Wednesday Evening

We just took another wonderful dirt-road drive after lunch that ended up taking most of the afternoon. We headed out of town on the paved Old Boulder Road and saw 3 guys on horseback moving a bunch of cattle. Annie was impressed; said it looked just like a western movie. A little further on we say a small bunch of pronghorn antelope. As soon as we rolled down the window, they spooked and took off running, but Annie got a shot as they departed. We then continued up into the mountains into timbered hills interspersed with meadows. Saw incredible fields of some purple flower. I would have jumped out to collect a specimen, but it was too swampy. We've had a couple of days of rain and the wildflowers are going crazy. As we continued into the hills we encountered more of the boulder-strewn, evergreen covered hillsides that are everywhere. The boulders are made of a fairly soft granite that erodes into rounded, bizarre shapes. The trees grow in and around them and the pinnacles of stacked stone seem to totter at impossible angles. The combination of dry sagebrush covered hillsides with timber covered boulder fields and lush meadows where ever there's a trickle of water make these impromptu drives we've been taking almost daily absolutely fascinating. We saw beautiful, white wild iris in one damp place and Annie noticed several patches of yellow lupine. There were also several varieties of vetch and, of course, the omnipresent dandelion.

On the way back to town, we stopped to take a picture of a cut-bank beside the road, where the soft rock had been eroded into a pillow-shaped wall that looked like Mayan Hieroglyphics. This is getting to be a rather long post but yesterday, we saw some critters in a field beside the road in Basin that we at first thought were goats. Since Bea had asked if we had any goats where we are staying, we naturally turned around and stopped to take a picture. On closer inspection these things look more related to big horn sheep than to goats. Does anyone recognize these animals? The ewe and kids (lambs?) look very goat-like, but these horns don't look like any goat I've ever seen. So much for my knowledge of domestic fauna in the Intermountain West.





By the way, we keep talking about sagebrush. For those of you on the east coast who don't know what that looks like, here's a picture.