June 6, 2015, Sunday: Big Horn Mountains

Spent a night beside the roaring creek and woke to sunny, clear skies but cold.  The outside 

thermometer is not working, but it was only 51 degrees inside, so probably in the 40's out there.  I put the furnace on just to get the chill off.

My moose buddy is back, enjoying a light breakfast of grass and weeds...but wait, there's more!  A little later, my moose brought along two friends...lots of photos.  

 After delaying my departure to watch the moose, I continued east on the Cloud Peak Highway over the Powder River Pass at 9,666 feet.  Snow capped peaks were beautiful.

At Loaf Mountain overlook, you can see three major peaks – Loaf Mountain at 11,722 ft., Big Horn Peak at 12,324 ft., and Darton Peak at 12,275 ft.  The Big Horn Mountains also contain the Cloud Peak Wilderness and the Big Horn National Forest – now that is conservation-protection!

Coming down the west side of the mountains, I came into the small town of Buffalo, famous for its Occidental Hotel where Butch Cassidy, Sundance Kid, Calamity Jane, Buffalo Bill Cody and Teddy Roosevelt all stayed (separate rooms of course, except maybe for Buffalo Bill and Calamity Jane.  As long as I am having fun speculating, maybe Butch and Sundance....?).  I walked around town, visited a few shops but nothing caught my eye.  I did come across an old time auctioneer doing his magic unintelligible fast-talking auction-speak out of a back of a pickup truck.  A bunch of cowboys/farmers were gathered around looking to buy used small ranch and household stuff.  I took a video, but the sound was too poor to post.  Good entertainment and people watching!  

Lobby of Occidental Hotel

A Great Tricycle!

I left Buffalo driving north (even though the sign said west) on I 90 and decided to visit Fort Phil Kearny.  I had previously decided to skip it because I had seen Fort Laramie a few days before and how different could it be?  Well, the answer is LOTS different!  OK, here comes the old west history lesson that I learned there:  Fort Phil Kearny was a military fort right from the beginning, built to serve the Bozeman Trail.  Back at Fort Laramie in 1851, the Great White Father signed a treaty with the Indians that allowed the white man to cross Indian territories on the Oregon, California and Mormon trails.  Then gold was found in northwest Montana and the gold seekers needed a faster way to get there than skirting Indian lands by going upstream on the Missouri and then overland.  So Mr. Bozeman found that shortcut, but it cut through the last remaining good hunting grounds of the Indians and they were not happy.  They warned the government they were breaking the treaty and that the massive wagon trains spread out hundreds of yards wide were denuding the grasslands and killing the little game that remained.  And still they came in greater and greater numbers. 

Finally, the Indians began to attack the wagon trains, so the Great White Father decided he had to protect all those good citizens and built a series of forts on Indian Territory in violation of the treaty, the largest of which was Fort Phil Kearny.  It was a stockaded fort and the task of finding wood to build it meant 80 wagons a day for two years were sent to clearcut surrounding areas,making these wood bearing wagons prime targets for the Indians.  For the first time in known history, the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapahoe formed an alliance and a battle plan that lured the protective detail away from the fort and killed 80 soldiers in 30 minutes.  The Indian Wars raged for two years until peace was forged in 1868, with the U. S. Government agreeing to remove the forts and close the Bozeman Trail.  Shortly afterward, the Cheyenne burned down the hated fort.  And so, no original structures remain, but there are placards and a small section of stockade built to illustrate how everything would have looked.  

The two folks who are in the visitor center/mini-museum were impressive with their knowledge and enthusiasm for sharing the history.  Even though a thunder and lightening storm shortened my walk about the grounds, I am so glad I stopped.  Okay, history lecture over.

I continued north to Sheridan, Wyoming where I asked the visitor center to check the weather.  I wanted to head back west over the Big Horn Mountains at this northern end on the Big Horn Scenic Highway, but only if the weather was okay.  All I could see was heavy dark clouds everywhere, but she assured me that the weather was good up in the mountains and even checked a webcam.  So, I headed up the mountains with magnificent views of the green (!) valley below.  As I climbed higher, the clouds got lower and I decided to stop at the closest campground so I could enjoy the views in better weather as tomorrow is supposed to be better.  Luckily, the first campground actually had some sites with electricity – unusual for a forest campground.  Got settled in to my heavily forested campsite among three or four others on this loop of about 20 sites when it began to drizzle (so much for the weather forecast) and settled in to organize all the photos from the last couple of days and write the blog entries that will have to wait until I get internet, probably sometime tomorrow.  Not even phone service up here in the woods....

View heading East as I head up the Bighorn Mountains

Jeeze, another too-long post … Sorry.   Hope you enjoy the pictures.