The 287 Effect

We caught up with 287 again on Wednesday morning just outside Laramie, Wyo. It was the same highway we took at Decatur and deserted at Dumas. That old friend would now take us across the Great Prairie all the way to the Teton Mountains. Sometimes old friends are best.

The Great Prairie that 287 took us through was not one Great Prairie but a hundred Great Prairies or a thousand. Each turn, each rise, each dip in the old road flashed a new image on my mind; each image a reality worth of a life time of exploration and experience. The highway rolled across rolling hills the color of old lemons, up and down, up and down. And just when I thought the Great Prairie was nothing but faded yellow rolling hills undulating from one humped horizon to the other, where the tallest vegetation was foot high sage, 287 topped a hill and dropped us into canyons filled with multi colored skyscraper rocks. At one place a ridge of rocks a mile long thrust up 200 feet above the grassy soil, showing an inclined surface as flat as a computer screen, and reflecting the noon sun as if it had been polished. Some force, with measured precision, had chiseled vertical lines every few hundred feet along its surface.

The prairies were also different colors. For some time the prairie was yellow like the inside of a mango. When I looked again it was the color of Boing 747 skin; and then like a fir and spruce forest seen from 40,000 feet.

On some prairies the earth lay draped across the horizon in a gently curved line, and in other prairies, black mountains, red hills, jagged striped bluffs, or distant gleaming white peaks decorated the horizon.

At one point 287 led us across a prairie that was like a yellow table cloth stretched from horizon to horizon. It seemed to have no end. And at that moment we fell off the table cloth and into the side canyons zigzagging and tumbling into the incomparable Wind River valley filled with green fields and surrounded with rocks like castles and turrets and minarets and steeples painted in alternating layers with ice cream colors, strawberry, vanilla, strawberry, vanilla, strawberry.

At the end of The Wind River valley 287 went up the mountains through the snowy pass and showed us the Teton Mountains, hazy white peaks thrust jaggedly into the heavens.