Day 71 – 9/12 – Cokeville, WY to Montpelier, ID – 36 miles
I walked angry today. My planned route would have led me into the mountains to the west, climbing back up a few hundred feet and hopefully scoring a view of Bear Lake in the process. From there, I would have turned north, eventually dropping back into the valley with US-30 for the final push. It […]
Days 69 & 70 – 9/10-9/11 – Kemmerer to Cokeville, WY – 41 miles
After the forced march through the red desert, I owed myself a break. I couldn’t quite justify a full day off–that’ll come soon enough, in Pocatello–but a shorter, 15-mile walk to Fossil Butte National Monument offered a healthy reprieve, and the follow-up to Cokeville was also a little lighter. It’s amazing what a leisurely morning, […]
Days 66-68 – 9/7-9/9 – Atlantic City to Kemmerer, WY – 117 miles
If you want to hear the best argument in favor of Manifest Destiny, look not to the heavens. Look to the rocks. As Will Bagley explains in South Pass: Gateway to a Continent, between the full height of what would become the United States, from Marias Pass near the Canadian border and Guadalupe Pass closer […]
Day 65 – 9/5 – Sweetwater Station to Atlantic City, WY – 33 miles
The day off was well timed, because today brought me the most strenuous walk of the trip. Admittedly, there wasn’t that much of an ascent involved, but I haven’t done a lot of climbing over the last couple months. I think my calves are smaller now than they typically are. And besides, when the day’s […]
Days 62-64 – 9/2-9/4 – Casper/Mills to Sweetwater Station, WY – 108 miles
One of the harder stretches of the walk began inauspiciously, following the skin-crawlingly-named Poison Spider Road. A thick darkness ruled at this early hour, still well before 5am. About a mile in, a newer highway bisected my arachnid artery, forcing me to hurdle a pair of barbed-wire fences and wade through a dried-out drainage ditch, […]
Days 60 & 61 – 8/31-9/1 – Douglas to Casper/Mills, WY – 62 miles
I’ve been thinking about home a lot over the last couple days. To some degree, that’s probably inevitable. I’ve been gone for a long time now. With the new school year in motion, that’s also reinforcing the finality of my departure, and the profound change in my life that only started unfolding over the summer. […]
Day 59 – 8/30 – Glendo to Douglas, WY – 27.5 miles
A Concise History of the Jackalope We’ll never know for sure where it all began. One account holds that the first man to spot the jackalope was Roy Ball in 1829. That’s all we know about both Roy and the jackalope. The town of Douglas, meanwhile, claims that John Colter, the first man known to explore […]