We started out this morning in Gillette, Wyoming at the Rock Pile Museum which was all about mining coal and pioneer days.
We watched the movie on how they mine the surface coal right here in Gillette. It is considered the energy capital of the United States. They have large stretches of land with large amounts of coal in Gillette, Wyoming. The Gillettes are famous and were very proud of their coal mining heritage! The processing of the coal has four basic steps, and it is all challenging work.
The first step is removal of the top soil with a tractor. The second step is that the workers set up the explosives (mainly dynamite & TNT) in which they use to blow up the ground to unveil the coal. Basically they dig holes, place in the explosives 70 feet down into the earth, attach them together with instant heat sensitive string, and they move far away to set off the blast. When the blast goes off the effect can be felt as a small earthquake all around the world. Pretty incredible!! The third step in the process is scooping up the coal and dumping it into the enormous Liebherr Haul trucks that weigh 443,000 pounds when empty, and 1,163,000 pounds when full. The tires on the truck are 15 feet high, the total height is 45’9”, and the trucks cost 3 million dollars apiece. Those are some gigantic trucks!! Next, the coal is taken the a storage area and then placed in crushers that crush the coal into two-inch pieces. From there it’s moved on conveyor belts where eventually it is loaded onto trains. Coal is the only cargo that these trains carry from Wyoming to central Missouri.
After coal is recovered, the land is reclaimed. The reclamation process includes backfilling the void with the top soil that was originally removed. Then they prepare the seeds bed and sow approved seed mixtures. And then they start all over again on another piece of land.
When we left Gillette we had to take Douglas Highway all the way south to Douglas, Wyoming . . . I think that is so funny!! As we were driving along, all of a sudden we saw buffalo right on the edge of the freeway roaming the hills. This was a huge buffalo ranch. Oh . . . we were so excited because we missed them at Custer State Park in South Dakota. Of course we had to pull over! There were many babies with their mothers, and they were actually cute! They all looked at us, starred at us for a minute, and then turned and walked the other way. It was hiliarious!!
This is definitely the great outdoors because we also saw antelope alongside the road.
We continued driving through nowhere land and on to Douglas town, Wyoming. I love the name of the town but it was definitely Radiator Springs. The town was awfully run down and nothing left of it. All of these towns that we have passed between Kansas and Wyoming that have nothing to the town makes me sad. Definitely a different way of life in America and makes me wonder how they survive. We stopped in a few stores to try to find t-shirts, and finally we were lucky to find some at the drug store. The girls got the ones with the Jackalope on it because Douglas is where the myth of the Jackelope came from. The Jackalopes are legendary in the U.S. and attributed by the New York Times to a 1932 hunting outing involving Douglas Herrick of Douglas, Wyoming, and the town was named the "Home of the Jackalope" by the state of Wyoming in 1985. Herrick and his brother had studied taxidermy by mail order as teenagers and when the brothers returned from a hunting trip, Herrick tossed a jackrabbit carcass into the taxidermy store, where it came to rest beside a pair of deer antlers. The accidental combination of animal forms sparked Douglas Herrick's idea for a Jackalope. The first jackalope the brothers put together was sold for $10 to the La Bonte Hotel in town. The visitors in town were in awe of this Jackalope and Douglas Chamber of Commerce issued thousands of Jackalope Hunting Licenses to tourists. The tags were good for hunting only during official Jackalope season, which was for only one day: June 31 (a nonexistent date because June has 30 days), from midnight to 2 AM. Ha . . . what a joke . . . a good way to suck tourists in!! It is still famous to this day and Douglas, Wyoming has a Jackalope day and parade the last weekend in June!
Just east of Douglas, WY is Fort Laramie which is the most well know and important trading post of the 1800’s during travels west. It was much bigger than I expected and had many buildings still intact and some with just remains. It was built in 1834 near the confluence of the Laramie and North Platte Rivers. The official name was Fort William and was a small post 100 by 80 feet in size. It was the biggest buffalo trading post until Fort Platte was built a mile away in 1841. This rivalry spurred Fort William’s to replace their structure with a larger, adobe-walled structure named Fort John. Indian tribes, especially the Lakota, traded tanned buffalo robes for manufactured goods. Every spring caravans arrived at the fort with trade goods, and in the fall, buffalo hides and other furs were shipped east. In 1841 the first of many emigrants arrived at Fort John and over the next 20 years thousands of emigrants bound for Oregon, California, and Salt Lake Valley would eventually stop at the fort. In 1849 the U.S Army bought Fort John and the post was officially renamed it Fort Laramie.
The army constructed new buildings for stables, officers, a soldiers quarter, a bakery, guardhouse, and powder magazine to house and support the garrison and it soon became the main military outpost on the Northern Plains. The fort was also the primary meeting place for transportation and communications through the central Rocky Mountain region for the emigrant trails, the stage coach, the Pony Express, and the transcontinental telegraph. It was also an important meeting place for several treaty negotiations with Northern Plains Indians, which included the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe. The Indian, Crazy Horse, traded continually at Fort Laramie and because he was so revered and honored by all the various Indian tribes, Fort Laramie was never attacked by Indians. The majority of the buildings at Fort Laramie still remain today and have been restored. If the building was not 80% intact it was unable to be restored and has become just a shell around Fort Laramie. I am so glad that we ventured off the freeway a little to see this amazing place in the 1840’s-1860’s!! We even got to see a bull snake slithering along the walking path. . . . yuck, I hate snakes. Thankfully it wasn’t a rattle snake which is the biggest fear of mine. But this snake was huge and it didn’t seem to be bothered by the presence of the kids excitedly taking pictures. I had to walk away – I really can’t stand snakes, but it was fun for them to see.
We drove another hour and a half to our sweet friend’s house in Windsor, Colorado, which is right outside of Fort Collins. Shirley is my mom’s best friend from high school and I haven’t seen her in probably 15 years. They were very gracious and excited to have us come stay overnight with them. We pulled up in the RV and Shirley, Al, their daughter Amy, who I haven’t seen since we were in college, and her husband and 3 girls were all there to greet us. They have a beautiful home with their back yard looking straight out at the Rocky Mountains.
We had a wonderful dinner with them and chatted with Shirley and Al until midnight. They were so adorable and just kept talking and talking. Al was telling us all about his men’s ministry’s at his church and it was wonderful to hear all about his passion for God. He had his Bible on the kitchen table and it was so worn from reading it constantly that many pages were torn. What a Godly couple and so inspiring to Shelley and I!!
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