Curt Gowdy State Park
We left Curt Gowdy State Park in Wyoming yesterday (Monday, it took me a couple days to publish). It was a wonderful park, best we’ve been on this trip so far. The weather was a bit of a challenge, so I don’t think LeeAnn enjoyed it as much as I did. She has a point; it was cold and windy for much of our stay. And when I say windy, I think it was the worst wind we’ve had at a stop, the only other stops I can think of that come close are two stops in Texas two years ago (and one of those a tornado hit about 10 miles away!). But Curt Gowdy wins. We had about 48 hours of sustained winds over 30 mph and frequent gusts doubling that. We even brought our windward side room slide-outs in. It made for a cramped coach, but we were worried about damaging them. One morning the windchill was -13°F! The point is it didn’t make for a great sit outside and relax stop. On our last day, Easter Sunday, we were able to sit outside with a midday campfire, and that was nice.
While sitting outside wasn’t a comfortable option, it’s a beautiful park with lots of hiking opportunities, and I took advantage. It’s one of those that made me exclaim, “oh, my” on the approach in. The park is at around 7000 ft in elevation, so the first day I took it easy, and only hiked about two miles. The next day I increased to about four miles and was good to go after that. I certainly felt the elevation, getting up the hills was a little harder than I’m used to, but it wasn’t bad. A few years ago I got altitude sick in Colorado at about 8600 ft, so I made sure I was careful here.
Barnie enjoys our campsite on Sunday, the nice day.
Out hiking I got to see lots of cool rock formations. There’s a waterfall in the park called Hidden Falls, and it is hidden. It’s a small waterfall in a crevice that’s hard to see unless you’re looking at just the right angle, but it’s a rewarding site to find and a nice peaceful time in a secluded spot. We also saw lots of deer on our hikes. Barnie got to know where they were likely to be and started looking for them whenever we were in good spots for them.
We also got to see a bald eagle. He perched on a post near our campsite several different times. Then on Sunday he (or maybe she) flew around above us.
While there, we went to town a few times. In Cheyenne, we had a great breakfast at an old diner called The Luxury Diner. In Laramie, we had another really good breakfast at the 17th Street Café, near the university. You can read more about those here. Laramie was a really cool town to visit. We had a really good time with some downtown shopping in some cool, old buildings, two of which had large dogs inside that were just hanging out. Not customer’s dogs, just shop dogs. It was great.