down was the World’s Largest Elkhorn Arch in a place that I believe was called Alton. The arch stretched over four lanes of road. They really took their Second Amendment solutions to heart here, I thought, but did not stop for this memorial to kitsch and carnage.

I drove fast until the brown signs telling the way to the monument appeared on the roadsides. That is usually a certain sign that you are close unless you happen to be heading to Great Basin National Park in Nevada. The brown road signs appear 200 miles away near Las Vegas and in Utah. I wonder how many people have become disheartened searching for the park only to discover that they were on one of Nevada’s many highways to nowhere?

Compared to those, the route we took through Wyoming was heavily populated. When we made the final left under the Union Pacific tracks and then the right on Chicken Ranch Road, we found ourselves in the land of sagebrush. A cold desert is what they called it, like I told you before. At the entrance sign we stopped and looked at the lonely promontory from which the NPS property took its name.

You might say it is plain, but I felt its power rearing out of the flats. Along the top, fossil hunters had found the bones of fish and other creatures dwelling around a tropical lake a few million years ago. There’s quite a market for specimens taken from the Green River Formation. The State of Wyoming, ever after a dollar, leases out a few quarries to collectors. The quarry at Fossil Butte is now closed.

I, a native Southern Californian, have seldom known a clear morning. This one felt as if you could make out every twig on every sagebrush bush. Yes, there was a nip to the air. But it was the clarity of the atmosphere that excited me the most. I took out my grandfather’s Ihagee Exakta and aimed it at the butte. Later I would use my Nikon and my Instax. It would be a good day for photography.

This is part of a nonsequential memoir of our recent vacation. Expect more.