Moving Thru

I woke up fairly early for an unknown reason and decided to use it to my advantage today to get to Worland before the headwinds started. It was a relaxing ride of 40 miles and relatively easy. I beat the winds to town and ended up getting a room to have a bit of a break. I ran some errands and then just took it easy.

The next day I wanted to get about halfway to Casper, about 85 miles. I headed out halfway early and made it to Thermopolis quite easily. Thermopolis is the home to the world's largest natural mineral springs, and you can smell when you are getting close. I continued through here, as I have been here before and wanted to cover ground today. There is a beautiful canyon just south of town and it was a gorgeous day to ride through it. The highway wound along the river and overlooked the train tracks on the other side. As one goes along this road you slowly descend through time as the various ages of rock are exposed. Towards the bottom one is surrounded by steep cliffs on all sides and has a small view of the sky. It played with my senses as I felt I was descending, yet the river flowed as if I was ascending. The climb out of the canyon was also not as challenging as it should have been.

I stopped in Shoshoni at a park next to the school for lunch. Graduation was going on and I had a couple of conversations with locals about my ride and the lack of anything between here and Casper. I decided to cook food here because I would most likely be roadside camping and didn't want to have a stove to deal with out there. I headed on and the wind greatly increased. A storm was moving from the east and pushing the air out in front of it. Eventually the rain hit, but the wind stopped. It was quite a mild ride with the rain, yet not too draining. I started watching for places to stay but this is high desert prairie. There isn't much there.

I eventually made it through the storm, but was becoming more exhausted and needed to camp. After miles of searching I was wore out and just headed to a fence about 50 feet from the highway and set up. Soon after another rainstorm hit. I fell asleep only to be awakened less than an hour later.

Bright flashes and loud crashes brought me out of my sleep. A great rainstorm had moved in and was directly overhead. I started to count time between flashes and thunder and made one-thou... before the crash came. It was this close for about 15 minutes and I was one of the tallest things out there. I got into lightning position for about 20 minutes until the lightning moved far enough away. I eventually fell asleep and had quite a restful night.